The Brutalists

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This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

The Brutalist is a movie.

I don't know if it's a good movie or a bad movie, but it is definitely the most movie I've seen this year.

It is also a movie nominally about architecture and is nominated for 10 10 Academy Awards.

So it felt like journalistic malpractice if we didn't talk about it on the show at least a little bit.

The story follows a fictional Hungarian architect named Laszlo Toth and his struggles to build a community center in rural Pennsylvania.

The film neatly summarizes the debate about the architectural style known as brutalism in this one exchange.

Concrete is sturdy and cheap.

Concrete, it's not very attractive.

The job of of architect has often been depicted in movies, even though the practice of architecture is not very cinematic.

It's mostly meetings and such.

But it is a romantic profession that lends itself to high drama and strained metaphors, which, after seeing the brutalist, is why I wanted to talk to Mark Lampster.

Mark is the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, editor of a book called Architecture and Film, and he teaches an Architecture on Screen course at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

So he's basically the first and only call you make when you want to talk about this stuff.

Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

It's super fun to be here.

Thanks for having me.

And you have seen the movie The Brutalist.

I have heard you talk about it.

Yes, I have definitely seen the movie The Brutalist.

I have podcasted about it.

I wrote a review of it for our newspaper.

So yes.

So let's talk a little bit just about brutalism in general and why you think that this is the style that this character is working in.

How does Brutalism fit into this?

That's a great question.

I'm not really sure that it does.

When we first meet Laszlo Toth, lead character of The Brutalist, he is

really designing in like an international style way.

He's just come over.

He's doing this bent tube furniture, kind of very Marcel Breuer inspired.

The next thing we see that he designs is this library, but that's more kind of a modern project.

It is the appropriate time

mostly for brutalism.

It's a little early

for brutalism.

If you're

an architectural historian looking at moments of history,

it's a little earlier than brutalism might begin.

I mean,

I have a contention that what it has to do with brutalism is that the

word brutalist is just great.

Yes, it is a great word.

And unfortunately, it has become sort of the, I think for much of the public, it has become like sort of default word for just all modern architecture, which is completely inappropriate, but

and it's sort of a cross that we architecture critics and architects themselves have to bear to explain this fact that no brutalism is actually this type of architecture that's really constrained to this relatively short period of time.

But, you know, in the mind of the general public, any building that they don't like is brutalism.

Yeah.

So the director of the Brutalist has mentioned that Laszlo Toth, the lead character, is this amalgam of, you know, maybe a little Paul Rudolph and Mies Vandero and Marcel Breuer.

I mean, like, were you thinking about this at the time you were watching it?

The main thing I kept thinking about as I was watching it was that this émigré architect who had you know, ostensibly been the leading modernist architect of Hungary, was thrust into abject poverty in America with no connections.

And all I could think about was that Philadelphia at that time where he moves to had this very significant émigré community of architects.

The most notable modernist friend there was How and Laskaz.

They built the PSFS Tower, which if you've taken an architectural history modernism survey, you've seen it as the first modernist skyscraper.

So that was built in the 30s in Philadelphia.

So So the idea that Laszlo Tos comes there, can't find work, is like this unicorn modernist in a city that, you know, where that is an apostasy.

And I kept just sitting there and sitting there and sitting there and sitting there because this movie is like.

three and a half very long hours

and just wondering like why, you know, that he wasn't getting a job or going out and hanging out with all these cool modern architects who, you know, live down the block.

That's a good point.

Did you think about his buildings as an architecture critic at all?

Did you look at them and judge them in a certain way?

Well, I'm not really sure what to say about him as an architect per se, because we see very little of his actual built architecture until

the very end of the film.

The first thing we see is this library that he's designed, and it's very beautiful as an object, but the only piece of furniture in the library is this you know,

Corbusier-style lounge chair.

And it just struck me as like

so frigid and uncomfortable for a library.

And, you know, I live not far from the actual house that Walter Gropius built for himself here outside of Boston.

And it's exactly the opposite kind of space.

It's very comfortable and luxurious.

And the idea that the only kind of modernist library would be this bare, frigid place, I think didn't line up for me with history.

It looked nice on screen, right?

But it wasn't the kind of place that you would want to actually read a book.

Yeah, I think most of the depictions of architecture and design in the movie are all about, you know, what looks good to be filmed or photographed and what serves the story.

And they're not really about the veracity of different movements and such like that.

I think if the movie wasn't about architecture itself,

there would be a lot easier to forgive the transgressions, shall we say.

But I mean, you asked about like his actual architecture.

Really, the only time we really encounter his full architecture is, you know, at the end when we're presented with this community center that the community actually didn't ask for yet.

So let's talk about architecture in movies in general.

I mean, you edited a book on architecture in film and thought about this a lot.

What are architects in movies for?

They seem like they have different purpose than your average vocation as depicted on screen.

Absolutely.

Well, first of all, there are very few films that are about actual architects that center on the practice of making architecture.

And it's kind of easy to understand why.

And it's because

architecture is kind of boring.

It takes a long time to make.

It's, you know, a lot of plumbing details.

It's a lot of going over plans.

You know, no one dies.

There's no spying.

There are no superheroes involved.

Right.

So it doesn't easily fit into the standard narrative structures of Hollywood film that require the sort of, you know, incredible existential drama, right?

Architecture is kind of like oxygen.

You know, it's all around us.

We can't live without it, but we also take it super for granted.

Right.

So when architects do appear in films, usually they're there as a signpost of sort of bourgeois respectability.

He is both, it's usually a man, not always, but quite often.

And he is both an artist and a respected professional, right?

So he is this ideal figure, very attractive.

I think of, you know, the character Sam Waterston plays in Hannah and Her Sisters, right?

I really came in here because I was bored stiff by the party.

What makes you think we're more interesting?

And he's this very urbane, has, you know, a box at the opera,

is able to, you know, discourse on all of the arts.

The design's deliberately non-contextual, but I wanted to keep the atmosphere of the street, you know, in the proportions.

And in the material, that's unpolished unpolished red grain.

He's very successful, has a Mercedes.

And, you know, in the film, we see characters played by Diane Wiest and Carrie Fisher just fawning over him.

It's like, which one of them will get to bed?

This man is the principal action around his character.

Of course, I was so tongue-tied all night.

I can't believe I said that about the Guggenheim.

That is like, we often see that.

It's like

this architect is this a signpost rather than an actual

you know than his his career actually described you know in any number of films uh you will see this from you know jungle fever the spike lee film um sleepless in seattle you know you could just go through hollywood and that's sort of the idealized vision of the architect as professional and artist at once very desirable i mean so the the architect is essentially just this artist that just has his his stuff together enough to you know pay a mortgage and to bmw right exactly so so like an older woman can like go like okay i'm not like throwing my life away for this guy yeah yeah exactly yeah so funny

sort of the ground zero for architects depicted on film is howard roourke in the fountainhead um

this is an awful awful movie

well

it's both a great movie and a terrible movie right so 1949 uh the fountain head uh based on the novel by ayn rand and directed by king vidor and the the characters in the film are of course generally just mouthpieces for her objectivist ideology basically libertarianist thinking they hate you for the greatness of your achievement They hate you for your integrity.

They hate you because they know they can neither corrupt you nor rule you.

And the lead character in the film, played by Gary Cooper, is this architect named Howard Rourke.

And he's a very dogmatic modernist.

He does not want his vision corrupted.

You know, we see him heroically at the beginning of the film getting this incredible commission for a skyscraper.

And when the conservative bankers who he presents his model to see his modern building, they want to attack on this sort of classical facade on the front.

And he is aghast and refuses this and storms up because no one shall interfere with his genius.

It shocked people.

It's too different, too original.

Why take chances when you can stay in the middle?

If you want my work, you must take it as it is or not at all.

We are your clients and it's your job to serve us.

I don't build in order to have clients.

I have clients in order to build.

Of course, the film sort of culminates with this incredible scene where he has now designed a housing project and once again, its completion has escaped his control and his solution to this is to just go and blow up the housing project

arrest me i'll talk at the trial and of course today this sounds like domestic terrorism but in the world of the film it's this act of completely justified righteous behavior and he's in fact uh gets off uh at this trial that's held because no one, you know, in the world of Ayn Rand should interfere with the individual heroic genius.

This idea of this architect who no one should confront his vision.

He's a sole male genius.

It basically holds, you know, even through today.

I think the brutalist is very much a product of that same vision.

We also have, you know, the character here played by Adrian Brody, also sort of

refuses to have his work corrupted in any way to the extent that he will pay for all change orders and overruns on its claws.

He cuts three meters from the top, I add it to the bottom.

We can't afford all this.

I'm already over budget this quarter.

You take what you need from my fee, Rashley.

Come on, and what's the difference between 40 and 50 feet anyway?

The ceilings are still plenty high.

Got it approved.

Several of the scenes in the Brutalist are even borrowed directly from the fountainhead, these scenes in quarries and what have you.

Architecture is really a collaborative art practiced by many people working together over long periods of time.

So I think in many ways, this is a very dated way of thinking about the profession.

Are there some examples in history of film where

architecture is presented in a way that feels true to you?

I think the best examples are always going to be documentaries.

Two recent ones that I really enjoyed.

One, Stardust, which is a film about the careers and lives of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi.

And it's really about their partnership working together about ideas.

Another film I really enjoyed was called We Start with the Things We Find, a documentary about the New York-based firm Low Tech, founded by Neapolitan partners, Ara Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano.

And they, what's amazing, I think there's this very comparable scene to The Brutalist and also to The Fountainhead, right?

Where in The Brutalist, we see Laszlo Toth going to this Italian quarry to find the most beautiful marbles for his project.

Whereas uh the film on Lotech starts with uh the characters also going to Italy, but in fact, they're going to a shipyard to look look at shipping containers and all this other infrastructural work, which is, you know, the detritus of the world, which, you know, they've decided that we need to recover this and use this and transform the stuff that we might throw away or

think of as purely industrial and transform that into architecture.

And it's a really beautiful idea.

It strikes me that another thing that filmmakers use architects for is as

a very basic metaphor to directors and filmmakers.

Megalopolis, I think, is a movie about filmmaking more than it's about city planning in any sort of meaningful way.

In the Brutalist, it kind of blew my mind that the end credit song is this song that says, one for me, one for you, one for me, one for you, which is a movie trope of like, you're going to make one for the masses or for Hollywood and one of your personal things.

This is not a line architects say very much to each other because they're all like for all of us.

You know, know like there is no one for me so what about this is sort of like uh architecture as ham-fisted metaphor to movie making well i think it's kind of an an obvious choice i you right and i saw exactly the same thing when i was looking at at both of those films and it you know it strikes me they're you know they're both

stereotypically the product of this lone male genius who has this vision and you know sees it to be completed as per you know meeting his genius ideas.

Whereas really, they're also, it's this wide cast of craftsmen to create this and artist working

together over a very long period of time.

Usually one person gets the credit, but there's innumerable, look at the credits to a film.

It's like an endless, you know,

in the end, you have this sort of three-dimensional object that you sort of encounter in time and space, right?

Whether it's a film or a building.

So there is like a really interesting analogy there.

And I think a lot of filmmakers have seen that over the years.

Peter Greenaway and his film.

Nabelle Even Architect might be an example for that.

Obviously, both the Brutalist and Megalopolis stand for that.

In a way,

the fountainhead is very much that for Ayn Rand in a way.

But are there actually any works of fiction that get architecture right where you felt like they really nailed it?

I think the filmmaker who best got it was Jacques Taty, the French filmmaker, the sort of French chaplain, if you will.

And his films, Monuncle and Playtime, they're really about a confrontation with traditionalism and modernism and how the modern city shapes who we are.

And our like very humane look at modern architecture, about Americanization of the the city the modernization of the city and they look at it critically but also with a sort of humanity and acceptance like we need to accept what is happening and we can make fun of it uh but we're going to live in this world whether we like it or not before we go are there any other fictional architects that you want to talk about Well, we haven't talked about America's most famous screen architect.

Who would that be?

Well, Mike Brady, of course.

That's right.

Mike Brady.

So tell me about Mike Brady and how he practices architecture.

Well, I think, you know, I'm guessing that for many of the listeners out there who are our age, Mike Brady is their most common architect.

You know,

he's not a very good architect.

He lives in this very dated, kitschy ranch burger with this Lungen living room.

And, you know, of course, the very dramatic open staircase.

And sure, yeah.

I find it, there aren't too many episodes of the Brady Bunch where we see Mike actually engaging in architecture, but there is one that I find incredibly interesting.

It's an episode called Mike's Horror Scope.

And in this episode, Mike is approached by this.

quasi-Italian fashion impresario named Bibi Gallini, and she is very fabulous.

I would introduce myself, but everyone knows who Bibi Gallini is.

Even people on the street come up to me and say, It's Bibi.

And I always say to them, Hello, my darling.

She wants Mike to design a factory for her, and she gives him this complete freedom to do something creative and inventive.

She wants it to be pink and fluffy.

Make the factory the shape of a powder puff.

Powder puff?

Or maybe tall, like a lipstick.

A lipstick?

A factory has to be practical and efficient.

There are things.

And Mike just can't wrap his mind around it.

He keeps designing these like very straightforward factories for her, and she's like, no, no, no.

And then she says she wants the roof to open up.

And he's like, that's technically impossible.

And what's funny to me is that instead of embracing this brief that he's given, he could do anything and create some really interesting architecture.

He is just so straightforward and lacks such an idea of invention that he sort of loses the client.

I always find that very sad for Mike.

And it

shows a challenge of the architect, right?

Which is like clients are always difficult.

You have to figure out how to both satisfy your own vision while satisfying demands.

It's such a notable deviation from all the other ones we've discussed that given complete freedom, he just is like, please just make it a box and put stuff in it.

Well, this has been so fun to talk about, Mark.

I really appreciate you coming on the show.

That's been a lot of fun.

Thanks.

You can read Mark Lamster's architecture column in the Dallas Morning News.

He also wrote an excellent biography of architect Philip Johnson.

It's called The Man in the Glasshouse.

Check it out.

After the break, Brutalism 101 with Avery Truffleman.

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And we're back.

If you finished the Brutalist and thought, I don't really understand brutalism, well, we have a story for you.

Enjoy.

The best James Bond is either Sean Connery or Daniel Craig.

I lean towards Daniel Craig.

The new movies are just better.

But the Sean Connery films definitely had the best villains.

There's Blofeld, of course, who's so iconic that he turned the act of cat-stroking into a thing that super villains do.

But Bond's flashiest nemesis has to be Goldfinger.

Do you expect me to talk?

No, Mr.

Bond, I expect you to die.

Do you expect me to talk?

Yeah, I expect you to talk.

There's There's this dorky fun fact that the Bond villain Goldfinger was actually named after a real person.

That's Truffleman.

Avery Truffleman.

The author of the James Bond books, Ian Fleming, named Goldfinger for a man he found so dastardly, so terrible, that he immortalized him in pop culture.

The real Goldfinger was an architect, Erno Goldfinger, and he made giant, hulking, austere concrete buildings.

Goldfinger's buildings were decreed soulless.

Inhabitants claimed to suffer health problems and depression from spending time inside them.

Some of Goldfinger's buildings were vacated because occupants found them so ugly.

And yet many architects praised Goldfinger's buildings.

His trelloc tower, which was once threatened with demolition, has been awarded landmark status.

This divide, this hatred from the public and love from designers and architects tends to be the narrative around buildings like Goldfingers, which is to say, gigantic, imposing buildings made of concrete.

What some people refer to as brutalist architecture.

And a lot of folks, beyond the creator of James Bond, love to hate them.

We are in Worcester Hall, which to my great dismay and frustration is often considered the worst building on campus, or Worcester Hall, more like worst.

I met up with Sarah Briggs Ramsey in Worcester Hall, a brutalist building at UC Berkeley.

I can't tell you how many times I've been locking up my bike outside and I overhear undergrads walking with their parents and going, ironically, this is the architecture school and it's the ugliest building on campus.

Yep, Worcester Hall is the architecture school.

Sarah completed her master's there.

Buildings like this are pretty pervasive across most

American and Canadian campuses.

Yeah, there was a big bulky concrete building on the campus where I went to college, and I hated when I had to go through it.

It just reminded me of a bunker or a bomb shelter.

These big concrete buildings just like bum me out.

Absolutely.

I mean, it has these connotations of, you know, Soviet era construction, sometimes third world construction, all these negative associations.

This is Professor Adrian Forte, author of the excellent book, Concrete and Culture.

He's been researching concrete for around 10 years now.

It has a bad name.

Apart from aesthetic criticisms, concrete buildings present environmental concerns.

A lot of these buildings built at a time when energy was cheap, and they use up an awful lot of energy to heat and cool them.

Concrete buildings were built with the illusion of plenty.

that we will always have enough energy to build and heat and cool these massive, inefficient structures.

As harsh as it looks, concrete is an utterly optimistic building material.

Arguably too optimistic.

Really from the 1920s, it was seen as being the material that would change the world.

It had the potential to build things in a way that hadn't been seen before.

Concrete was this material that seemed boundless, readily available in vast quantities, and could create massive spaces unlike any other material.

So concrete sprang up everywhere.

It's the second most heavily consumed product in the world.

The only thing we consume more of than concrete is water.

We use concrete for sidewalks, bridges, tunnels and highways and of course for giant buildings.

Whether we're talking about stadia or auditoria or condominia or gymnasia or planetaria.

So historically government programs all over the world loved concrete.

Particularly in Soviet Russia, but also later in Europe, North America.

It was used for welfare, welfare state projects.

Concrete presented the most efficient way to house huge numbers of people.

And philosophically, it was seen as humble, capable, and honest.

Concrete was just out there in all of its rough glory, not hiding behind any paint or layers, saying, here I am, love me or hate me.

And as concrete buildings came to signify humility, honesty, and integrity, they were erected all over the world as housing projects, courthouses, schools, churches, hospitals, and city halls.

You'll stand outside and a tour bus will go by and they'll be, ladies and gentlemen, voted the most ugliest building in the world, Boston City Hall.

How do you compete with that?

Chris Grimley is up against a lot, but he's trying to restore Boston City Hall's reputation.

My name is Chris Grimley.

I'm with my fellow heroic people, Mark Pasnick and Michael Kubo.

Chris, Mark, and Michael have embarked on what they call the heroic project, chronicling the concrete structures in and around Boston.

Rather than referring to these concrete buildings as brutalist, they prefer the term heroic, because like so many superheroes, these structures have the best, most noble intentions, but are sorely misunderstood.

Also, just generally, brutalism is a big, broad label that gets used inconsistently in architecture.

People tend to disagree on one precise definition.

The name brutalism also just sounds intense, even though it's not actually related to brutality.

It comes from béton brut, which is a French term for raw concrete.

In any case, to these guys, heroic feels like a better term, especially in Boston.

where concrete architecture swooped in and saved the day.

You have to situate Boston in late 50s, 1960s.

It is America's first city.

Well, it is America's most historic city.

Again, not really, but I get your point.

And yet it finds itself in the doldrums.

Boston, like a lot of other American cities, was plagued by a loss of manufacturing jobs and white flight to the suburbs.

And for decades, Boston had the highest property taxes in the nation and almost no development.

There is this recognition from civic authorities that something needs to be done done and something needs to be done quickly.

So Boston sets an agenda to make the city great again with big, soaring, capable, thoroughly modern buildings made, of course, out of concrete.

And though some of these buildings were celebrated, others were really not.

What we call the third rail of Boston concrete modernism is City Hall.

When Boston City Hall was built in 1968, critics were put off by this concrete style.

It was called alienating and cold.

And since it was a government building, this criticism became impossible to remove from politics.

Boston City Hall became a political pawn.

Mayors and city council members kept trying to win public support with promises to get rid of the building, like John Tobin did when he ran for city council.

Hi, everybody.

This is John Tobin.

Thanks for visiting votejohntobin.com.

Here we are on City Hall Plaza in front of Boston City Hall.

I'm not an architect, but I know bad architecture when I see it.

This is a bad building, and I think we can do a lot by knocking this building down.

Former Mayor Thomas Menino actually started a study to really look into tearing it down.

It turned out as a result of the study that you would need something like a nuclear-grade weapon basically to destroy this building because it was so heavily overbuilt in concrete.

And so when they couldn't tear down City Hall, officials chose to ignore it.

People that occupied the building for decades and decades didn't like it, and so they didn't invest money into the building and effectively wanted to see the building go away.

This is called active neglect and it happens with a lot of concrete buildings.

They are intentionally unrepaired, unrenovated, and uncared for.

Which only makes the building more ugly and then more hated and then more ignored and creates this vicious cycle where the public hate of Boston City Hall feeds itself.

And then the discussion years on really became about what the original architects had done wrong, as if this were not a failure of maintenance, but a failure of the initial design.

When people built these mammoth concrete structures, no one really thought about maintenance.

They seemed indestructible.

In the early days of concrete, people assumed that this was an everlasting material that wouldn't need any attention at all.

And I mean, that's wrong.

We know that it does need to be looked after.

It does deteriorate.

It does decay.

But it can be hard to tell when concrete is decaying.

If you think of brick and timber, the decay takes place on the surface of them.

But with concrete, the deterioration is internal.

Concrete deteriorates chemically from the inside out.

Part of this has to do with the metal reinforcements that help hold up most concrete buildings.

The rebar, well, it can rust, and the rust eats away at the overall structure.

But Adrian Forty says, tearing them down is not the answer.

Because as soon as you tear them down, then you have a problem, first of all, what you do with the detritus that's left.

And secondly, you've got to replace them with something else and use up a whole lot more energy and create a lot more CO2 in building something in their place.

They already used up all that energy when they were made.

They're already there.

We can adapt these buildings to make them greener and make them more appealing places to be by adding windows, for example.

But basically, Professor Fordy thinks we can all develop the capacity to love these concrete brutes in all their hulking glory.

Yeah, sure, people can learn to love anything.

But, you know, as with any art form, whether it's opera or painting or literature, the more you know about it, the more you'll get out of it, the more you'll appreciate it.

And this is especially true of concrete buildings.

Architecture students appreciate them because they know that concrete actually requires a hell of a lot of skill and finesse to work with.

To do architecture in concrete is

proof that you are really an architect.

It's the test of being an architect.

With a concrete building, every little detail needs to be calculated in advance.

Concrete is wildly intimidating to work with.

Once you pour it, there's no going back.

With a concrete building, it's like the result of an immaculate conception.

The whole thing is an integral monolithic whole, and it has to be right.

And aside from the interesting design challenges it poses, concrete itself as a material can be subtly beautiful if you look closely.

You know, what we think of as just a monolithic, consistent, homogeneous texture is actually really rich and has a lot of interest when you actually go up to it and consider it.

Sarah Briggs-Ramsey, the one I spoke with at Berkeley's Worcester Hall, did a year-long project traveling around the world looking at concrete buildings in Europe and Asia and South and North America.

To create a global comparison of one material that I think is so sort of underconsidered.

It's like the background of all the cities, but no one actually stands to look.

We call the city a concrete jungle to talk about the artificialness of the urban landscape.

But concrete can actually be a very natural expression of the environment.

Concrete's color and texture can be dictated by local climate, local earth, and local rock.

This is the Harvard Science Center on the Harvard campus and it's got a very purpley, like a really pronounced purpley color and that's the ground from the site.

Concrete can also be an expression of local style and custom, like how UK concrete has big, thick, textured chunks of rock, while Japanese concrete is very fine and flat.

But the beauty of concrete architecture is all the better when you can just observe the buildings like pieces of sculpture without actually having to live and work in them.

Which brings in concrete's surprising ally, photography.

Concrete looks good in photographs.

It provides this kind of neutral background.

It provides a wonderful setting for people's skin tones,

color of their clothes.

Fashion photographers realized this first, and then pockets of the internet started to appreciate these concrete buildings.

There are lots of

these blogs and so on, which show a kind of extraordinary enthusiasm for concrete.

Photography is allowing a new audience of non-architects to appreciate these buildings for their strong lines, their crisp shadows, and increasingly the idealism they embody.

They represent a a set of ideas about the state of the world and what the future was imagined to be that, you know, we want to preserve.

We should remember what people were thinking 50 years ago.

If we tear these buildings down, we will lose all of that.

Architecture, whether we want to admit it or not, has a sort of shelf life, a time after which buildings fall out of fashion.

and then are allowed to fall apart.

Back in the 1960s, Victorian-style buildings were considered hideous, falling apart, impossible to repair, and we were tearing batches of them down, all the while erecting big concrete buildings.

But enough Victorians were saved that today they are these beautiful, lovingly restored treasures.

Brutalist, heroic, whatever you want to call it, concrete architecture now finds itself at a potential inflection point.

Too outdated to be modern, too young to be classic.

And a small but growing band of architects, architecture enthusiasts, and preservationists would like us to just wait a bit and see.

Maybe with a little time and love, we might discover some architectural diamonds in the rough that we just can't see right now.

That story was produced by Avery Truffleman back in 2015.

99% of Visible was produced this week by me, Roman Mars, along with Martine Gonzalez, who also mixed this episode.

Music by Swan Real and Martine Gonzalez.

Kathy Too is our executive producer.

Kurt Colstead is the digital director.

Delaney Hall is our senior editor.

The rest of the team includes Chris Barubay, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Bosh Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars, as I said before.

The 99% visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

I think all of us are on Blue Sky now, which is kind of like Twitter, except it's not supporting an unelected billionaire who's currently dismantling the government.

We're also having a ball on our Discord server where you can join us to make Oscar predictions and talk about your favorite architect movies.

There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.

Prices keep going up these days.

It feels like being on an elevator that only goes up.

Going up.

But not at Metro.

We're pushing the down button.

Going down.

We've lowered prices.

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That's 20% lower.

And you get a free Samsung 5G phone when you bring your number.

Only at Metro.

Five-year guarantee on eligible plans, exclusion supplies.

See website for details.

Not available at Metro with T-Mobile in the past six months.

Tax supplies.

Honey, do not make plans Saturday, September 13th, okay?

Why, what's happening?

The Walmart wellness event.

Flu shots, health screenings, free samples from those brands you like.

All that at Walmart.

We could just walk right in.

No appointment needed.

Who knew we could cover our health and wellness needs at Walmart?

Check the calendar Saturday, September 13th.

Walmart Wellness Event.

You knew.

I knew.

Check in on your health at the same place you already shop.

Visit Walmart Saturday, September 13th for our semi-annual wellness event.

Flu shots subject to availability and applicable state law.

Age restrictions apply.

Free samples while supplies last.

Are you ready to get spicy?

These Doritos golden sriracha aren't that spicy.

Sriracha?

Sounds pretty spicy to me.

Um, a little spicy, but also tangy and sweet.

Maybe it's time to turn up the heat.

Or turn it down.

It's time for something that's not too spicy.

Try Dorito's Golden Sriracha.

Spicy.

But not too spicy.