A standout of the recent Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF) held in New York City was a first-of-its-kind trivia night that dove into the dramatic intersection between brutalism and film. World-Architects partook in the fun event hosted by architect and filmmaker Jord den Hollander.
Since its inaugural edition in 2009, ADFF has grown from a once-a-year affair to a year-round festival traveling to multiple cities—six cities over the next six months, in fact, following last week's five-day run in NYC. ADFF:NY25 included screenings of sixteen films—from biopics on Enric Miralles and Sigurd Lewerentz to the world premieres of documentaries about building in Antarctica and outer space—plus Jord den Hollander's interactive event, a bit of a departure for the festival founded and directed by Kyle Bergman. One of the films, At the Garden's Pace, actually premiered at the 2024 Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam (AFFR), the annual film festival that happened to be co-founded, in 2001, by none other than the master of ceremonies for The Big Brutal Quiz.
As both an architect and filmmaker, Jord den Hollander's knowledge on brutalism and cinema is deep. Of the 26 film clips shown during the 90-minute-long quiz, about a third of them were famous, another third were less familiar, and the balance were complete unknowns, at least to this writer … the same one who ended up winning the quiz! I wish I could say I knew all of the brutalist buildings depicted in that selection of films, but they were similarly on a famous-to-obscure spectrum. And when I did know a brutalist building and/or the film it made an appearance in, den Hollander would reveal the same and then veer to a question about an unexpected architectural, cinematic, or historical fact. As such, the audience groaned as much as it laughed, the latter stemming from den Hollander's alternately biting and lighthearted remarks on what were generally dystopian films—appropriate given their settings in brutalist buildings.
A handful of clips from some of the films and buildings featured in The Big Brutal Quiz are embedded below, but given den Hollander's penchant for misleading quiz-goers, there are no spoilers here. These clips should give a taste of what kinds of films feature brutalist architecture, and perhaps encourage viewers to attend the quiz the next time it's part of ADFF.
Stereo is a “spooky” 1969 film David Cronenburg directed and shot at the Andrews Building—aptly designed by Australian architect John Andrews—at the University of Toronto Scarborough College:
The Energy Corporation headquarters in Rollerball, the dystopian sci-fi film from 1975 starring James Caan and John Houseman, is actually the BMW Headquarters in Munich designed by Karl Schwanzer (at 1:50 in the clip):
One of the most famous chase scenes in all of film, from The Hunter (1980), was shot at Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City in Chicago:
One of the more obscure films in the quiz is Sugarhouse, a 2007 film in which a middle class accountant steals the gun of a drug kingpin. It was shot partly at Alison and Peter Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens (RIP):
More disjointed than dystopian, quizmaster Jord den Hollander also showed a clip of the 2024/25 Chanel runway show that was held on the roof and in the “streets in the sky” of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, France: