Brady Corbet's new film, "The Brutalist," features a massive, fictional concrete structure called the Van Buren Institute. This building, designed by production designer Judy Becker, is integral to the film's narrative and the psychology of its main character, László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor and architect.
Despite viewers' inquiries, the institute is entirely fictional. A physical model was built but later destroyed due to budget constraints. The film cleverly uses this non-existent building to explore themes of memory, trauma, and architectural expression.
The Van Buren Institute serves as a symbol of both the architect's personal journey and the reconciliation of faith and trauma. The structure's design reflects László's personal history, and the film's coda reveals his intentions within the design itself.
Central to the plot of the director Brady Corbet’s new drama, “The Brutalist,” is an enormous structure known as the Van Buren Institute. Situated in Pennsylvania, it is made of concrete. The negative space between the two towers that stretch high above it forms the symbol of a cross. When light pours into a chapel below, the same emblem illuminates a marble altarpiece.
Viewers have asked Corbet and his co-writer and partner, Mona Fastvold, if they can visit the institute. The couple regrets to tell them they cannot.
“None of it is real,” Fastvold said during a recent interview.
“And what we did build we destroyed,” including an approximately nine-foot-long model, Corbet added. Given that the production cost only $10 million, they couldn’t afford the storage space to keep the memorabilia.
The institute is one of many tricks that “The Brutalist” pulls off in its run time of three-and-a-half hours, intermission included. Imagined by the production designer Judy Becker, working from details that Corbet and Fastvold put in the script, the edifice is crucial to understanding the psychology of the film’s hero, the Jewish Hungarian architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody.
László, a Holocaust survivor who arrives in America at the start of the film, is commissioned to build the community center by his wealthy patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Van Buren sees it as a tribute to his late mother, and seeks approval from the small-town government that demands it have Christian iconography. László turns it into a personal project related to the suffering he and his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), endured. The ways in which he conceived it as a tribute to their love are only revealed in the film’s coda.
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