We went to see The Brutalist at the Barbican – very appropriately as it’s about the construction of a crazily over-ambitious community centre-cum-library-cum-chapel on a hillside in Doylestown, just north of Philadelphia. 

The plot is half-convincing: about the arrival in Philadelphia of a Hungarian modernist, trained at the Bauhaus, who converts the study of a large colonial mansion into an ultra-modernist, daylit library, empty apart from a single reading couch, which leads to the commission to construct the massive community centre on top of a hill on the edge of the estate. 

There is a lot about Jewish identity and its relationship to Bauhaus modernism and about the desire of the great architect to be unconstrained by issues of cost and practicality.  I kept on thinking not of Marcel Breuer, but of Louis Kahn, who certainly had a magico-mystical belief in the virtues of brutalism.  I could have done with its melodrama being toned down a notch or two, but Adrien Brody is certainly extremely convincing as the architect Tóth.