László Tóth, a Jewish concentration camp survivor and Hungarian architect, immigrates to the US in 1947, while his ailing wife Erzsebet is stuck at the Austrian border due to the snarls of bureaucracy and legal whims. Initially forced to toil in poverty, László is a man in pieces who teeters on the edge of falling apart. To put his design skills to some use, he takes a job in a furniture shop. Turning the tide on his luck is the commission to rework the library of a wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren. The chance meeting soon wins him a contract that will change the course of the next thirty years of his life.
"For me, Brutalist architecture is representative of something that people do not understand and that they want torn down and ripped away. And I think it’s just really fascinating. This movement all came out of the Bauhaus – Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, or Louis Kahn, even though Louis’ buildings are a very different style – their work was all wrestling with what the entire world had been through in the first half of the century. So, the film is about how post-war psychology shaped post-war architecture." (Brady Corbet)