Backlash builds: why the architecture world hates The Brutalist

It has graced tea towels and cushions, mugs and socks, and spawned numerous Instagram accounts and coffee table books galore. Now brutalism, the once-maligned postwar architectural style of chiselled concrete forms, has finally reached Hollywood, in the form of an epic three-and-a-half-hour film that looks set to sweep the Oscars. You would think that architecture fans would be thrilled to have their subject in the limelight for a change. But they are raging.

There is nothing more irritating to enthusiasts than when the mainstream tries to portray their niche world and gets it wrong. And The Brutalist gets an awful lot wrong. Just as Gladiator II recently vexed classicists with its inaccurate portrayal of the emperors and its anachronistic scenes of people reading the newspaper and drinking at cafes (neither of which, apparently, existed at the time), so too has director Brady Corbet riled the architecture world by playing fast and loose with his interpretation of brutalism, the Bauhaus, postwar immigration and the basic process of architecture itself.

While the film world has showered the movie with five-star reviews – praising its heroic ambition, and drooling at the “authenticity” of shooting with hulking 1950s VistaVision cameras – architecture critics have been up in arms. “The Brutalist gets architecture wrong,” declared the Washington Post. It “perpetuates a colossal cliche,” fumed the Financial Times. Three prominent American architecture critics even got together to record a dedicated podcast, titled Why the Brutalist Is a Terrible Movie.