The Brutalist: Architecture as Work (Pejorative)

Kate Wagner’s review of The Brutalist is good, especially when she focuses on the empty canonization of “masters” carried out by critics and intellectuals. However, it spins the simplistic narrative, now very popular in certain architectural and design circles, of the “architect as worker”. In doing so, she romantically generalizes work. Wagner writes: “This is yet another iteration in a series of events that show that the architect—no less than the furniture builder, the coal shoveler, and the draftsman—is also a worker” forgetting that if Toth had kept shoveling coal, there would be no movie.

In fact, throughout the whole film, proletarian and even clerical work is depicted as a curse (compare it to Perfect Days to get an idea). These activities represent the narrative bottoms of the story. Shoveling coal is Pavlovianly associated with poverty and homelessness, from which Toth is generously saved by an angel with a check—the same person who earlier refused to pay for his work. Later in the story, our Bauhaus alumnus decides to abandon the calm but anonymous job in a big firm to go back to work, far from home and from his wife, for a childish, vile patron, to complete his signature work. Toth is moved by his professional ego. After all, he is an architect and has an architect’s soul. At this point, he himself becomes bossy and starts firing people on the spot. So much for worker solidarity.

I don’t deny that the way the director represents diverse forms of work is convincing and original, but the movie is not just about work: it is about professional status and proletarianization, about the always reversible processes (except for the ruling elites) of class. This can happen at any time and under circumstances nobody has control over. The Brutalist is not a rags-to-riches movie, but one of riches, either symbolic or financial, to literal rags. It shows that in our world, Howard Roark and Saint Francis could be the same person.

 

Silvio Lorusso

Silvio Lorusso is a designer witouth qualities, an artst without a gallery and a writer without spell cheker. Get his latest book, entitled What Design Can't Do, here!

 

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