The Brutalist’s fatal flaw The architect was never a Great Man

For seven centuries, travellers would marvel at the scattered verdigris fragments of the Colossus of Rhodes. The shortest-lived of the Ancient Wonders, the Sun God statue stood for just over half a century before being felled by an earthquake in 226BC. Built so close to a geological fault, the higher it rose, the more precarious it had become.

In recent decades, there has been a backlash against the Great Man theory embodied in that Ancient Greek icon of Helios. Thomas Carlyle summed up this once prevailing view, claiming in a lecture on heroics, “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.” The idea that societies are driven by the will, and virility, of exceptional (overwhelmingly male) individuals, rather than complex societal forces, is seen not just as reductive but anathema. The legend of the lone wolf genius has long been both a cloak and a cudgel. It has been employed to steal ideas, deny provenance, and bury the achievements of others. It has exploited women, under the guise of the muse, and justified the capricious venal desires of coddled elitist men. The built environment has been no exception, with the Shitty Architecture Men list being only the tip of the iceberg in terms of sexual misconduct, dubious morality, and toxic work culture.

If the discourse is anything to go by, then, the colossal Great Man has been toppled. A multitude of online articles say so, each a fragment of that fallen colossus. The only real differences are the vocabulary wielded against the heroic view of history and whether it’s casually disdainful or wildly alarmist. Yet, just as there was hubris in the raising of such a statue on unstable foundations, there is, too, in celebrating its destruction. It has long been rumoured that the Berlin Wall pieces sold to tourists are mostly manufactured. With a ripple of lamentations that Brady Corbet’s Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist, which tells the tale of a visionary architect, resurrects that idea of the Great Man, a thought recurred — what if these fragments were similar forgeries? What if the colossus never fell?

In 2012, I found myself in a godless tiki bar on the Gulf of Thailand shore. It was quiet, aside from one backpacking Patrick Bateman droning interminably on his phone. Suddenly, there was a commotion, and the bartenders vanished. Word spread there had been a massive earthquake off the Indonesian coast. Tsunami warnings were issued. Memories of the 2004 tsunami were raw. Lacking the wisdom of the locals, I took the idiot route and got hammered. All the while, facing mortality, that oblivious voice was babbling on the phone. He had been reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — the hero of which was an egotistic young architect. The book, now deemed synonymous with The Brutalist, had changed his life, he repeatedly insisted. This was to be the soundtrack to our impending deaths, the last words filling my ears before the flood.

We both lived, but I carried the grudge. Rand was, of course, persona non grata in nice liberal book circles, a petulant Right-libertarian dogmatist who extolled excellence if only we could free ourselves from the shackles of ethics. She was fanatical in her zeal for laissez-faire capitalism, individualism and reason, collecting a cult following who were enthralled to at least two-thirds of her formula. I was, though, eventually relieved of my anti-Rand bias by Slavoj Žižek. It was, he suggested, counter-revolutionary to throw her away. He compared her to Pascal, Kleist, Brecht… figures who are “over-orthodox”, who “spell out the secret premises of the ruling ideology in such [a] clear radical way that it’s unacceptable and embarrassing for the ruling ideology itself”. She is the paradigm of “enlightened egotism… no compassion for others… pure individualist brutal capitalism”. Rand, then, in his view, reveals not so much the inner workings of the elite but their internal mythos — the way they want to see themselves, as opposed to what they are (bankrolled by the state or asset-strippers of the High Street), something all too evident in the Musks and Bezos of the world. But while Rand’s The Fountainhead claims to be a portrait of an architect-genius Howard Roark and his adversaries, whether spiteful mediocrities or disingenuous ideologues, it inadvertently does something critics of the Great Men theory also do. It misattributes responsibility. The colossus it erects is as false as the one the critics decry.

The real colossus remains untoppled. For the architect was not the colossus. It was the client. It has always been the client. And they, whether market or state, have all the power, influence and money. The architects may receive the credit and blame but it is corporations who commission skyline monstrosities. It is institutions that block the advancement of female architects. It is boardroom meetings and government departments that bulldoze neighbourhoods and vernacular architecture. Yet, partly due to the anonymity of the former, it is architects who pick up the cheque, in both senses.

The Oracle of Delphi wisely forbade the rebuilding of the Colossus of Rhodes. Her view prevails today with The Brutalist coming in for flak for piecing together a “dangerous” archetype, comparisons with Rand’s egomaniac Roark abounding.

Beyond the vagaries of the discourse, The Brutalist offers truths or truisms. Conformity can be stifling, brilliance can be traumatised, vocation can mean sacrifice, and power can be sadistically cruel, raising the slippery question of who the Brutalist of the title actually is. The film certainly has elements of the unintentional mock heroism of The Fountainhead but the humanity it displays, at its best, is instructive. The main character László Tóth (an exceptional turn by Adrien Brody) is, however, fictional; a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Bauhaus alumni, émigré to the US, and visionary architect. Tóth initially, superficially, seems based on Marcel Breuer but the differences between the cool-headed gregarious Breuer and the (forgivably) histrionic Tóth outweigh similarities.

The character, then, seems to be a composite, except none of the parts fits. The Brutalist is like The Fountainhead in the sense that their disjuncture between fiction and reality is as illuminating as their closeness. Tóth survives Buchenwald concentration camp. In our world, countless architects such as Alfred Grotte, Diana Reiter and Harry Elte never returned from the camps. Ignjat Fischer’s health was broken in a Fascist prison, and he died not long thereafter. The eccentric outsider architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser survived under an assumed identity for the war’s duration. Marcel Janco only got out when friends were butchered, while Oskar Kaufmann watched his wife die while trapped as refugees.

Life after escaping the Nazis could be relentless. Exiles were treated with suspicion as “enemy aliens”. Some, like the once-revered Bruno Ahrends, were interned. Many more like Pierre Chareau, creator of the innovative House of Glass, slid into destitution. The genuinely visionary Erich Mendelsohn ended up constructing replica German housing for the US air force to firebomb, as practice for the real thing. Last act coronations were rare, if they existed at all.

Few of these lives embody the Great Man legend, except in the sense that greatness lies in resilience against hardships and the odds, the most redeeming aspect of The Brutalist, a quality hardly restricted to men. There were, after all, numerous female architect exiles. And there were success stories of architects who fled the Nazis — the Bauhaus maestro Gropius for instance became well-established and helped many émigrés — often as teachers rather than superstars. If anyone came close to the Great Man trope, it was Mies Van Der Rohe, who was not Jewish and who had been courted by the Nazis before migrating. Yet even he had masters, as well as essential collaborators — whether property developers, the government, or multinationals like Seagram and Bacardi. Even Rand’s inspiration, Frank Lloyd Wright, hid financial calamities (his unbuilt designs remain tantalising) and personal tragedy (the Taliesin massacre) behind his egotism. Life is not as simple as constructing a colossus or obliterating one.

The Brutalist is raw and intense, for Hollywood at least, but suffers from many of that realm’s ills — for a film that so hysterically cares, it extends little consideration to the architectural schools, styles and eras it misrepresents and throws into disorder. Its script is a convoluted shambles which would be admirably refreshing, if it did not somehow belie the complexity of reality. Its knots are too neat, its loose ends too ragged.

Impressive in cinematography and acting, The Brutalist, like its more politicised critics, relies on historical inaccuracies, clichéd dialogue, and character simplifications. This makes it more now than then. Whether superhuman or disgraced, individuals are forced into moulds, so that our worldviews can be substantiated. It’s one thing to examine how factual a movie is, and another to consider how fictional our perspective is. Within architecture, professional concerns are legitimate. No one should work under the tyranny of an egotist. Yet wider societal control does not begin or end with such figures. For all the talk of the collective, there is a staggering inability to see how insidiously powerful the corporate has become. Instead, everything becomes an atomised morality tale, where rotten fruit is picked off while the rotten tree is ignored.

It is not the shattered face, then, of the overthrown egocentric colossus that’s the architectural symbol of our times or the fates of our cities. It’s something far harder but essential to rail against — the acronyms, the monopolies, the faceless. The colossus, then, is more of an effigy than a statue. Who commissioned it and why, The Brutalist suggests, is the real story.