‘The Brutalist’: Production Designing László Tóth’s Monumental Institute as Tragic Autobiography

To design the monumental Institute depicted in “The Brutalist,” production designer Judy Becker channeled László Tóth, the film‘s Holocaust-surviving, Hungarian architect played by Adrien Brody. This was crucial to understanding Tóth because his work symbolizes his lived history and struggle. Fortunately, Becker was already a fan of Brutalism, the minimalist architectural style that Tóth embraces for his passion project in Pennsylvania during the 1950s.

“I definitely became László,” Becker told IndieWire. “But then I always do a kind of method designing.  I think through the characters and through their world. And, so, with László, it was multiplied many, many times because he was an architect. He was designing partly his own world and then the other things that you see as his creations in the movie.”

Becker’s first conversations with director Brady Corbet were about the towering and heavily symbolic Institute, which Tóth builds for industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) in fits and starts on a hill over the course of many years. “We needed to know how we were going to approach it,” added Becker. “What parts we were going to try to build in reality and what we would allude to.”

Becker had to create a design that not only looked authentically Brutalist (non-decorative, emphasizing function over form, with large blocks of concrete and steel), but also resembled something that this Bauhaus-trained architect might have concocted in real life. The film’s VistaVision format (printed in 70mm) even conveyed the essence of Brutalism with its wide rectangular shape.

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In addition, the construction had to be achievable within the production without being an actual building. That is why it is seen in pieces on the site and mostly in giant models throughout.

 ” This kind of Brutalism moved completely away from the pre-war style of architecture  that was monumental and stark but also very referential to ancient architecture,” Becker said. “Just moving forward with a kind of starting from the beginning minimalism and leaving all decorative elements behind, leaving history behind.”

However, the most important factor was having the Institute reflect the architect’s post-war trauma. It was described in the script as representing the barracks of the concentration camps where Tóth and his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) were imprisoned. In addition to the horror of the holocaust, the Institute also needed to represent the idea of freedom and some kind of passageway between the couple.

“I pulled references for concentration camps, for Brutalist architecture, for everything that was mentioned in the script,” she said, “and so by combining concentration camp elements with architectural elements in a way that made sense cohesively and meaningfully, it was my first experience channeling László Tóth.”

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Becker even dug deep into her own memory for guidance. When she was a child growing up in New York, she remembered that her local synagogue had a Star of David overhead. That became an epiphany when she realized that the Institute should be in the shape of a cross, towering above the building’s lower feature, which resemble concentration camp bunkers.

“The biggest challenge for me was figuring out how to incorporate the elements of the concentration camp into the Institute because that wasn’t at all obvious to me,” Becker said. “ If you examined the model and the plans of the building, you would see how it relates to a concentration camp, but looking at the imagery and just to understand the architecture was really hard. And, at times, it was just emotionally overwhelming.”

But all of these puzzle pieces eventually came together with the help of a central tunnel and steep stairs leading underground (inspired by the subway in Washington, D.C.). This serves as the connecting point between two sides of the barracks that lead Tóth to Erzsébet.

“It’s very theoretical,” Becker said, “because he and his wife were separated, so this is an attempt to recreate that experience, and, I guess, to find a way to have them unite.  And I almost would like to build this building just as an experience.”