The Brutalist

[last lines]

Older Zsofia: My uncle is, above all, a principled artist. His lifelong ambition was not only to define an epoch but to transcend all time. In his memoirs, he described his designs as machines with no superfluous parts, that at their best, at his best, possessed an immoveable core; a "Hard Core of Beauty." A way of directing their inhabitant's perception to the world as it is. The inherent laws of concrete things such as mountains and rock define them. They indicate nothing. They tell nothing. They simply are. Born in 1911 in a small fishing village in Austria-Hungary, László Toth looked out upon the Adriatic Sea. He was a boy with eyes wide open, full of yearning. New borders would eventually rip this expanse of sea away from him but never did he cease to try and fill its void. Forty years later, he survived the camps at Buchenwald, as did his late wife, and myself, in Dachau. His first American masterpiece, the Van Buren institute outside of Philadelphia, remained unfinished until 1973. The building referenced his time at Buchenwald as well as the deeply felt absence of his wife, my Aunt Erzsébet. For this project, he re-imagined the camp's claustrophobic interior cells with precisely the same dimensions as his own place of imprisonment, save for one electrifying exception; when visitors looked 20 meters upwards, the dramatic heights of the glass above them invited free thought; freedom of identity. He further re-imagined Buchenwald and his wife's venue of imprisonment in Dachau on the same grounds, connected by a myriad of secret corridors re-writing their history and transcending space and time so that he and Erzsébet would never be apart again. Uncle, you and Aunt Erzsébet once spoke for me, I speak for you now, and I am honored. "Don't let anyone fool you, Zsófia" he would say to me as a struggling young mother raising my daughter during our first years in Jerusalem, "no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey." Thank you.