The Brutalists

A film about a struggling architect, a style the world loves to hate—The Brutalist and Brutalism itself share more than just a name. Is it bold vision or concrete failure?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  Some of the most important design choices are the ones that go unnoticed. The details that together make an experience feel intuitive, comfortable, and above all, exhilarating. At Acura, that means looking closely at how every detail can make your experience behind the wheel more rewarding. Every lesson learned and every idea refined becomes part of what comes next, and it lives inside every MDX, ADX, and Integra. That's precision crafted performance. That's Acura.

• 0:34Roman Mars?

  If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job, the premium status it deserves, at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

• 1:16Roman Mars?

  The Brutalist is a movie. I don't know if it's a good movie or a bad movie, but it is definitely the most movie I've seen this year. It is also a movie nominally about architecture and is nominated for 10 Academy Awards. So it felt like journalistic malpractice if we didn't talk about it on the show, at least a little bit. The story follows a fictional Hungarian architect named Laszlo Toth and his struggles to build a community center in rural Pennsylvania. The film neatly summarizes the debate about the architectural style known as brutalism in this one exchange.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Concrete is sturdy and cheap. Concrete, it's not very attractive.

• 1:58Roman Mars?

  The job of architect has often been depicted in movies, even though the practice of architecture is not very cinematic. It's mostly meetings and such, but it is a romantic profession that lends itself to high drama and strained metaphors, which, after seeing The Brutalist, is why I wanted to talk to Mark Lambster. Mark is the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, editor of a book called Architecture in Film, and he teaches an architecture on-screen course at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. So he's basically the first and only call you make when you want to talk about this stuff. Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  It's super fun to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 2:38Roman Mars?

  And you have seen the movie The Brutalist. I have heard you talk about it.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Yes, I have definitely seen the movie The Brutalist. I have podcasted about it. I wrote a review of it for our newspaper, so yes.

• 2:51Roman Mars?

  So let's talk a little bit just about brutalism in general and why you think that this is the style that this character is working in. What, how does brutalism fit into this?

• 3:00Speaker 02

  That's a great question. I'm not really sure that it does. When we first meet Laszlo Toth, lead character of The Brutalist, he is really designing in like an international style way. He's just come over. He's doing this bent tube furniture, kind of very Marcel Breuer inspired. The next thing we see that he designs is this library, but that's more kind of a modern project. It is the appropriate time mostly for brutalism. It's a little early for brutalism. If you're, you know, architectural historian, looking at moments of history, it's a little earlier than brutalism might begin.

• 3:45Roman Mars?

  I mean, I have a contention that what it has to do with brutalism is that the word brutalist is just great.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Yes, it is a great word. And unfortunately, it has become sort of the, I think, for much of the public, it has become like sort of default word for just all modern architecture, which is completely inappropriate, but.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  And it's sort of a cross that we architecture critics and architects themselves have to bear to explain this fact that no brutalism is actually this type of architecture that's really constrained to this relatively short period of time. But, you know, in the mind of the general public, any building that they don't like is brutalism.

• 4:29Roman Mars?

  Yeah. So the director of The Brutalist has mentioned that Laszlo Toth, the lead character, is this amalgam of, you know, maybe a little Paul Rudolph and Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. I mean, like, were you thinking about this at the time you were watching it?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  The main thing I kept thinking about as I was watching it was that this emigre architect, who had ostensibly been the leading modernist architect of Hungary, was thrust into abject poverty in America with no connections. And all I could think about was that Philadelphia, at that time where he moved to, had this very significant emigre community of architects. The most notable modernist firm there was Howen Laskas. They'd built the PSFS Tower, which if you've taken an architectural history modernism survey, you've seen it as the first modernist skyscraper. So that was built in the 30s in Philadelphia. So the idea that

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Laszlo Toth comes there, can't find work, is like this unicorn modernist in a city that, where that is an apostasy. And I kept just sitting there and sitting there and sitting there and sitting there because this movie is like three and a half very long hours and just wondering like why, you know, that he wasn't getting a job or going out and hanging out with all these cool modern architects who, you know, lived down the block.

• 6:00Roman Mars?

  That's a good point. Did you, did you think about his buildings as an architecture critic at all? Did you like, look at them and judge them in a certain way?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Well, I'm not really sure what to say about him as an architect per se, because we see very little of his actual built architecture until, you know, the very end of the film. The first thing we see is this library that he's designed, and it's very beautiful as an object. But the only piece of furniture in the library is this, you know, Corbusier style lounge chair. And it just struck me as like, so frigid and uncomfortable for a library. And, you know, I live not far from the actual house that Walter Gropius built for himself here outside of Boston. And it's exactly the opposite kind of space.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  It's very comfortable and luxurious. And the idea that the only kind of modernist library would be this spare, frigid place, I think, didn't line up for me with history. It looked, looked nice on screen, right? But it wasn't the kind of place that you'd want to actually read a book.

• 7:11Roman Mars?

  Yeah, I think most of the depictions of architecture and design in the movie are all about, you know, what looks good to be filmed or photographed and what serves the story. And they're not really about the veracity of different movements and such like that.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  I think if the movie wasn't about architecture itself, that you, there would be a lot easier to forgive the transgressions, shall we say? But I mean, you asked about like, his actual architect. Really, the only time we really encounter his full architecture is, you know, at the end, when we're presented with this community center that the community actually didn't ask for.

• 7:46Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 7:50Roman Mars?

  So let's talk about architecture in movies in general. I mean, you edited a book on architecture and film and thought about this a lot. What are architects in movies for? They seem like they have different purpose than your average vocation as depicted on screen.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Well, first of all, there are very few films that are about actual architects that center on the practice of making architecture. And it's kind of easy to understand why. And it's because, uh, architecture is kind of boring.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  It takes a long time to make. It's, you know, a lot of plumbing details. It's a lot of going over plans, you know? No one dies. There's no spying. There are no superheroes involved, right? So it doesn't easily fit into the standard narrative structures of Hollywood film that require the sort of, you know, incredible existential drama, right? Architecture is kind of like oxygen, you know? It's all around us. We can't live without it, but we also take it super for granted, right? So when architects do appear in films,

• 9:08Speaker 02

  usually they're there as a signpost of sort of bourgeois respectability that he is both it's usually a man, not always, but but quite often, and he is both an artist and a respected professional, right? So he is this ideal figure, very attractive. I think of, you know, the character Sam Waterston plays in Hannah and Her Sisters, right?

• 9:36Speaker 03

  I really came in here because I was bored stiff by the party.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  What makes you think we're more interesting?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  And he's this very urbane, has, you know, a box at the opera, is able to, you know, discourse on all of the arts.

• 9:51Speaker 05

  The design's deliberately noncontextual, but I wanted to keep the atmosphere of the street, you know, and the proportions and in the material. That's unpolished red granite.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Oh, exactly.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  He's very successful, has a Mercedes. And, you know, in the in the film, we see characters played by Diane Weest and Carrie Fisher just fawning over him. It's like which one of them will get to bed. This man is the principal action around his character.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  Of course, I was so tongue-tied all night.

• 10:20Speaker 07

  I can't believe I said that about the Guggenheim.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  That is like, we often see that. It's like that the this architect is this a signpost rather than an actual, you know, than his, his career actually described, you know, in any number of films, you will see this from, you know, Jungle Fever, the Spike Lee film, Sleepless in Seattle, you know, you could just go through Hollywood and that's sort of the idealized vision of the architect as professional and artist at once, very desirable.

• 10:55Roman Mars?

  I mean, so the, the architect is essentially just this artist that just has his stuff together enough to, you know, pay a mortgage.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  And a BMW, right?

• 11:03Roman Mars?

  Exactly. So like an older woman can like go like, okay, I'm not like throwing my life away for this guy. Yeah, yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 11:10Roman Mars?

  Yeah, so funny.

• 11:16Roman Mars?

  Sort of the ground zero for architects depicted on film is Howard Rourke in The Fountainhead. This is an awful, awful movie.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Well, it's both a great movie and a terrible movie, right? So 1949, The Fountainhead, based on the novel by Ayn Rand and directed by King Vidor. And the, the characters in the film are of course generally just mouthpieces for her objectivist ideology, basically libertarianist thinking.

• 11:51Speaker 07

  They hate you for the greatness of your achievement. They hate you for your integrity. They hate you because they know they can neither corrupt you nor rule you.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  And the lead character in the film, played by Gary Cooper, is this architect named Howard Rourke, and he's a very dogmatic modernist. He does not want his vision corrupted. You know, we see him heroically at the beginning of the film, getting this incredible commission for a skyscraper. And when the conservative bankers who he presents his model to see his modern building, they want to tack on this sort of classical facade on the front, and he is aghast and, and refuses this and storms out because no one shall interfere with his genius.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  It'd shock people. It's too different, too original. Why take chances when you can stay in the middle? If you want my work, you must take it as it is or not at all. We are your clients and it's your job to serve us. I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Of course, the film sort of culminates with this incredible scene where he has now designed a housing project and once again, its completion has escaped his control. And his solution to this is to just go and blow up the housing project.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Arrest me. I'll talk at the trial.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  And of course, today, this sounds like domestic terrorism, but in the world of the film, it's this act of completely justified righteous behavior and he's in fact gets off at this trial that's held because no one, you know, in the world of Ayn Rand should interfere with the individual heroic genius. This idea of this architect who no one should confront his vision, he's a sole male genius, it basically holds, you know, even through today, I think The Brutalist is very much a product of that same vision. We also have, you know, the character here, played by Adrian

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Brody, also sort of refuses to have his work corrupted in any way to the extent that he will pay for all change orders and overruns on its cost. It cuts three meters from the top. I add it to the bottom.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  We can't afford all this. I'm already over budget this quarter.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  You take what you need from my fee, Ashley.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Come on, what's the difference between 40 and 50 feet anyway? The ceilings are still plenty high.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Good. It approved. Several of the scenes in The Brutalist are even borrowed, you know, directly from the fountainhead, these scenes in quarries and what have you. Architecture is really a collaborative art practiced by many people working together over long periods of time. So I think in many ways, this is a very dated way of thinking about the profession.

• 14:47Roman Mars?

  Are there some examples in history of film where

• 14:52Roman Mars?

  architecture is presented in a way that feels true to you?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  I think the best examples are always going to be documentaries.

• 14:58Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Two recent ones that I really enjoyed, one Stardust, which is a film about the careers and lives of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. And it's really about their partnership, working together, about ideas. Another film I really enjoyed is called We Start With The Things We Find, documentary about the New York-based firm Lottec founded by Neapolitan partners, Adatola and Giuseppe Lignano. And they, what's amazing, I think there's this very comparable scene to The Brutalist and also to The Fountainhead, right? Where in The Brutalist, we see Laszlo Tóth going to this

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Italian quarry to find the most beautiful marbles for his project. Whereas the film on Lottec starts with the characters also going to Italy, but in fact, they're going to a shipyard to look at shipping containers and all this other infrastructural work, which is, you know, the detritus of the world, which, you know, they've decided like, we need to recover this and use this and then transform the stuff that we might throw away or think of as own purely industrial and transform that into architecture. It's a really beautiful idea.

• 16:21Roman Mars?

  It strikes me that another thing that filmmakers use architects for is as a very basic metaphor to directors and filmmakers. Megalopolis, I think, is a movie about filmmaking more than it's about city planning in any sort of meaningful way. In The Brutalist, it kind of blew my mind that the end credits song is this song that says, "One for me, one for you, one for me, one for you," which is a movie trope of like, you're going to make one for the masses or for Hollywood and one of your personal things. This is not a line architects say very much to each other because they're all like, for all of, you know, like, there is no one for me. So what about this as sort of like, architecture as ham-fisted metaphor to movie making?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's kind of an obvious choice, right? And I saw exactly the same thing when I was looking at both of those films. You know, it strikes me, they're both stereotypically the product of this lone male genius who has this vision and sees it to be completed as per meeting his genius ideas. Whereas really, you know, they're also, it's this wide cast of craftsmen to create this, an artist working together over a very long period of time. Usually one person gets the credit, but there's, look at the credits to a film. It's like endless, you know.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  You know, in the end, you have this sort of three dimensional object that you sort of encounter in time and space, right? Whether it's a film or a building. So there is like a really interesting analogy there. And I think a lot of filmmakers have seen that over the years. Peter Greenaway and his film, The Belly of an Architect, might be an example for that. Obviously, both The Brutalist and Megalopolis stand for that. In a way, The Fountainhead is very much that for Ayn Rand, in a way.

• 18:23Roman Mars?

  But are there actually any works of fiction that get architecture right? Where you felt like they really nailed it?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  I think the filmmaker who best got it was Jacques Tati, the French filmmaker, the sort of French chaplain, if you will. And his films, Mon Uncle and Playtime, they're really about a confrontation with traditionalism and modernism and how the modern city shapes who we are. And our very humane look at modern architecture about Americanization of the city, the modernization of the city. And they look at it critically, but also with this sort of humanity and acceptance.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Like, we need to accept what is happening and we can make fun of it, but we're going to live in this world, whether we like it or not.

• 19:19Roman Mars?

  Before we go, are there any other fictional architects that you want to talk about?

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Well, we haven't talked about America's most famous screen architect.

• 19:28Roman Mars?

  Who would that be?

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Well, Mike Brady, of course.

• 19:31Roman Mars?

  That's right. Mike Brady.

• 19:39Roman Mars?

  So tell me about Mike Brady and how he practices architecture.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Well, I think, you know, I'm guessing that for many of the listeners out there who are our age, Mike Brady is their most common architect, you know. He's not a very good architect. He lives in this very dated, kitschy ranch burger with the sunken living room and, you know, of course, the very dramatic open staircase.

• 20:03Roman Mars?

  Sure, yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  I find it, there aren't too many episodes of The Brady Bunch where we see Mike actually engaging in architecture, but there is one that I find incredibly interesting. It's an episode called Mike's Horoscope. And in this episode, Mike is approached by this quasi-Italian fashion impresario named Bibi Galini, and she is very fabulous.

• 20:29Speaker 08

  I would introduce myself, but everyone knows who Bibi Galini is. Even people on the street come up to me and say, "It's Bibi." And I always say to them, "Hello, my darling."

• 20:38Speaker 02

  She wants Mike to design a factory for her. And she gives him this complete freedom to do something creative and inventive. She wants it to be pink and fluffy.

• 20:50Speaker 08

  Make the factory the shape of a powder puff.

• 20:52Speaker 09

  Powder puff?

• 20:53Speaker 08

  Or maybe tall, like a lipstick.

• 20:57Speaker 09

  Oh, lipstick? A factory has to be practical and efficient.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  And Mike just can't wrap his mind around it. He keeps designing these like very straightforward factories for her. And she's like, "No, no, no." And then she says she wants the roof to open up. And he's like, "That's technically impossible." And what's funny to me is that instead of embracing this brief that he's given, he could do anything and create some really interesting architecture. He's just so straightforward and lacks such an idea of invention. It just sort of loses the client. I always find that very sad for Mike. It shows a challenge of the architect, right? Which is like, clients are always difficult.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  You have to figure out how to both satisfy your own vision while satisfying demands.

• 21:51Roman Mars?

  It's such a notable deviation from all the other ones we've discussed that given complete freedom, he just is like, please just make it a box and put stuff in it.

• 22:06Roman Mars?

  Well, this has been so fun to talk about, Mark. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  It's been a lot of fun. Thanks.

• 22:15Roman Mars?

  You can read Mark Lambster's architecture column in the Dallas Morning News. He also wrote an excellent biography of architect Philip Johnson. It's called "The Man in the Glass House." Check it out.

• 22:30Roman Mars?

  After the break, Brutalism 101 with Avery Trufelman.

• 22:37Roman Mars?

  This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop off, the first sweater weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions. Crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider.

• 23:12Speaker 10

  This podcast is supported by Nurtac ODT. Remedy Pant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nurtac. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtac can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtac is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to NerTec ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur.

• 23:54Speaker 10

  Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NER-TAC or visit ner-tac.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

• 24:12Speaker 11

  With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 24:38Speaker 12

  Time for a quick break to talk about McDonald's. It's the tangiest time of the year. For a limited time, head to McDonald's and get a McRib sandwich. Make it a meal by adding a medium fries and a soft drink like an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper. So grab a McRib sandwich and embrace the tang. Save time by ordering ahead on the app. Participate in McDonald's for a limited time. Dr. Pepper is a registered trademark of Dr. Pepper, 7-Up Inc.

• 25:06Speaker 13

  And we're back. If you finished The Brutalist and thought, "I don't really understand brutalism," well, we have a story for you. Enjoy.

• 25:18Speaker 13

  The best James Bond is either Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. I lean towards Daniel Craig. The new movies are just better. But the Sean Connery films definitely had the best villains. There's Blofeld, of course, who's so iconic that he turned the act of cat stroking into a thing that supervillains do. But Bond's flashiest nemesis has to be Goldfinger.

• 25:42Speaker 14

  Do you expect me to talk? No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.

• 25:47Speaker 15

  Do you expect me to talk?

• 25:48Speaker 13

  Yeah, I expect you to talk.

• 25:50Speaker 15

  There's this dorky fun fact that the Bond villain Goldfinger was actually named after a real person.

• 25:57Speaker 13

  That's Trufelman, Avery Trufelman.

• 26:00Speaker 15

  The author of the James Bond books, Ian Fleming, named Goldfinger for a man he found so dastardly, so terrible, that he immortalized him in pop culture.

• 26:14Speaker 13

  The real Goldfinger was an architect, Erno Goldfinger, and he made giant, hulking, austere, concrete buildings.

• 26:22Speaker 15

  Goldfinger's buildings were decreed soulless. Inhabitants claimed to suffer health problems and depression from spending time inside them. Some of Goldfinger's buildings were vacated because occupants found them so ugly.

• 26:34Speaker 13

  And yet, many architects praised Goldfinger's buildings. His Trelic Tower, which was once threatened with demolition, has been awarded landmark status.

• 26:43Speaker 15

  This divide, this hatred from the public and love from designers and architects, tends to be the narrative around buildings like Goldfinger's, which is to say gigantic, imposing buildings made of concrete, what some people refer to as brutalist architecture.

• 27:02Speaker 13

  And a lot of folks, beyond the creator of James Bond, love to hate them.

• 27:07Speaker 16

  We are in Worcester Hall, which, to my great dismay and frustration, is often considered the worst building on campus, or Worcester Hall, more like worst.

• 27:19Speaker 15

  I met up with Sarah Briggs Ramsey in Worcester Hall, a brutalist building at UC Berkeley.

• 27:24Speaker 16

  I can't tell you how many times I've been locking up my bike outside and I overhear undergrads walking with their parents and going, ironically, this is the architecture school and it's the ugliest building on campus.

• 27:37Speaker 13

  Yep, Worcester Hall is the architecture school. Sarah completed her masters there.

• 27:42Speaker 16

  Buildings like this are pretty pervasive across most American and Canadian campuses.

• 27:48Speaker 15

  Yeah, there was a big, bulky, concrete building on the campus where I went to college, and I hated when I had to go through it. It just reminded me of a bunker or a bomb shelter. These big, concrete buildings, just like... Bum me out.

• 28:02Speaker 17

  Absolutely. I mean, it has these connotations of, you know, Soviet-era construction, sometimes Third World construction, all these negative associations.

• 28:16Speaker 15

  This is Professor Adrian Forti, author of the excellent book Concrete and Culture. He's been researching concrete for around 10 years now.

• 28:24Speaker 17

  It has a bad name.

• 28:26Speaker 13

  Apart from aesthetic criticisms, concrete buildings present environmental concerns.

• 28:31Speaker 17

  A lot of these buildings were built at a time when energy was cheap, and they use up an awful lot of energy to heat and cool them.

• 28:41Speaker 13

  Concrete buildings were built with the illusion of plenty, that we will always have enough energy to build and heat and cool these massive inefficient structures.

• 28:51Speaker 15

  As harsh as it looks, concrete is an utterly optimistic building material, arguably too optimistic.

• 28:59Speaker 17

  Really, from the 1920s, it was seen as being the material that would change the world. It had the potential to build things in a way that hadn't been seen before.

• 29:12Speaker 15

  Concrete was this material that seemed boundless, readily available in vast quantities, and it could create massive spaces unlike any other material. So, concrete sprang up everywhere.

• 29:23Speaker 17

  It's the second most heavily consumed product in the world.

• 29:28Speaker 15

  The only thing we consume more of than concrete is water.

• 29:33Speaker 13

  We use concrete for sidewalks, bridges, tunnels, and highways, and of course, for giant buildings.

• 29:39Speaker 17

  Whether we're talking about stadia or auditoria.

• 29:44Speaker 15

  Or condominium, or gymnasium, or planetaria.

• 29:47Speaker 13

  So, historically, government programs all over the world loved concrete.

• 29:52Speaker 17

  Particularly in Soviet Russia, but also later in Europe and North America. It was used for welfare, welfare state projects.

• 30:03Speaker 15

  Concrete presented the most efficient way to house huge numbers of people. And philosophically, it was seen as humble, capable, and honest. Concrete was just out there in all of its rough glory, not hiding behind any paint or layers, saying, "Here I am. Love me or hate me."

• 30:21Speaker 13

  And as concrete buildings came to signify humility, honesty, and integrity, they were erected all over the world as housing projects, courthouses, schools, churches, hospitals, and city halls.

• 30:34Speaker 18

  You'll stand outside and a tour bus will go by and they'll be, ladies and gentlemen, voted the most ugliest building in the world, Boston City Hall. How do you compete with that?

• 30:44Speaker 15

  Chris Grimley is up against a lot, but he's trying to restore Boston City Hall's reputation.

• 30:50Speaker 18

  My name is Chris Grimley. I'm with my fellow heroic people, Mark Paznik and Michael Kubo.

• 30:57Speaker 15

  Chris, Mark, and Michael have embarked on what they call the heroic project, chronicling the concrete structures in and around Boston.

• 31:05Speaker 13

  Rather than referring to these concrete buildings as brutalist, they prefer the term heroic, because like so many superheroes, these structures have the best, most noble intentions, but are sorely misunderstood.

• 31:19Speaker 15

  Also, just generally, brutalism is a big, broad label that gets used inconsistently in architecture. People tend to disagree on one precise definition.

• 31:29Speaker 13

  The name brutalism also just sounds intense, even though it's not actually related to brutality.

• 31:35Speaker 19

  It comes from béton brut, which is a French term for raw concrete.

• 31:39Speaker 15

  In any case, to these guys, heroic feels like a better term, especially in Boston, where concrete architecture swooped in and saved the day.

• 31:47Speaker 18

  You have to situate Boston in late 50s, 1960s. It is America's first city.

• 31:54Speaker 13

  Well...

• 31:54Speaker 18

  It is America's most historic city.

• 31:57Speaker 13

  Again, not really, but I get your point.

• 32:00Speaker 18

  And yet, it finds itself in the doldrums.

• 32:03Speaker 13

  Boston, like a lot of other American cities, was plagued by a loss of manufacturing jobs and white flight to the suburbs. And for decades, Boston had the highest property taxes in the nation and almost no development.

• 32:15Speaker 18

  There is this recognition from civic authorities that something needs to be done, and something needs to be done quickly.

• 32:22Speaker 15

  So Boston sets an agenda to make the city great again with big, soaring, capable, thoroughly modern buildings made, of course, out of concrete.

• 32:32Speaker 13

  And though some of these buildings were celebrated, others were really not.

• 32:37Speaker 19

  What we call the third rail of Boston concrete modernism is City Hall.

• 32:42Speaker 15

  When Boston City Hall was built in 1968, critics were put off by this concrete style. It was called alienating and cold. And since it was a government building, this criticism became impossible to remove from politics.

• 32:57Speaker 13

  Boston City Hall became a political pawn. Mayors and city council members kept trying to win public support with promises to get rid of the building, like John Tobin did when he ran for city council.

• 33:08Speaker 20

  Hi, everybody. This is John Tobin. Thanks for visiting votejon Tobin dot com. Here we are on City Hall Plaza in front of Boston City Hall. I'm not an architect, but I know bad architecture when I see it. This is a bad building, and I think we can do a lot by knocking this building down.

• 33:21Speaker 15

  Former Mayor Thomas Menino actually started a study to really look into tearing it down.

• 33:27Speaker 21

  It turned out as a result of the study that you would need something like a nuclear-grade weapon, basically, to destroy this building because it's so heavily overbuilt in concrete.

• 33:36Speaker 13

  And so, when they couldn't tear down City Hall, officials chose to ignore it.

• 33:41Speaker 21

  People that occupied the building for decades and decades didn't like it, and so they didn't invest money into the building and effectively wanted to see the building go away.

• 33:50Speaker 15

  This is called active neglect, and it happens with a lot of concrete buildings. They are intentionally unrepaired, unrenovated, and uncared for.

• 33:59Speaker 13

  Which only makes the building more ugly, and then more hated, and then more ignored, and creates this vicious cycle where the public hate of Boston City Hall feeds itself.

• 34:09Speaker 21

  And then the discussion years on really became about what the original architects had done wrong, as if this were not a failure of maintenance, but a failure of the initial design.

• 34:19Speaker 15

  When people built these mammoth concrete structures, no one really thought about maintenance. They seemed indestructible.

• 34:26Speaker 17

  In the early days of concrete, people assumed that this was an everlasting material that wouldn't need any attention at all. And I mean, that's wrong. We know that it does need to be looked after. It does deteriorate. It does decay.

• 34:44Speaker 15

  But it can be hard to tell when concrete is decaying.

• 34:47Speaker 17

  If you think of brick and timber, the decay takes place on the surface of them. But with concrete, the deterioration is internal.

• 34:58Speaker 13

  Concrete deteriorates chemically from the inside out. Part of this has to do with the metal reinforcements that help hold up most concrete buildings. The rebar, well, it can rust, and the rust eats away at the overall structure.

• 35:12Speaker 15

  But Adrian Forti says tearing them down is not the answer.

• 35:16Speaker 17

  Because as soon as you tear them down, then you have a problem. First of all, what you do with the detritus that's left. And secondly, you've got to replace them with something else and use up a whole lot more energy and create a lot more CO2 in building something in that place.

• 35:36Speaker 15

  They already used up all that energy when they were made. They're already there.

• 35:39Speaker 13

  We can adapt these buildings to make them greener and make them more appealing places to be by adding windows, for example. But basically, Professor Forti thinks we can all develop the capacity to love these concrete brutes in all their hulking glory.

• 35:54Speaker 17

  Yeah, sure. People can learn to love anything. But, you know, as with any art form, whether it's opera or painting or literature, the more you know about it, the more you'll get out of it, the more you'll appreciate it.

• 36:14Speaker 15

  And this is especially true of concrete buildings. Architecture students appreciate them because they know that concrete actually requires a hell of a lot of skill and finesse to work with.

• 36:26Speaker 17

  To do architecture in concrete is proof that you are really are an architect. It's the test of being an architect.

• 36:36Speaker 15

  With a concrete building, every little detail needs to be calculated in advance. Concrete is wildly intimidating to work with. Once you pour it, there's no going back.

• 36:48Speaker 17

  With a concrete building, it's like the result of an immaculate conception. The whole thing is an integral monolithic whole, and it has to be right.

• 37:01Speaker 13

  And aside from the interesting design challenges it poses, concrete itself as a material can be subtly beautiful, if you look closely.

• 37:10Speaker 16

  You know, what we think of as just a monolithic, consistent, homogeneous texture is actually really rich and has a lot of interest when you actually go up to it and consider it.

• 37:21Speaker 15

  Sarah Briggs Ramsey, the one I spoke with at Berkeley's Worcester Hall, did a year-long project, travelling around the world, looking at concrete buildings in Europe, in Asia, and South and North America.

• 37:32Speaker 16

  To create a global comparison of one material that I think is so sort of under-considered. It's like the background of all the cities, but no one actually stands to look.

• 37:45Speaker 15

  We call the city a "concrete jungle" to talk about the artificialness of the urban landscape. But concrete can actually be a very natural expression of the environment. Concrete's color and texture can be dictated by local climate, local earth, and local rock.

• 38:01Speaker 16

  This is the Harvard Science Center on the Harvard campus, and it's got a very purply, like a really pronounced purply color, and that's the ground from the site.

• 38:13Speaker 13

  Concrete can also be an expression of local style and custom, like how UK concrete has big, thick, textured chunks of rock, while Japanese concrete is very fine and flat.

• 38:24Speaker 15

  But the beauty of concrete architecture is all the better when you can just observe the buildings like pieces of sculpture, without actually having to live and work in them, which brings in concrete's surprising ally: photography.

• 38:39Speaker 17

  Concrete looks good in photographs.

• 38:42Speaker 13

  It provides this kind of neutral background.

• 38:44Speaker 17

  It provides a wonderful setting for people's skin tones.

• 38:50Speaker 17

  Colour of their clothes.

• 38:52Speaker 13

  Fashion photographers realised this first, and then pockets of the internet started to appreciate these concrete buildings.

• 38:58Speaker 17

  There are lots of these blogs and so on, which show a kind of extraordinary enthusiasm for concrete.

• 39:06Speaker 15

  Photography is allowing a new audience of non-architects to appreciate these buildings for their strong lines, their crisp shadows, and increasingly, the idealism they embody.

• 39:18Speaker 17

  They represent a set of ideas about the state of the world and what the future was imagined to be that, you know, we want to preserve. We should remember what people were thinking 50 years ago. If we tear these buildings down, we will lose all of that.

• 39:37Speaker 13

  Architecture, whether we want to admit it or not, has a sort of shelf life, a time after which buildings fall out of fashion and then are allowed to fall apart.

• 39:47Speaker 15

  Back in the 1960s, Victorian-style buildings were considered hideous, falling apart, impossible to repair, and we were tearing batches of them down, all the while erecting big, concrete buildings. But enough Victorians were saved that today, they are these beautiful, lovingly restored treasures.

• 40:08Speaker 13

  Brutalist, heroic, whatever you want to call it, concrete architecture now finds itself at a potential inflection point. Too outdated to be modern, too young to be classic. And a small but growing band of architects, architecture enthusiasts and preservationists would like us to just wait a bit and see. Maybe with a little time and love, we might discover some architectural diamonds in the rough that we just can't see right now.

• 40:48Roman Mars?

  That story was produced by Avery Trufelman back in 2015. 99% Invisible was produced this week by me, Roman Mars, along with Martin Gonzalez, who also mixed this episode. Music by Swan Real and Martin Gonzalez. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kirk Colstead is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laish Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Madina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars, as I said before.

• 41:27Roman Mars?

  The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. I think all of us are on Blue Sky now, which is kind of like Twitter, except it's not supporting an unelected billionaire who's currently dismantling the government. We're also having a ball on our Discord server, where you can join us to make Oscar predictions and talk about your favorite architect movies. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 42:12Speaker 10

  This podcast is supported by Nurtac ODT, Remedy Pant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nurtac. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtac can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtac is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to Nurtac ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers

• 42:57Speaker 10

  and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NUR-TAC or visit nurtec.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

• 43:11Speaker 12

  Time for a quick break to talk about McDonald's. It's the tangiest time of the year. For a limited time, head to McDonald's and get a McRib sandwich. Make it a meal by adding a medium fries and a soft drink like an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper. So grab a McRib sandwich and embrace the tang. Save time by ordering ahead on the app. At participating McDonald's for a limited time. Dr. Pepper is a registered trademark of Dr. Pepper 7-Up Inc.