The Brutalists

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

The Brutalist is a movie. I don’t know if it’s a good movie or a bad movie, but it is definitely the most movie I’ve seen this year. It is also a movie nominally about architecture and is nominated for 10 Academy Awards, so it felt like journalistic malpractice if we didn’t talk about it on the show at least a little bit. The story follows a fictional Hungarian architect named László Toth and his struggles to build a community center in rural Pennsylvania. The film neatly summarizes the debate about the architectural style known as Brutalism in this one exchange. 

LÁSZLÓ TOTH [THE BRUTALIST]: Concrete is sturdy and cheap. 

LESLIE WOODROW [THE BRUTALIST]: Concrete… It’s not very attractive.

ROMAN MARS: The job of architect has often been depicted in movies, even though the practice of architecture is not very cinematic. It’s mostly meetings and such. But it is a romantic profession that lends itself to high drama and strained metaphors, which–after seeing The Brutalist–is why I wanted to talk to Mark Lamster. Mark is the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News–editor of a book called Architecture and Film–and he teaches an Architecture on Screen course at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. So, he’s basically the first and only call you make when you want to talk about this stuff. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. 

MARK LAMSTER: It’s super fun to be here. Thanks for having me. 

ROMAN MARS: And you have seen the movie, The Brutalist. I have heard you talk about it. 

MARK LAMSTER: Yes, I have definitely seen the movie, The Brutalist. I have podcasted about it. I wrote a review of it for our newspaper. So, yes. 

ROMAN MARS: So, let’s talk a little bit just about Brutalism in general and why you think that this is the style that this character is working in. How does Brutalism fit into this? 

MARK LAMSTER: That’s a great question. I’m not really sure that it does. When we first meet László Toth, lead character of The Brutalist, he is really designing in, like, an international style way. He’s just come over. He’s doing this bent tube furniture–kind of very Marcel Breuer inspired. The next thing we see that he designs is this library, but that’s more kind of a Moderne project. It is the appropriate time mostly for Brutalism. It’s a little early for Brutalism if you’re, you know, an architectural historian looking at moments of history. It’s a little earlier than Brutalism might begin. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, I have a contention that what it has to do with Brutalism is that the word “Brutalist” is just great. 

MARK LAMSTER: Yes, it is a great word. And unfortunately, I think for much of the public, it has become sort of a default word for just all modern architecture, which is completely inappropriate. And it’s sort of a cross that we architecture critics and architects themselves have to bear to explain this fact that no, Brutalism is actually this type of architecture that’s really constrained to this relatively short period of time. But, you know, in the mind of the general public, any building that they don’t like is Brutalism.

ROMAN MARS: So, the director of The Brutalist has mentioned that László Toth, the lead character, is this amalgam of maybe a little Paul Rudolph and Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. I mean, like, were you thinking about this at the time you were watching it? 

MARK LAMSTER: The main thing I kept thinking about as I was watching it was that this émigré architect who had, you know, ostensibly been the leading modernist architect of Hungary was thrust into abject poverty in America with no connections. And all I could think about was that Philadelphia at that time, where he moves to, had this very significant émigré community of architects. The most notable modernist firm there was Howe & Lescaze. They built the PSFS Tower, which if you’ve taken an architectural history modernism survey, you’ve seen it as the first modernist skyscraper. So, that was built in the ’30s in Philadelphia. So, the idea that László Toth comes there, can’t find work, is, like, this unicorn Modernist in a city where that is an apostasy… And I kept just sitting there and sitting there and sitting there and sitting there, because this movie is, like, three and a half very long hours, and just wondering, like, why he wasn’t getting a job or going out and hanging out with all these cool modern architects who live down the block.

ROMAN MARS: That’s a good point. Did you think about his buildings as an architecture critic at all? Did you, like, look at them and judge them in a certain way? 

MARK LAMSTER: Well, I’m not really sure what to say about him as an architect, per se, because we see very little of his actual built architecture until the very end of the film. The first thing we see is this library that he’s designed, and it’s very beautiful as an object. But the only piece of furniture in the library is this Corbusier-style lounge chair. And it just struck me as, like, so frigid and uncomfortable for a library. And I live not far from the actual house that Walter Gropius built for himself here outside of Boston. And it’s exactly the opposite kind of space. It’s very comfortable and luxurious. And the idea that the only kind of Modernist library would be this bare, frigid place, I think, didn’t line up for me with history. It looked nice on screen, right? But it wasn’t the kind of place that you’d wanna actually read a book. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I think most of the depictions of architecture and design in the movie are all about, you know, what looks good to be filmed or photographed and what serves the story. And they’re not really about the veracity of different movements and stuff like that. 

MARK LAMSTER: I think if the movie wasn’t about architecture itself, it would be a lot easier to forgive the transgressions, shall we say? But I mean, you asked about his actual architect. The only time we really encounter his full architecture is at the end when we’re presented with this community center that the community actually didn’t ask for.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah.

So let’s talk about architecture in movies in general. I mean, you edited a book on architecture and film and thought about this a lot. What are architects in movies for? They seem like they have different purpose than your average vocation as depicted on screen. 

MARK LAMSTER: Absolutely. Well, first of all, there are very few films that are about actual architects that center on the practice of making architecture. And it’s kind of easy to understand why. And it’s because architecture is kind of boring. It takes a long time to make. It’s a lot of plumbing details. It’s a lot of going over plans. No one dies. There’s no spying. There are no superheroes involved, right? So, it doesn’t easily fit into the standard narrative structures of Hollywood film that require the sort of incredible existential drama, right? Architecture is kind of like oxygen; it’s all around us and we can’t live without it. But we also take it super for granted, right? So, when architects do appear in films, usually they’re there as a signpost of sort of bourgeois respectability. It’s usually a man–not always–but quite often. And he is both an artist and a respected professional, right? So, he is this ideal figure–very attractive. I think of the character Sam Waterston plays in Hannah and Her Sisters, right? 

DAVID [HANNAH AND HER SISTERS]: I really came in here because I was bored stiff by the party.

HOLLY [HANNAH AND HER SISTERS]: And what makes you think we’re more interesting?

MARK LAMSTER: And he is very urbane, has a box at the opera, is able to discourse on all of the arts… 

DAVID [HANNAH AND HER SISTERS]: The design’s deliberately non-contextual, but I wanted to keep the atmosphere of the street, you know, and the proportions. And in the material, that’s unpolished red granite…

MARK LAMSTER: He’s very successful–has a Mercedes. In the film, we see characters played by Dianne Wiest and Carrie Fisher are just fawning over him. It’s like which one of them will get to bed this man is the principal action around his character. 

HOLLY [HANNAH AND HER SISTERS]: Of course, I was so tongue tied all night. I can’t believe I said that about the Guggenheim… 

MARK LAMSTER: We often see that. It’s like this architect is a signpost rather than his career actually described. In any number of films you will see this from–Jungle Fever, the Spike Lee film, Sleepless in Seattle… You know, you could just go through Hollywood and that’s sort of the idealized vision of the architect as professional and artist at once. Very desirable. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, so the architect is essentially just this artist that just has his stuff together enough to pay a mortgage?

MARK LAMSTER: And a BMW, right?

ROMAN MARS: So, an older woman can go, “Okay, I’m not throwing my life away for this guy. Yeah. Yeah. 

MARK LAMSTER: Exactly. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. So funny.

[THE FOUNTAINHEAD MOVIE MUSIC]

ROMAN MARS: Sort of the ground zero for architects depicted on film is Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. This is an awful, awful movie. 

MARK LAMSTER: Well, it’s both a great movie and a terrible movie, right? So, 1949–The Fountainhead, based on the novel by Ayn Rand and directed by King Vidor. And the characters in the film are, of course, generally just mouthpieces for her objectivist ideology–basically libertarianist thinking. 

DOMINIQUE FRANCON [THE FOUNTAINHEAD]: They hate you for the greatness of your achievement. They hate you for your integrity. They hate you because they know they can neither corrupt you nor rule you… 

MARK LAMSTER: And the lead character in the film, played by Gary Cooper, is this architect named Howard Roark. And he’s a very dogmatic Modernist. He does not want his vision corrupted. You know, we see him heroically, at the beginning of the film, getting this incredible commission for a skyscraper. And when the conservative bankers who he presents his model to see his modern building, they want to attack on this sort of classical facade on the front. And he is aghast and refuses this and storms out because no one shall interfere with his genius. 

BANKER #1 [THE FOUNTAINHEAD]: It’ll shock people! It’s too different–too original! 

BANKER #2 [THE FOUNTAINHEAD]: Why take chances when you can stay in the middle? 

HOWARD ROARK [THE FOUNTAINHEAD]: If you want my work, you must take it as it is or not at all. 

BANKER #1 [THE FOUNTAINHEAD]: We are your clients, and it’s your job to serve us. 

HOWARD ROARK [THE FOUNTAINHEAD]: I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build… 

MARK LAMSTER: Of course, the film sort of culminates with this incredible scene where he has now designed a housing project. And once again, its completion has escaped his control. And his solution to this is to just go and blow up the housing project.

HOWARD ROARK [THE FOUNTAINHEAD]: Arrest me. I’ll talk at the trial. 

MARK LAMSTER: And, of course, today this sounds like domestic terrorism. But in the world of the film, it’s this act of completely justified, righteous behavior. And he, in fact, gets off at this trial that’s held because no one, in the world of Ayn Rand, should interfere with the individual heroic genius. This idea of this architect who no one should confront his vision–he’s a sole, male genius–it basically holds even through today. I think The Brutalist is very much a product of that same vision. The character here played by Adrian Brody also sort of refuses to have his work corrupted in any way to the extent that he will pay for all change orders and overruns on its cost.

LÁSZLÓ TOTH [THE BRUTALIST]: He cuts three meters from the top? I add it to the bottom. 

LESLIE WOODROW [THE BRUTALIST]: We can’t afford all this! I’m already over budget this quarter. 

LÁSZLÓ TOTH [THE BRUTALIST]: You take what you need from my fee, Leslie. 

LESLIE WOODROW [THE BRUTALIST]: Come on, what’s the difference between 40 and 50 feet anyway? The ceilings are still plenty high. 

LÁSZLÓ TOTH [THE BRUTALIST]: Get it approved.

MARK LAMSTER: Several of the scenes in The Brutalist are even borrowed, you know, directly from The Fountainhead–these scenes in quarries and what have you. Architecture is really a collaborative art practiced by many people working together over long periods of time. So, I think, in many ways, this is a very dated way of thinking about the profession. 

ROMAN MARS: Are there some examples in history of film where architecture is presented in a way that feels true to you?

MARK LAMSTER: I think the best examples are always going to be documentaries. Two recent ones that I really enjoyed–one–Stardust, which is a film about the careers and lives of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. And it’s really about their partnership, working together about ideas. Another film I really enjoyed is called We Start With The Things We Find–a documentary about the New York-based firm LOT-EK, founded by Neapolitan partners Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano. And they… What’s amazing– I think there’s this very comparable scene to The Brutalist and also to The Fountainhead, right? In The Brutalist, we see László Toth going to this Italian quarry to find the most beautiful marbles for his project. Whereas, the film on LOT-EK starts with the characters also going to Italy but, in fact, they’re going to a shipyard to look at shipping containers and all this other infrastructural work, which is the detritus of the world. They’ve decided, like, “We need to recover this and use this and transform the stuff that we might throw away or think of as purely industrial and transform that into architecture. And it’s a really beautiful idea.

ROMAN MARS: It strikes me that another thing that filmmakers use architects for is as a very basic metaphor to directors and filmmakers. Megalopolis, I think, is a movie about filmmaking more than it’s about city planning in any sort of meaningful way. In The Brutalist, it kind of blew my mind that the end credit song is this song that says, “One for me, one for you, one for me, one for you,” which is a movie trope of like, “You’re going to make one for the masses or for Hollywood and one of your personal things.” This is not a line architects say very much to each other because there is no one for me. So, what about this is sort of, like, architecture as a ham-fisted metaphor to moviemaking.

MARK LAMSTER: Well, I think it’s kind of an obvious choice, right? And I saw exactly the same thing when I was looking at both of those films. It strikes me they’re both stereotypically the product of this lone, male genius who has this vision and sees it to be completed as per meeting his genius ideas. Whereas, really, it’s this wide cast of craftsmen to create this and artists working together over a very long period of time. Usually, one person gets the credit, but look at the credits to a film. It’s, like, an endless… In the end, you have this sort of three-dimensional object that you sort of encounter in time and space, whether it’s a film or a building. So, there is a really interesting analogy there. And I think a lot of filmmakers have seen that over the years. Peter Greenaway and his film, The Belly of an Architect, might be an example for that. Obviously, both The Brutalist and Megalopolis stand for that. In a way, The Fountainhead is very much that for Ayn Rand. 

ROMAN MARS: But are there actually any works of fiction that get architecture right, where you felt like they really nailed it? 

MARK LAMSTER: I think the filmmaker who best got it was Jacques Tati, the French filmmaker–the sort of French Chaplin, if you will. And his films Mon Oncle and Playtime–they’re really about a confrontation with Traditionalism and Modernism and how the modern city shapes who we are and our very humane look at modern architecture about Americanization of the city, the modernization of the city… And they look at it critically, but also with a sort of humanity and acceptance. Like, we need to accept what is happening. And we can make fun of it, but we’re going to live in this world whether we like it or not. 

ROMAN MARS: Before we go, are there any other fictional architects that you want to talk about? 

MARK LAMSTER: Well, we haven’t talked about America’s most famous screen architect.

ROMAN MARS: Who would that be? 

MARK LAMSTER: Well, Mike Brady, of course. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. Mike Brady.

[THE BRADY BUNCH THEME]

ROMAN MARS: So, tell me about Mike Brady and how he practices architecture. 

MARK LAMSTER: Well, I’m guessing that for many of the listeners out there who are our age, Mike Brady is their most common architect. He’s not a very good architect. He lives in this very dated, kitschy ranchburger with the sunken living room and, of course, the very dramatic open staircase. There aren’t too many episodes of The Brady Bunch where we see Mike actually engaging in architecture. But there is one that I find incredibly interesting. It’s an episode called “Mike’s Horror-Scope.” And in this episode, Mike is approached by this quasi-Italian fashion impresario named Bebe Gallini, and she is very fabulous.

BEBE GALLINI [THE BRADY BUNCH]: I would introduce myself, but everyone knows who Bebe Gallini is. Even people on the street come up to me and say, “It’s Bebe.” And I always say to them, “Hello, my darling.” 

MARK LAMSTER: She wants Mike to design a factory for her. And she gives him this complete freedom to do something creative and inventive. She wants it to be pink and fluffy.

BEBE GALLINI [THE BRADY BUNCH]: Make the factory the shape of a powder puff. 

MIKE BRADY [THE BRADY BUNCH]: Powder puff? 

BEBE GALLINI [THE BRADY BUNCH]: Or maybe tall, like a lipstick. 

MIKE BRADY [THE BRADY BUNCH]: Oh, lipstick? A factory has to be practical and efficient… 

MARK LAMSTER: And Mike just can’t wrap his mind around it. He keeps designing these very straightforward factories for her. And she’s like, “No, no, no.” And then she says she wants the roof to open up, and he’s like, “That’s technically impossible.” And what’s funny to me is that, instead of embracing this brief that he’s given–he could do anything and create some real interesting architecture–he is just so straightforward and lacks such an idea of invention that he just sort of loses the client. I always find that very sad for Mike. It shows the challenge of the architect, right? Clients are always difficult. You have to figure out how to both satisfy your own vision while satisfying demands. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s such a notable deviation from all the other ones we’ve discussed that, given complete freedom, he just is like, “Please just make it a box and put stuff in it.”

Well, this has been so fun to talk about, Mark. I really appreciate you coming on the show. 

MARK LAMSTER: It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks.

ROMAN MARS: You can read Mark Lamster’s architecture column in the Dallas Morning News. He also wrote an excellent biography of architect Philip Johnson. It’s called The Man in the Glass House. Check it out.

After the break, Brutalism 101 with Avery Trufelman…

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: And we’re back. If you finished The Brutalist and thought, “I don’t really understand Brutalism,” well, we have a story for you. Enjoy.

[007 THEME]

ROMAN MARS: The best James Bond is either Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. I lean towards Daniel Craig. The new movies are just better. But the Sean Connery films definitely had the best villains. There’s Blofeld, of course, who’s so iconic that he turned the act of cat stroking into a thing that supervillains do. But Bond’s flashiest nemesis has to be Goldfinger.

JAMES BOND [GOLDFINGER]: Do you expect me to talk? 

AURIC GOLDFINGER [GOLDFINGER]: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die! 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Do you expect me to talk? 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I– I expect you to talk. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: There’s this dorky fun fact that the Bond villain, Goldfinger, was actually named after a real person. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s Trufelman… Avery Trufelman. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: The author of the James Bond books, Ian Fleming, named Goldfinger for a man he found so dastardly–so terrible–that he immortalized him in pop culture.

ROMAN MARS: The real Goldfinger was an architect–Ernő Goldfinger. And he made giant, hulking, austere concrete buildings. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Goldfinger’s buildings were decreed soulless. Inhabitants claimed to suffer health problems and depression from spending time inside them. Some of Goldfinger’s buildings were vacated because occupants found them so ugly.

ROMAN MARS: And yet, many architects praised Goldfinger’s buildings. His Trellick Tower, which was once threatened with demolition, has been awarded landmark status. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: This divide–this hatred from the public and love from designers and architects–tends to be the narrative around buildings like Goldfinger’s, which is to say gigantic, imposing buildings made of concrete. What some people refer to as Brutalist architecture… 

ROMAN MARS: And a lot of folks, beyond the creator of James Bond, love to hate them. 

SARAH BRIGGS RAMSEY: We are in Wurster Hall–which, to my great dismay and frustration–is often considered the worst building on campus. “Wurster Hall? More like worst!” 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: I met up with Sarah Briggs Ramsey in Wurster Hall, a Brutalist building at UC Berkeley.

SARAH BRIGGS RAMSEY: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been locking up my bike outside and I overhear undergrads walking with their parents and going, “Ironically, this is the architecture school. And it’s the ugliest building on campus.”

ROMAN MARS: Yep, Wurster Hall is the architecture school. Sarah completed her master’s there.

SARAH BRIGGS RAMSEY: Buildings like this are pretty pervasive across most American and Canadian campuses. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah, there was a big, bulky, concrete building on the campus where I went to college. And I hated when I had to go through it. It just reminded me of a bunker or a bomb shelter. These big, concrete buildings just, like, bum me out.

ADRIAN FORTY: Absolutely. I mean, it has these connotations of, you know, Soviet era construction–sometimes third world construction–all these negative associations. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: This is Professor Adrian Forty, author of the excellent book Concrete and Culture. He’s been researching concrete for around 10 years now. 

ADRIAN FORTY: It has a bad name.

ROMAN MARS: Apart from aesthetic criticisms, concrete buildings present environmental concerns. 

ADRIAN FORTY: A lot of these buildings were built at a time when energy was cheap, and they use up an awful lot of energy to heat and cool them. 

ROMAN MARS: Concrete buildings were built with the illusion of plenty–that we will always have enough energy to build and heat and cool these massive, inefficient structures.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: As harsh as it looks, concrete is an utterly optimistic building material–arguably too optimistic. 

ADRIAN FORTY: Really from the 1920s, it was seen as being the material that would change the world. It had the potential to build things in a way that hadn’t been seen before. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Concrete was this material that seemed boundless, readily available in vast quantities, and could create massive spaces unlike any other material. So, concrete sprang up everywhere. 

ADRIAN FORTY: It’s the second most heavily consumed product in the world. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: The only thing we consume more of than concrete is water. 

ROMAN MARS: We use concrete for sidewalks, bridges, tunnels, and highways–and, of course, for giant buildings. 

ADRIAN FORTY: Whether we’re talking about stadia or auditoria… 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Or condominia or gymnasia or planetaria… 

ROMAN MARS: So, historically, government programs all over the world loved concrete. 

ADRIAN FORTY: Particularly in Soviet Russia, but also later in Europe and North America, it was used for welfare, welfare state projects…

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Concrete presented the most efficient way to house huge numbers of people. And philosophically, it was seen as humble, capable, and honest. Concrete was just out there in all of its rough glory–not hiding behind any paint or layers–saying, “Here I am! Love me or hate me!” 

ROMAN MARS: And as concrete buildings came to signify humility, honesty, and integrity, they were erected all over the world as housing projects, courthouses, schools, churches, hospitals, and city halls.

CHRIS GRIMLEY: You’ll stand outside and a tour bus will go by and they’ll be like, “Ladies and gentlemen, voted the most ugliest building in the world, Boston City Hall!” How do you compete with that? 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Chris Grimley is up against a lot, but he’s trying to restore Boston City Hall’s reputation. 

CHRIS GRIMLEY: My name is Chris Grimley. I’m with my fellow Heroic people, Mark Pasnick and Michael Kubo.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Chris, Mark, and Michael have embarked on what they call the Heroic Project, chronicling the concrete structures in and around Boston. 

ROMAN MARS: Rather than referring to these concrete buildings as “Brutalist,” they prefer the term “heroic” because, like so many superheroes, these structures have the best, most noble intentions, but are sorely misunderstood.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Also, just generally, “Brutalism” is a big, broad label that gets used inconsistently in architecture. People tend to disagree on one precise definition. 

ROMAN MARS: The name “Brutalism” also just sounds intense, even though it’s not actually related to brutality. 

CHRIS GRIMLEY: It comes from “béton brut,” which is the French term for raw concrete.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: In any case, to these guys, “heroic” feels like a better term, especially in Boston, where concrete architecture swooped in and saved the day. 

CHRIS GRIMLEY: You have to situate Boston in the late ’50s, 1960s. It is America’s first city. 

ROMAN MARS: Well…

CHRIS GRIMLEY: It is America’s most historic city. 

ROMAN MARS: Again, not really, but I get your point. 

CHRIS GRIMLEY: And yet it finds itself in the doldrums.

ROMAN MARS: Boston, like a lot of other American cities, was plagued by a loss of manufacturing jobs and white flight to the suburbs. And for decades, Boston had the highest property taxes in the nation and almost no development. 

CHRIS GRIMLEY: There is this recognition from civic authorities that something needs to be done and something needs to be done quickly.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: So, Boston sets an agenda to make the city great again, with big, soaring, capable, thoroughly modern buildings made, of course, out of concrete. 

ROMAN MARS: And though some of these buildings were celebrated, others were really not. 

CHRIS GRIMLEY: What we call the “third rail” of Boston concrete Modernism is City Hall. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: When Boston City Hall was built in 1968, critics were put off by this concrete style. It was called “alienating” and “cold.” And since it was a government building, this criticism became impossible to remove from politics. 

ROMAN MARS: Boston City Hall became a political pawn. Mayors and City Council members kept trying to win public support with promises to get rid of the building, like John Tobin did when he ran for City Council.

JOHN TOBIN: Hi everybody, this is John Tobin. Thanks for visiting votejohntobin.com. Here we are on City Hall Plaza in front of Boston City Hall. I’m not an architect, but I know bad architecture when I see it. This is a bad building, and I think we can do a lot by knocking this building down. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Former Mayor Thomas Menino actually started a study to really look into tearing it down.

CHRIS GRIMLEY: It turned out, as a result of the study, that you would need something like a nuclear grade weapon basically to destroy this building because it’s so heavily overbuilt in concrete. 

ROMAN MARS: And so, when they couldn’t tear down City Hall, officials chose to ignore it. 

CHRIS GRIMLEY: People that occupied the building for decades and decades didn’t like it, and so they didn’t invest money into the building and effectively wanted to see the building go away.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: This is called “active neglect,” and it happens with a lot of concrete buildings. They are intentionally unrepaired, unrenovated, and uncared for. 

ROMAN MARS: Which only makes the building more ugly and then more hated and then more ignored and creates this vicious cycle where the public hate of Boston City Hall feeds itself. 

CHRIS GRIMLEY: And then the discussion years on really became about what the original architects had done wrong, as if this were not a failure of maintenance but a failure of the initial design.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: When people built these mammoth, concrete structures, no one really thought about maintenance. They seemed indestructible. 

ADRIAN FORTY: In the early days of concrete, people assumed that this was an everlasting material that wouldn’t need any attention at all. I mean, that’s wrong. We know that it does need to be looked after. It does deteriorate. It does decay. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: But it can be hard to tell when concrete is decaying. 

ADRIAN FORTY: If you think of brick and timber, the decay takes place on the surface of them. But with concrete, the deterioration is internal. 

ROMAN MARS: Concrete deteriorates chemically from the inside out. Part of this has to do with the metal reinforcements that help hold up most concrete buildings. The rebar–well–it can rust. And the rust eats away at the overall structure. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: But, Adrian Forty says tearing them down is not the answer. 

ADRIAN FORTY: Because as soon as you tear them down, then you have a problem, first of all, with what you do with the detritus that’s left. And secondly, you’ve got to replace them with something else and use up a whole lot more energy and create a lot more CO2 in building something in their place.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: They already used up all that energy when they were made! They’re already there! 

ROMAN MARS: We can adapt these buildings to make them greener and make them more appealing places to be by adding windows, for example. But basically, Professor Forty thinks we can all develop the capacity to love these concrete brutes in all their hulking glory.

ADRIAN FORTY: Yeah, sure, people can learn to love anything. But, you know, as with any art form–whether it’s opera or painting or literature–the more you know about it, the more you’ll get out of it and the more you’ll appreciate it. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: And this is especially true of concrete buildings. Architecture students appreciate them because they know that concrete actually requires a hell of a lot of skill and finesse to work with.

ADRIAN FORTY: To do architecture in concrete is proof that you really are an architect; it’s the test of being an architect. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: With a concrete building, every little detail needs to be calculated in advance. Concrete is wildly intimidating to work with. Once you pour it, there’s no going back. 

ADRIAN FORTY: With a concrete building, it’s like the result of an immaculate conception. The whole thing is an integral, monolithic whole. And it has to be right. 

ROMAN MARS: And aside from the interesting design challenges it poses, concrete itself as a material can be subtly beautiful if you look closely. 

SARAH BRIGGS RAMSEY: You know, what we think of as just a monolithic, consistent, homogenous texture is actually really rich and has a lot of interest when you actually go up to it and consider it.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Sarah Briggs Ramsey–the one I spoke with at Berkeley’s Wurster Hall–did a yearlong project traveling around the world, looking at concrete buildings in Europe and Asia and South and North America…

SARAH BRIGGS RAMSEY: To create a global comparison of one material that, I think, is so sort of under considered. It’s like the background of all the cities, but no one actually stands to look.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: We call the city a “concrete jungle” to talk about the artificialness of the urban landscape. But concrete can actually be a very natural expression of the environment. Concrete’s color and texture can be dictated by local climate, local earth, and local rock. 

SARAH BRIGGS RAMSEY: This is the Harvard Science Center on the Harvard campus, and it’s got a really pronounced purpley color. And that’s the ground from the site.

ROMAN MARS: Concrete can also be an expression of local style and custom–like how UK concrete has big, thick, textured chunks of rock, while Japanese concrete is very fine and flat. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: But the beauty of concrete architecture is all the better when you can just observe the buildings like pieces of sculpture, without actually having to live and work in them, which brings in concrete’s surprising ally: photography. 

ADRIAN FORTY: Concrete looks good in photographs. 

ROMAN MARS: It provides this kind of neutral background. 

ADRIAN FORTY: It provides a wonderful setting for people’s skin tones, color of their clothes… 

ROMAN MARS: Fashion photographers realized this first, and then pockets of the internet started to appreciate these concrete buildings.

ADRIAN FORTY: There are lots of these blogs and so on which show a kind of extraordinary enthusiasm for concrete. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Photography is allowing a new audience of non-architects to appreciate these buildings for their strong lines, their crisp shadows, and–increasingly–the idealism they embody. 

ADRIAN FORTY: They represent a set of ideas about the state of the world and what the future was imagined to be that, you know, we want to preserve. We should remember what people were thinking 50 years ago. If we tear these buildings down, we’ll lose all of that. 

ROMAN MARS: Architecture, whether we want to admit it or not, has a sort of shelf life–a time after which buildings fall out of fashion and then are allowed to fall apart. 

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Back in the 1960s, Victorian style buildings were considered hideous, falling apart, and impossible to repair. And we were tearing batches of them down, all the while erecting big, concrete buildings. But enough Victorians were saved that, today, they are these beautiful, lovingly restored treasures.

ROMAN MARS: Brutalist, heroic… Whatever you want to call it, concrete architecture now finds itself at a potential inflection point–too outdated to be modern–too young to be classic. And a small but growing band of architects, architecture enthusiasts, and preservationists would like us to just wait a bit and see. Maybe with a little time and love we might discover some architectural diamonds in the rough that we just can’t see right now.

99% Invisible was produced this week by me, Roman Mars, along with Martín Gonzalez, who also mixed this episode. Music by Swan Real and Martín Gonzalez. 

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, and me, Roman Mars, as I said before.

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. 

I think all of us are on Bluesky now, which is kind of like Twitter, except it’s not supporting an unelected billionaire who’s currently dismantling the government. We’re also having a ball on our Discord server, where you can join us to make Oscar predictions and talk about your favorite architect movies. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.