In a world where building seems difficult at best and oppressive at worst, what’s the point of being an architect at all? That question unites two of last year’s most talked-about movies: Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.” To be sure, both films peddle the trope of the embattled auteur. In “Megalopolis,” the gloomy genius Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) battles philistines in his quest to renovate New Rome, a thinly-veiled Manhattan. (There is even a skyscraper scene to match Vidor’s.) Corbet’s tortured architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), too, a Jewish-Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust based roughly on Breuer, obsesses over a bunkerlike civic chapel that will brood over 1950s Pennsylvania in reinforced concrete, again recalling Roark, who in Rand’s “The Fountainhead” (the book, but not the film) builds a secular Temple of the Human Spirit for a rich financier. When Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), finds his blueprints and tells him, “I’m just looking at you,” she’s voicing the old belief: Buildings are extensions of their authors.
But these movies flip that formula, as if to explain how we’ve changed our minds about it — one bleakly, the other romantically.
The films remind us that a building is for the people and places surrounding it as much as for its maker or client.
Despite its sweeping shots of Manhattan’s great early towers, “The Brutalist” takes a dim view of ambition. Like Vidor, Corbet directs a sexual assault on the outskirts of a quarry, too — except in this ghastly scene, the architect is victimized, and the rapist is the rich industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who commissioned the chapel and has flown with Tóth to Carrara to select a slab of marble for its altarpiece. By inverting the “Fountainhead” assault, Corbet depicts an existential trap that is often overlooked in popular accounts of the auteur building: If you depend on clients to realize a work of art, it is never fully yours.
By the film’s epilogue, set during the debut Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1980, Tóth is wheelchair-bound and mute, depleted. A late plot revelation suggests the chapel, in its design as well as its marble core, stands as a reminder of the Tóths’ aggressors as much as László’s design principles. The Biennale is a cruelly apt setting, because it was there, in real life, that a disruptive generation of postmodernists gathered to continue undoing the sober ambitions of their predecessors. Robert Venturi, an American who loved Las Vegas kitsch, had elevated the “ugly and ordinary.” The Luxembourgish Léon Krier, was — still is — radically regressive, and has argued that buildings must imitate the past. This was all of a piece with environmental and feminist critiques of the 1960s and ’70s that called out the austerity of Modernist utopias.
