'The Brutalist' Production Designer Speaks on the Film’s Architecture

“It's the first time I've worked on a movie that felt grander and bigger than the budget. Not having that much money is usually better for me,” Becker tells Art & Object. “I think I want to work on lower budget films now. It seems like the bigger the budget, there’s always more voices, always more input, there’s always disagreement, and you get this product that is a compromise in a lot of ways. Sometimes the low budget film is really a director's vision and it’s the best one.”

The centerpiece of the film is the Van Buren Institute, a large scale church and community center built in brutalist style. To come up with the design, Becker channeled Marcel Breuer, the architect behind notable structures like The Met Breuer (formerly The Whitney), and Paris’ UNESCO Headquarters. Like Tóth, he was a refugee working in the Bauhaus tradition. Unlike Tóth, he came over before the war.

The Van Buren Institute sits on a hill, its tall steeple forming the outline of a cross that casts a powerful shadow on the land when the sun is just right. 

“I designed it very specifically so that it was an imposing experience for the visitor, so they would walk into the building and gradually start to feel claustrophobic,” says Becker of a design inspired by the DC subway system. “We built it so that when you entered the building you descended this very steep staircase that also narrowed as you went down into a very long and low-ceiling corridor. As you enter, you’re getting imprisoned underground.” 

The idea was to make the building a reflection of Tóth’s history and experiences as a holocaust survivor. For Becker the challenge was referencing the Jewish experience in the context of a Christian Church. Studying concentration camps and other barracks-based facilities, she discovered many of them were laid out in the shape of a cross. 

“I was incorporating all these concentration camp ideas and then adding these touches that made it look like a church,” she explains. “With brutalism, it looked like a factory on the hill. But then you add the cross in the tower and it looks like a church. So, it could be seen as a subversive building.” 

At the end of his last term, President Trump signed an executive order discouraging the use of brutalism on Federal buildings. It’s a style that has often been maligned, with former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp calling Breuer’s Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, “ten floors of basement.” 

“It never has been popular,” Becker says of the minimalist style that often features naked concrete. “Maybe it frightens people. I can understand that in its worst incarnation it could look like a factory or crematorium, and it could be frightening. But if you look at a beautiful brutalist house, and you see how it looks with light and with the exterior and interior, and plants, it can look so inviting. To me, that’s comfort. I think it’s very related to minimalism, which I love.” 

Becker grew up in Scarsdale, New York, with an interest in art, design, and architecture since childhood, a passion she shared with her mom, an amateur artist. After studying music history and theory at Columbia University, she started in film as a production assistant. With the help of some drafting classes, she worked her way up, getting her first Production Design credit with 1992’s From a High Place, a crime thriller starring Jim Gaffigan.

“I learned a lot watching the people above me. I had no training in architecture, design and art, no formal training, none,” she says of a career learned on the job. “I like saying that, now that Daniel Liebskind has praised my work in ‘The Bruitalist’.”