I recently watched a film called The Brutalist.
And I don’t know how to explain what it did to me.
There is something about Brutalist architecture that has always pulled me in not gently, but with force. As if the buildings themselves are reaching through the screen or the page or the photograph to say,
“You have seen me before.”
Even though I haven’t.
I have never been to Norilsk.
I have never walked through a frozen alley in post-Soviet Russia.
I have never touched the concrete skin of a monument that stands both as structure and memory.
But when I look at Brutalist buildings especially the ones imagined by AI engines trained on architectural archives I feel like I have returned.
To something.
To somewhere.
To someone.
I don’t know why I love Brutalist architecture.
Maybe it’s the rawness. The honesty of material. The refusal to decorate or seduce.
Maybe it’s how these buildings look like they have survived things.
Brutalism doesn’t smile for the camera. It doesn’t invite you in with warm tones or perfect proportions.
It just stands.
Like a witness.
Like a memory.
Like something that has nothing to prove.
When I look at those buildings, I feel still.
And strangely safe.
It makes no sense. I have grown up in places that look nothing like that.
But when I see the heavy shadows of a concrete stairwell, when I see a slab wall cutting the sky, when I see the geometry of quiet defiance something inside me pauses. And listens.
Sometimes I wonder if it is déjà vu.
Or maybe some faint trace of collective memory.
I don’t know if this happens to everyone.
But it happens to me.
I want to study Brutalist architecture. Not because I want to build it. But because I want to understand it. I want to know what it means to stand like that unadorned, unapologetic, complete in its own weight.
I like the AI-generated ones too. The Instagram ones.
They don’t exist. And yet they do.
They’re familiar in a way I cannot place.
As if someone looked into my memory and tried to sketch it out.
This love is not rational.
It’s not a preference. It’s a pull.
Maybe it’s the silence.
Maybe it’s the loneliness.
Maybe it’s the way these structures seem to know how to hold grief without collapsing.
All I know is this:
When I look at Brutalist buildings, I feel like I am not just looking at concrete.
I am looking at time.
I am looking at presence.
I am looking at something that remembers me back.
