This is important, recognizing how an ideology gets embedded in a historical narrative film. And in a simplistic sense: this happens and because of that this happens. The arguments about Zionism among Jewish intellectuals was fraught, understandably so. Minds such as Einstein's and Benjamin's and Kafka's were very ambivalent, and because doubt and trouble about the establishment of a Jewish state is removed from Zionism's history, it has allowed Americans not to see its drastic problems, not see people taken forcibly off their land. Not see the Israeli government as it is, as it behaves. Its brutality. Which brings me back to The Brutalist. I'll see it because of your essay.
The author appears to have issue with jewish folks having a homeland in the middle east after being forced out of Europe and mostly exterminated.
The movie brings up important questions like how many other architects, scientists, musicians or artists that would have progressed humankind were lost in the Holocaust?
Whitney completely ignores and turns a blind eye to the launched offensive of murder, rape and hostage taking of Oct 7 that was meant to replicate a second holocaust. The author goes so far as to try and discredit the jewish contributions to Brutalist architecture by handing credit to those that came before. Everyone knows that before anything came something else, and so on. What a loaded piece of trash.
I'm not handing credit to those who came before. Brutalism is part of Modernism. Most buildings we now identify as Brutalist were not created by architects who identified as Brutalist. These architects identified as Modernist, and often made a range of Modernist works, some leaning toward what we now call Brutalist, with heavier blockier forms. (Architects all around the world including in Japan, Brazil, France, England, and the USSR were experimenting with these forms, a combination of the bleakness of the postwar psyche and the possibilities of reinforced concrete. In America, some of the most prominent practitioners were Marcel Breuer and Louis Kahn).
Modernism is part of an intellectual-aesthetic movement in the early 20th-century that has some uncomfortable ideas regarding rationalism, efficiency, and progress — uncomfortable when we look at history and see the evil ways these principles were soon after employed. Adolf Loos’s 1908 essay Ornament and Crime argued that ornament is related to moral degeneracy. This intellectual history is related to the Holocaust, and how aesthetic theory had a role in fueling the horrific systematic killing of six million European Jews. Marcel Breuer (the closest historic figure to the architect in the film) worked together with Philip Johnson at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. The two men were part of a group of architects known as the Harvard Five. Philip Johnson went and saw a Hitler rally in Berlin. THIS is the Modernist architecture community in mid-century America. It included both Breuer a Hungarian-Jew who had to flee Germany in 1935 and Philip Johnson who had an attraction to Nazism (even though he was gay and homosexuals were also persecuted and murdered during the Holocaust). It's a period full of contradictory and complicated figures who defined mid-century architecture. Instead of showing any realistic portrait of this architecture community, or any community, the film tells the story of one sole architect without any peers whose story is more about heroin and the allure of Zionism.
Ideology determines how many people's stories and many historical events are streamlined into a narrative of historical-fiction. The streamlined story they've chosen to tell is one that makes people feel good about Zionism, not ask any questions about it. If you feel deeply about how terrible it is to be forced out of a home where your ancestors have lived for many generations, why would you want to force that on others?
This is important, recognizing how an ideology gets embedded in a historical narrative film. And in a simplistic sense: this happens and because of that this happens. The arguments about Zionism among Jewish intellectuals was fraught, understandably so. Minds such as Einstein's and Benjamin's and Kafka's were very ambivalent, and because doubt and trouble about the establishment of a Jewish state is removed from Zionism's history, it has allowed Americans not to see its drastic problems, not see people taken forcibly off their land. Not see the Israeli government as it is, as it behaves. Its brutality. Which brings me back to The Brutalist. I'll see it because of your essay.
The author appears to have issue with jewish folks having a homeland in the middle east after being forced out of Europe and mostly exterminated.
The movie brings up important questions like how many other architects, scientists, musicians or artists that would have progressed humankind were lost in the Holocaust?
Whitney completely ignores and turns a blind eye to the launched offensive of murder, rape and hostage taking of Oct 7 that was meant to replicate a second holocaust. The author goes so far as to try and discredit the jewish contributions to Brutalist architecture by handing credit to those that came before. Everyone knows that before anything came something else, and so on. What a loaded piece of trash.
I'm not handing credit to those who came before. Brutalism is part of Modernism. Most buildings we now identify as Brutalist were not created by architects who identified as Brutalist. These architects identified as Modernist, and often made a range of Modernist works, some leaning toward what we now call Brutalist, with heavier blockier forms. (Architects all around the world including in Japan, Brazil, France, England, and the USSR were experimenting with these forms, a combination of the bleakness of the postwar psyche and the possibilities of reinforced concrete. In America, some of the most prominent practitioners were Marcel Breuer and Louis Kahn).
Modernism is part of an intellectual-aesthetic movement in the early 20th-century that has some uncomfortable ideas regarding rationalism, efficiency, and progress — uncomfortable when we look at history and see the evil ways these principles were soon after employed. Adolf Loos’s 1908 essay Ornament and Crime argued that ornament is related to moral degeneracy. This intellectual history is related to the Holocaust, and how aesthetic theory had a role in fueling the horrific systematic killing of six million European Jews. Marcel Breuer (the closest historic figure to the architect in the film) worked together with Philip Johnson at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. The two men were part of a group of architects known as the Harvard Five. Philip Johnson went and saw a Hitler rally in Berlin. THIS is the Modernist architecture community in mid-century America. It included both Breuer a Hungarian-Jew who had to flee Germany in 1935 and Philip Johnson who had an attraction to Nazism (even though he was gay and homosexuals were also persecuted and murdered during the Holocaust). It's a period full of contradictory and complicated figures who defined mid-century architecture. Instead of showing any realistic portrait of this architecture community, or any community, the film tells the story of one sole architect without any peers whose story is more about heroin and the allure of Zionism.
Ideology determines how many people's stories and many historical events are streamlined into a narrative of historical-fiction. The streamlined story they've chosen to tell is one that makes people feel good about Zionism, not ask any questions about it. If you feel deeply about how terrible it is to be forced out of a home where your ancestors have lived for many generations, why would you want to force that on others?