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History Made Concrete: Production Designer Judy Becker on The Brutalist
The brutalism in The Brutalist In constructing The Brutalist, his epic of assimilation and survival, Brady Corbet sought a sense of scale large enough to reflect the ambitious vision of László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who flees to America with hopes of building a better future. As Tóth works to reclaim his life, legacy and marriage to wife Erzsébet after being forcibly separated from all three, this decades-spanning immigrant saga—which Corbet directed and produced from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold—settles in Philadelphia, where Tóth is offered the commission of a lifetime, albeit at a steep psychological cost.
For production designer Judy Becker, The Brutalist was a “dream come true,” not only requiring her to revisit the mid-century Americana she’d recreated for Todd Haynes’s romantic drama Carol but also indulging her long-standing fascination with the starkness and minimalism of Brutalism, the international architectural movement that emerged in the 1950s. To do so while telling the story of a specific artist, whose traumatic experiences of persecution and imprisonment is reflected in the austere concrete structures he designs, presented Becker with an added “emotional challenge,” she says. “I had to draw on every inspiration, idea and element in my inner library to become László Tóth.”
As Tóth enters into a tensely conditional business arrangement with sadistic industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, he labors atop a hill overlooking Doylestown, Pennsylvania, to construct a massive community center—known as the Institute—which is to feature a library, theater, gymnasium and chapel. In early conversations, Becker and Corbet spoke at length about the Institute, which needed to be not only authentically brutalist but reflective of Tóth’s personal history and struggle as well. It also had to be achievable without ever existing in full. “At my first meeting with Brady in person, he said, ‘We’re not going to build this whole building, obviously,’” Becker recalls. “‘Can you design it, so we can figure out what piece of it we can build to indicate the construction of this giant building?’”
Corbet struggled to secure financing for The Brutalist, ultimately made across seven years for about $10 million. Filming was originally set to start in 2020, then postponed due to the pandemic; subsequent delays meant cameras didn’t roll until spring 2023, when the production was set up in Hungary. The protracted prep time gave Becker an opportunity to research brutalist architecture, as well as the barracks of the concentration camps where Tóth and his wife would have been imprisoned. This combination, she says, gave her a unique window into Tóth’s architectural genius—and his anguish.
The Brutalist tracks the decades-long build of the Institute through numerous delays and setbacks; it’s glimpsed in sections on site and in large-scale models throughout. Designing the structure was a daunting challenge, but Becker understood the importance of envisioning this mammoth complex in its entirety: as a monument to Tóth’s dream of freedom, a reflection of the horrors he endured during the war and a manifestation of his longing to reconnect with Erzsébet.
“You enter the Institute from a long, deep staircase that goes down into the ground until you reach a center hallway with low ceilings, as if entering into imprisonment,” Becker explains. “On either side of the hallway are functional rooms. They connect to each other through doors that close, and the ceilings are very high—to make the rooms feel more claustrophobic, in a sense, because they have no windows. The proportions are the same as they would have been in the barracks that László and Erzsébet were quartered in.”
Becker simultaneously envisioned the Institute as “a passageway to freedom and an escape from imprisonment,” one that would symbolize László’s desire to reconcile the memory of his family’s suffering with the promise of their deliverance. “Up at the top,” she says, “there’s a strip of skylight, similar to strips of windows in the concentration camp barracks, that gives light and hope, that’s almost a way of communicating through to a skylight on the other side, from László to Erzsébet.”
Moving down the hallway, the Institute opens up into a chapel, the roof of which includes a cut-out in the shape of a cross, allowing the sun to shine through and cast a cruciform ray of light along the chapel floor. Two accompanying towers, meanwhile, resemble crematorium chimneys. Finally, “when you exit the building, you go up a very steep staircase,” Becker says. “It’s wide, but it’s hard to get up, and you exit into the natural world. Everything is right in front of you, the openness of the world. You enter as a prisoner, and you exit into freedom.”
Becker also studied eco-architecture and earthworks sculpture, particularly the work of land-art practitioner James Turrell, to understand “the relationship of the sky to the structure” and ensure that light and darkness would be counterposed throughout the Institute, suggesting a spiritual dimension to Tóth’s torment.
All the craftspeople of The Brutalist were fascinated by the work of the European architectural avant-garde, particularly Hungarian-German architect Marcel Breuer, who, like Tóth, was forced to immigrate to the United States. While Becker avoided looking at other architects who came out of the Bauhaus school, to more firmly ground herself in the imagined experience of Tóth, Breuer proved an inescapable influence. Becker grew up in Scarsdale, New York, home to the largest Jewish congregation—the Westchester Reform Temple—in Westchester county; the synagogue was originally designed in the shape of a Star of David by, she recently learned, none other than Breuer. “You wouldn’t know it was designed that way unless you saw it from above, which I found fascinating,” she recalls. “It was a secret. From above, it was in the shape of the Star of David, but from below it just looked like a bunch of crooked white walls.”
Becker and others in The Brutalist’s art department worked closely with director of photography Lol Crawley to ensure their collective contributions aligned with the strong foundation laid by Corbet and Fastvold’s expansive script. “When you’re all on the same page, it’s seamless, and that was the case here,” she says of Crawley. “He’s an artist, and he lights in a very natural way.”
Working with Corbet and Crawley on The Brutalist most reminded Becker of her experience collaborating with Haynes and director of photography Edward Lachman across I’m Not There and Carol. “There’s synchronicity on those types of visionary indie projects,” she says. “When Todd or Brady’s the leader, they’re informing everything. You have a couple of team meetings, and then you go off all on the same page, and it happens.”
While searching for a location that could serve as Van Buren’s library, where Tóth first encounters his less-than-benevolent benefactor, the production came across a mansion near Budapest that featured a curvilinear-glass winter garden. Though the specifics of this space were not what the script had called for, it was available to the production, and Becker instinctively felt it was the right place for the library. “A lot of directors would have told me to find them something else, but Brady’s not like that; he’s flexible,” she recalls. “It was a true sign of creativity, to me, that we could try to find a way to make this work.”
In “one of those eureka moments that never happen when you want them to,” Becker realized while installing cabinets resembling floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases that she could use forced perspective to change the shape of the room, making it appear to narrow toward the back and highlighting a rounded extension where the library’s patron could sit. “That idea never changed,” she says. “The only problem was executing it; actually making cabinets that tall was monumental.”
As described in the script, the moment where László installs these shelving units involved them being “pulled up into place like a flower’s petals opening,” Becker adds, an abstract concept that later inspired her to use a special-effects rig system to, at the push of the button, spring all the shelves open at a 45-degree angle simultaneously. “It had to look perfect because this is where we learn that László is a talented artist, that he knows what he’s doing and can make something beautiful,” she says. “In a way, it’s one of the film’s biggest reveals.”
Beyond these large-scale builds, Becker gave careful consideration to each piece of furniture that Tóth designs for his cousin Attila’s business in Philadelphia, seeking not to reproduce work from any other artists of the era but to instead motivate it by what Tóth might have encountered and had access to with limited time and resources. To this end, she placed webbed beach chairs in the furniture shop, as well as a chest of drawers. Later, these chairs inspire the design of the webbing and straps in chairs that Tóth designed for the Van Buren library, and he also repurposes a drawer from that chest to design a tubular-steel desk.
The cantilever tubular steel frame design of the Cesca chair is popularly attributed to Breuer (and named for his adopted daughter), but Becker knew that others had designed similar chairs throughout the 1930s and sensed that Tóth would have come across it multiple times. Moreover, she questioned whether his four years of confinement in the concentration camps would have informed his affinity for such exposed, industrial materials as tubular steel and reinforced concrete. “We kept the hardware on that drawer but shaved off the trim to convey the idea that László had taken this ugly drawer and reused it,” Becker recalls. “It was very method, on purpose. I was trying to say, ‘What would he have done? He’s here. He has no money, but he wants to do something beautiful and different for his cousin.’”
Stepping back and evaluating her work on The Brutalist as a whole, Becker reflects that while Corbet’s ambition for the project was “monumental,” both in terms of the ideas he wanted to express and the years he spent working toward the film’s completion, she never applied that word literally to her production design. “Everything in filmmaking is an illusion,” she reflects. “It’s amazing how many people think that [a real] László Tóth designed those buildings we see, that he designed the furniture, that he designed the library. People ask me who designed all that, and I say, ‘Well… I did.’”
