Among this year's top contenders at the Oscars is the film "The Brutalist," with 10 nominations. It tells the fictional story of a European architect who, after surviving the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, emigrates to the United States, where he lands a building commission.

A hit with critics, the three-and-a-half-hour movie has also been honored with prizes at film festivals and has won Golden Globe and BAFTA awards. Along with its epic narrative scope, the film also pays tribute to the divisive architectural style known as brutalism.

That name comes not from the style's generally rugged, massive and radical look but from its original raw material: unplastered, raw concrete, called "beton brut" in French. Their form and appearance are uncompromising, with no decorative adornments and few colors. To some observers, the buildings appear coarse, intimidating and unapproachable, recalling bunkers.

The architectural style emerged after World War II, when living space in Europe was scarce due to wartime destruction.

One of its pioneers was Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who was commissioned to build a large residential complex in Marseille.

Between 1947 and 1952, he built Cite Radieuse (radiant city), a complex almost 140 meters (460 feet) long, 25 meters wide and 56 meters high, supported by large stilts and offering 330 apartments for up to 1,700 people. The complex includes shopping streets as well as child care and leisure facilities. The building has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016.

The Cite Radieuse was just the beginning. Well into the 1970s, brutalist architecture dominated new construction worldwide. Concrete was affordable, and the unadorned forms meant a relatively short construction time. Because of that, the style was used for many public buildings like city halls, universities, churches and libraries; or large-scale living complexes, with their own infrastructure, that function like self-contained cities.

Brutalism continues to influence international architecture, with contemporary architects incorporating elements of the style into their modern designs.

'Deal with it'

Despite how widespread the building style is, brutalist architecture also has its critics, with many dismissing the constructions as ugly. Nearly every city has at least one such massive structure dominating its space, its concrete gradually darkening and weathering.

"These buildings don't care about their surroundings," art historian Karin Berkemann told German SZ-Magazin in 2017. "They say, 'I am a building. Deal with it.'"

The ways of dealing with those buildings have varied. London's Robin Hood Gardens, a 1970s housing estate designed by architects Alison and Peter Smithson, was demolished starting in 2017. The residential complex was in disrepair and was considered out of date, decried as a "failure," a "slum" and a "concrete monstrosity."

For the English Heritage organization, it was "a failed place for human life from the start." Despite many protests and calls for the building to be listed, it eventually made way for a larger urban development plan.

Germany, too, is reassessing its "concrete bunkers." In Hamburg, for example, a post office administration building known as the "Post Pyramid" was demolished in 2018 despite attempts to give the building a friendlier face with bright colors.

Saving the Toilet Paper Roll

A building just a few kilometers away met a different fate. The Catholic St. Maximilian Kolbe Church, built in 1973, was also marked for demolition due to significant structural damage despite being historically listed.

Vocal protests, a revision of Hamburg's monument protection laws and a sustainable new concept for use saved the now deconsecrated church, called the "Toilet Paper Roll" due to its distinctive form. It's now being converted to house a community center.

An especially striking building known as the Mouse Bunker, which looks like a sci-fi battleship, sits on a canal in southwestern Berlin. The nickname comes from its original purpose as the Central Animal Lab for the Free University. Its architecture is not only an example of brutalism in its purest form, it's also very deliberate, according to architecture historian Felix Torkar in an interview with German public radio Deutschlandfunk. 

"It was planned at the end of the 1960s when man had just flown to the moon," Torkar said. "It's an eerie science-fiction era. And that's where the ship motif of classical modernism comes together with the science-fiction architecture of the '60s and '70s to create this Star Destroyer."

Individual aesthetics and climate protection

Despite being considered one of the most outstanding examples of brutalist architecture, the Central Animal Lab building was also set to face the wrecking ball. That triggered a wave of protest, and a petition was launched calling for the extraordinary building to be placed under protection.

People in both Germany and abroad campaigned for its preservation. Finally, Berlin's State Conservator Christoph Rauhut made the decision.

"The Mouse Bunker is an example of a building stock from the second half of the 20th century that was highly technical and built for particular functions," he explained to the press when he placed the concrete colossus under a preservation order in 2023.

But it's not only preservationists and brutalism fans who have argued strongly for saving the concrete monsters. Environmentalists have also called for a move toward repurposing or renovating, rather than complete demolition.

They criticize the fact that dismantling and disposing of aging building materials often has a considerable environmental impact. In fact, the demolition of such a building can be very environmentally damaging, not only because of the high amount of energy involved but also because of the materials that were used at the time, like asbestos and polystyrene.

Growing community of enthusiasts

Meanwhile, a kind of brutalism hype has developed online. Several Instagram accounts feature dystopian brutalist architecture, sometimes in an amusing way, like @catsofbrutalism, where cats lie on or around Brutalist buildings. 

The account @african_brutalism showcases brutalist architecture in Africa, while buildings in Switzerland are the focus of @swiss_brutalism. There are brutalism fans from Japan to Brazil.

Since 2007, there has been a Facebook group that campaigns for the preservation of concrete buildings. The Brutalism Appreciation Society initiated it in the UK and now boasts more than 260,000 members.

The German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt am Main and the Wüstenrot Foundation have launched a website dedicated to saving brutalist buildings, with a global database. Using the hashtag #SOSBrutalism, anyone can participate and get involved. Photos from all over the world end up here, submitted by the growing global community of fans of these concrete monuments.

This article was originally written in German.

Correction, February 25, 2025: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Berlin's state conservator as Christian Rauhut. DW apologizes for the error.