What is Brutalism? And Why Do Architects Hate the Movie "The Brutalist"?

Here are five things to know about the film, which is up for 10 statuettes, including Best Picture:

Who was Marcel Breuer?

Laszlo Toth is "an amalgamation" of several famous architects including Marcel Breuer, director Brady Corbet said.

Like the character played by Adrien Brody, Marcel Breuer was born in Hungary, honed his skills at the Bauhaus school in Germany before emigrating to the United States.

Both designed iconic chairs before working on large buildings. As Jews, they were commissioned to build gigantic Christian buildings in the United States, which became their masterpieces.

Marcel Breuer is also known for having designed parts of the Paris headquarters of UNESCO and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

What is brutalism?

Brutalism is an architectural style that emerged in the 1950s during the reconstruction of Europe after World War II.

Its main features? The use of exposed concrete and giant geometric shapes, in particular.

But "The Brutalist" almost never highlights this architectural style, apart from the masterpiece by Laszlo Toth, seen after 3 hours of the film.

In a podcast episode, in English, titled "Why The Brutalist is a horrible film", Alexandra Lange, an architecture critic, has strong words: the authors "read all the books on Brutalism, but absolutely none of that was used".

Victoria Young, a professor at the University of St. Thomas, told AFP that the building at the end of the film is not Brutalist but rather early modernist. "I thought, 'You don't seem to understand the timeline.'"

Far from reality

Laszlo Toth is a Holocaust survivor who, upon arriving in the United States after the war, struggles to find work and waits in line for a piece of bread, before his talents are spotted by a wealthy benefactor.

In reality, Bauhaus students like Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius crossed the Atlantic in the 1930s, before World War II. They arrived as professionals, internationally recognized, and were welcomed into leading institutions, such as Harvard University.

Modernist architecture was established and fashionable in the United States long before the time in which the film is set. Laszlo Toth is a heroin addict and a pious man. Marcel Breuer, on the other hand, was sober and secular.

"As an architectural historian, my head is still spinning after seeing this film," Young said.

Other controversies?

Artificial intelligence was used for Mr. Toth's buildings and plans, according to the film's editor, David Jancso.

The director said the shots were hand-drawn but that technology was used to create "intentionally... bad 1980s digital renderings" for the film's epilogue.

AI, which is both used and reviled in Hollywood, was also applied to improve the actors' Hungarian accent.

Robert McCarter, an architect and author of a monograph entitled "Breuer," said he was not "bothered" by the historical distortion.

"They are simply using his biography for practical purposes," he told AFP.