Driving down South Winton Road, it’s easy to miss it. The First Unitarian Church of Rochester doesn’t announce itself with a steeple or stained glass. There are no ornate carvings, no flashes of color, no architectural gestures designed to please the eye. Instead, it rises from the earth like something discovered rather than built, an elemental mass of concrete and light.
Designed in 1962 by Louis Kahn, one of the 20th century’s most revered architects, the church remains one of the Finger Lakes region’s quiet marvels. It is both austere and spiritual, monumental yet human. To walk through its shadowed corridors and open chambers is to enter a space that feels less like a building and more like an idea: that truth, in architecture as in life, begins with honesty.
That same idea is at the heart of Brady Corbet’s film, The Brutalist. Like Kahn’s work, it unfolds with gravity and restraint, asking what it means to build something lasting in a world shaped by impermanence.
The architecture of survival
The Brutalist tells the story of László Toth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who emigrates to America after World War II. Arriving with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), he carries with him not only the trauma of what he endured but the vision of what he might create. In America, he hopes to build structures that speak of endurance and rebirth, a dream as ambitious as it is fragile…