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Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather use the recent Oscar-winning movie The Brutalist as a jumping-off point to talk about the profound effect of built environments on our lives. We may not have seen this movie, but we’ve all been in buildings, and we have opinions about them.
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Show Notes
Our architectural survey starts in New Haven, CT, where the ugliest building on Yale’s campus is ironically (or appropriately?) the architecture school.
By Ɱ – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125929427
From there we visit another surreal Brutalist environment: the office building that serves as a phantasmagorical battleground of the video game Control.
Less phantasmagorical, but still brutal: Boston City Hall.
By andrewjsan – https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewsan/6776358460/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=101393496
More ecclesiastical, but VERY brutal: Newman Hall, a Catholic church in Berkeley, CA.
Less brutal, more gentle: we visit the animals at Franklin Park Zoo and Smolak Farms, and get frustrated by need to backtrack back to your stroller that you left by the entrance to the gorilla enclosure.
Lastly, we tackle the built environment in the streets of Culver City, Los Angeles, where an attempt to redesign the streetscape in favor of bikes and pedestrians at the expense of cars caused much consternation. It’s Los Angeles, after all.
Further Reading
30 people getting coffee vs. 30 people getting coffee
byu/lushe3D inpics
(Caveat: I also have not seen the movie, and have no education in architecture, but like the Overthinkers I have been in several buildings.)
As a resident of Washington DC and someone who has worked in a couple of the Brutalist government office buildings, I wanted to comment on Pete’s well-stated point about how many of the best examples of Brutalism are “public on the outside but not on the inside.” You make a good point, but there are a couple of notable exceptions – in particular, two of the most famous Brutalist built environments in DC are public: the Hirshhorn Museum (modern art gallery on the National Mall), and most of the stations of the DC Metro. I’ve spent a lot of time in both, and my “underthinking” take is that I like them. There is a feeling of solidity and permanence that I find comforting – a sense that these structures, created by squishy mortal humans like myself, are stronger and more durable than their small weak builders.
I often like to think about that contrast when I’m walking around – the contrast between people and the environments we collectively build. Even in a small town, the buildings and roads are surprisingly impressive in comparison to the little monkey creatures who make them.
I will also take this opportunity to recommend the Korean movie Architecture 101 (건축학개론). It’s emotionally pretty painful, but fascinating on a number of levels. You might enjoy considering what it says about the similarities between movies as an art form and architecture as an art form, the way both narratives and physical spaces are constructed for us to make use of, and how they both accommodate and constrain us.