Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The Brutalist begins in darkness; a chaotic, crowded space of stress and strange sounds, the hold of a ship. It’s an origin story for László Tóth, a Jewish-Hungarian architect, newly arrived in America in 1947, whose subsequent work will be characterised by an obsession with darkness and light, confinement and release, defined by trauma. You might ask whether this is the best experience to subject his subsequent building’s users to. But then, you never actually see any of the users of his buildings. The movie skips from the construction site to a belated recognition of his brilliance, decades later, at a Venice Biennale of Architecture. Even his first US work, a home library for his wealthy benefactor-to-be, is never seen being used, only displayed. Despite its undoubted, epic brilliance, Brady Corbet’s film falls into the trap of the clichéd portrayal of the architect as tortured male genius, working in solitude. The screen architect’s career is defined by struggle, a desire for complete control, a battle to defend the purity and perfection of his vision and a refusal to compromise. It’s intriguing that the movies, which use architecture and space so magically, get it so wrong. There is an Ariadne’s thread running from the labyrinthine spaces beneath the hilltop community centre that forms the obsessive centrepiece of The Brutalist right back through to that most unintentionally hilarious of all architectural films, King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949). An extrapolation of Ayn Rand’s dreadful, but insanely influential, paean to the individual over the collective (which titans of finance and tech so adore), the movie manages to be sillier than the book. At one point in both films, the pigheaded architect protagonist quits design for the horny-handed construction site rather than see his dream despoiled by wealthy philistines. The real villain, incidentally, of The Fountainhead, is the architecture critic.The building in The Brutalist is a community centre. The community is, of course, not involved (though we do see Tóth presenting his model). The building in The Fountainhead is a corporate office tower. Here the workers are not involved — or even considered. These are architects as visionaries whose work we must take as so brilliant that it cannot be questioned or interfered with. It is an almost insane simplification of architecture which understands any concessions to the user as a compromise. Certainly there are architects like this, the solo virtuosos, the creators. It’s an image deeply ingrained in culture, but it needs to be expunged. Architecture is a collective venture.It is perhaps even more bizarre in the case of The Brutalist, in which we learn that the rooms planned for the community are based on painful memories from Tóth’s past. This then is a “serious”, existential building, one concerned with life and death, darkness and light, suffering and redemption. Fine, perhaps, for a memorial or a crematorium chapel, less so, perhaps, for a community space, gym and library. For most of Hollywood history the profession of architecture appears only to indicate a solid, bourgeois dependability. Think Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, Liam Neeson in Love Actually or Henry Fonda, the decent architect juror who stands alone against injustice in 12 Angry Men. But occasionally the profession pops up as an analogue of a kind of capacity for brooding creative intensity and even second sight. In Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now it is not accidental that Donald Sutherland’s grieving architect is involved in the endless struggle against the entropy of Venice’s churches and somehow foresees the tragedy of his daughter’s — and his own — demise.The problem usually arises when architecture appears at the heart of a movie. Perhaps the movie director, trying to get the perfect film made without interference from the studios and the money men, inevitably identifies with the lone (male) hero. This was the impression you might have received from last year’s Megalopolis, in which Adam Driver’s pompous architect Cesar Catilina seems a cipher for director Francis Ford Coppola’s own dream of total control. This architect seems to have developed a technique for stopping time, and what he does with it is a party trick to catch himself from falling off a skyscraper. That’s it. Incidentally, when we do see Catilina’s city plan, it is ridiculous, an incoherent student fantasy, almost unimaginably bad. As is the movie.None of these films show the reality of architecture, which is inevitably contingent; it is about working with existing realities, acknowledging the world as it is and its imperfections. It is about accommodating people; users and clients, neighbours and authorities. Tóth’s niece, Zsófia, mute at the start of the film but vocal at its end, sums up her uncle’s dedication by saying, in a speech: “No matter what the others try to sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”The most haunting space in Tóth’s fictional building appears as a kind of sinister, cavernous cistern. Initially we see the architect sketching a space in charcoal characterised by a grid of columns. In the movie we see it mostly as an uncompleted volume, flooded and illuminated by torchlight. To me it evoked the climax of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and its “room” with an undulating floor of what appears to be salt contained by pillars of massive industrial concrete. This is a place where wishes might be granted, or it might be a collective hallucination or dream. Once experienced (in the movie or by the viewer), Tarkovsky’s room cannot be forgotten. It creates its own afterlife. In one of Tóth’s lines, architecture is about the creation of something that outlives the individual. “My buildings were designed to endure such erosion,” he says. In fact, architecture is highly vulnerable to changes in use and fashion; it seems permanent but it is not. Just look at the ashes of the modernist villas of LA. The irony perhaps is that the movies, with their impermanent constructions and powerful image-making, often preserve space better than does reality.
