For anyone involved in architecture, it’s no surprise that a film focusing on a visionary architect and his profession demands the epic dimensions of cinematography, drama and 215-minute running time of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. This week the film was nominated in ten Oscar categories including best picture, best director and best actor.
Despite architects being present in film from the early stages of cinema, architecture’s role in society has rarely been at the epicentre of the narrative.
Notable exceptions are King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949), where the architect is a vessel for Ayn Rand’s hymn to individualism; Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect (1987), which looks at the political stance of architects; and last year’s Megalopolis, where the architect is the ultimate coordinator of everyday life. But I never felt these films grasped the reality of architecture’s complex obligations or the challenges beyond designing.
