“There is no place for originality in architecture! No one can improve the buildings of the past! ,
They are the second and third lines spoken in the film version of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” in 1949, adapted by Rand, which is protected by studio medaling, the world’s most hunk from the 1943 Bestseller. About the unrelated visionary architect. The story concludes the construction of the world’s tallest building, and fulfills the fate of the eastern planet of a divine person, which he shared with reluctance, small mind and beauty weaknesses. One such weak, Architecture School Dean expelled his precious Prodigy Howard Rork (starred by Gary Cooper), is the first voice recited in “The Fountainhead”.
The films have long exploited a selected fist for the stories of obsessive creatives, which has been making. Sometimes it is a real-life singer-songman, blowin in the air since recent times, A la “A full unknown.” Or a real -life theoretical physicist who risks to destroy the world to end war, aka “Openheimer.”
Recently it is the architect, imaginary division, especially two. The “The Brutilist” concerns a fictional Hungerian Jew, a Lasslo Toth (starred by the Adrian Body), who runs in Holocaust and America in 1947. Here, their bouhus-manual credentials and pre-war-ward design achievements mean very low.
A stroke of fate comes at a price. The son of a rich industrialist surprises his stuffed, inconsistent father (Gai Pierce) as a library renewal. The man, the Harrison Lee Van Bureaune, loses modernist results until the look is praised by the Magazine Architect and the Van Bureauran Library. Directed by Brady Corbett and co-written, “The Brutilist” dedicates a significant part of its running time to the Magnum Ops of Toth: Dylestown, a huge, concrete community center outside Pennsylvania, was commissioned by Van Bureaune , Which was designed in the brootalist architectural style. Every neoclassical, tradition-bound in the body of his adopted country was seen as an opposition.
Body’s character “Megalopolis” is Mr. Easy compared to the only film architect, compared to adam driver’s supernaturally talented talent, whose ego is higher than the level of Ayan Randian. Writer and director Francis Ford Copola is not back. “Do you find me cruel, selfish and incomplete?” The driver asks his future wife, quickly answers his question: “I am.” He says “I am because I am an architect!” Only because there is no need.
I talked about the architect’s screen image, The Terrars and Sukh of Brutilist Designs and (since he brought her) with Anjuli Rao of Chicago. Rao of Garfield Park, gives lectures to the Art Institute in Chicago and contributes to the Dwel Magazine, for which Rao recently interviewed “The Brutilist” production designer Judy Baker. Our interaction is edited for clarity and length.
Question: Anjuli, you have seen both “The Cruelty” and “Megalopolis”. Are we trapped with a certain image of difficult, unrelated architects, as much as these movies?
A: Okay, I think “cruelist” “a man does not compromise on the trop of changing the world with his vision”. The Adrian Body character is saved from the Buchanwald concentration camp, but has not survived his trauma. He is suffering. And he is not seen as any kind of talent, except for his patron, Gai Pierce character. He feeds the relationship, mentor and architect, two men, each, confirming the worst symptoms of each other. And this makes them feel really more intelligent and in control, really.
Question: For those who do not know what is the title “The Brutilist”, what does the familiar meaning of “cruel” mean to you?
A: This is the most likes of architecture and the most hate style. This is also a matter of our new President, as he clarified in his first term. He actually hates the FBI headquarters at Washington, DC, for example, which is cruelist in its heavy solid structure, and very small windows are strategically placed so that the light comes to unusual angles. Often with cruelist buildings, a type of sung garden, a trapped plaza area, so you get down to enter the building. When I was at a grade school in Saic, I remember reading about these trapped plazas about surveys of people’s feelings, which hated many people. It felt like people were like looking down on them.
Therefore cruelty is a loving style. For some time, roam in the UIC premises, which are almost all cruelist buildings. You will know where you are very early on style. I really love cruelty for its craft and texture-water buildings. I personally love cruelty. My father worked in the IBM campus in Boulder, Colorado (now closed), a long, low, cruel building. I think I grew up with it.
Question: I like what “The Brutilist” production designer Judy Baker does to show you the whole thing without showing you the whole thing. We are just seeing this. Your father worked for IBM; In Rasine, Wisconsin, my father worked in the Johnson Wax Building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. “The Brutilist” Johnson borrows Wright’s Skiny Column from the Wax Administration Building!
A: The Priori school style of the right of modernism is present in that long dynasty of modernity. Cruelty has its own place, and can be minimal in some ways, but with very heavy beauty.
If you look at “Mangalopolis”, it is nothing like “The Cruist”. It is completely dedicated to the myth of the lonely male talent architect. The most aggressive way (laughing). Everyone has to worship on their altar. It is different from the “The Brutilist”, which pays some attention to Toth’s journalist wife, Erzebet (Felicity Jones), although Toth is eventually tied to his own painful past. And it informs that he behaves the way he does.
Especially after Kovid, I think more and more people are sensitive to the environment created around them, how the cities look and feel. In the US, at least, a lot of people are trying to find out where they are. The search for that discovery seems deeper than ever. I don’t know that “cruelist” is tapping in it, but it can happen.
Question: What is your feeling about the future of Chicago’s design?
A: I feel a little … Jerked for the last few years, as if we have hit the brake. Eight-year-old Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot, with a word, we had the mayor who had designs- and architecture-ages. As an object of mercy culture, more focus was focused on architecture, not an object of money creation. Lightfoot had an idea of creating a wealth, and his planning and development commissioner, Maurice Cox, had a real belief in the south and west (bolting). With mercy we found the riverwalk, which is very good, and Lightfoot gave us a revived city plan. And now, with Brandon Johnson, it is more about cutting red tape and reconsideration rules for developers.
Question: So aesthetics….
A: Now on the back seat. (Play) Sometimes I feel about the situation of architecture. Certainly there is no more enthusiasm.
Question: This is a purely economic matter, do you think?
A: It may also be that people focus more in internal places, places where they live. And when we get another new glass tower, such as the cellsforce tower Chicago, it is like mixtures with the rest of the glass towers.
Question: So they are Marvel movies of architecture?
A: Yes. Here one more comes!
Question: Give me a film about an architect that people cannot know, one you really like.
A: Ooh! Netflix Show (from 2018), “Hill House Hunting). It is a beautiful use of architecture to protect herself from being consumed from being consumed.
I am thinking that poetry, filmmaking, writing, architecture all have to touch everyone, or make some big comments on the world. Or transfer people’s perspectives on everything in life. Architecture does not need to change the world, or history course. Buildings usually change the lives of somewhere and 300 people somewhere.
I do not think “cruelist” does not mean “educational”. I like it really very small. This is not about how a man changed the course of history.
Question: So, the sooner we get “The Fountainhead” in the rearview mirror, the better?
A: Right. Let it go! Let things be small.
“The Brutilist” is now in theaters.