E274: Merry Brutalistmas w/ Ross Wolfe & Susannah Grossman Wolfe

Merry Christmas, everyone! This year, the Santifada is bringing you the same present as always: an episode about the themes of Jewish identity and antisemitism! We discuss Brady Corbet's new epic film, The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody as a Bauhaus architect and Holocaust survivor trying to rebuild his life in the absurd New World of America.

In the first half of the episode, our brutalism scholar guests, Ross and Susannah, explain what brutalism is and how it relates—or doesn’t relate—to Brody's character, Laszlo Toth, and the themes of the movie in general. In the second half, we discuss the film's final chapter and epilogue, which features an infuriating, although perhaps excusable, political twist ending.

Some notes by Ross & Sussanah:
Laszlo’s buildings share DNA with Le Corbusier’s Untié d’Habitation (Marseilles), Notre Dame du Haut (Ronchamp), Safdie’s Habitat ‘67 in Montreal, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building. Other examples of the style:

• penguin pool at the London Zoo, 1934, housing estates in the fifties-sixties, Bethnal Green, Cranbrook Estate, Balfron Tower, Carradale House, Glenkerry House, Trellick Tower, council housing estates, Robin Hood Gardens, London, Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate, London, Thamesmead, London, Park Hill, Sheffield, Ronan Point, the Barbican, the Smithsons’ Economist building, National Theatre, University of East Anglia, Yale University School of Art & Architecture (aka Rudolph Hall), University of Edinburgh Main Library, Regenstein, UChicago, Bobst, NYU, McLennan, McGill, Robarts, UToronto, Marcel Breuer’s Pirelli Tire Building, New Haven, Gateshead Multistorey Car Park, Newcastle, the Bull Ring, Birmingham, New towns: town of Cumbernauld, Scotland (often cited as “Britain’s ugliest); East Kilbride, Chichester Theological College, House of Soviets, Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg, Kant’s hometown), House of Aviators, “The Centipede,” Moscow, Bank of Georgia, Tbilisi, Druzhba Holiday Center Hall, Yalta, Novi Beograd, Belgrade

  
  Further reading:

  -Owen Hatherley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n22/owen-hatherley/strange-angry-objects
  -Reyner Banham: https://www.architectural-review.com/archive/the-new-brutalism-by-reyner-banham
  -https://www.tumblr.com/fuckyeahbrutalism
  
  Music for the episode is mostly from the brutalist soundtrack by Daniel Blumberg. Closing song is La Bionda - One For You, One For Me