Editor’s Note: Since publishing this piece, a response was received and published on FingerLakes1.com. You can read that by clicking here.
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.
When an American industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), takes an interest in László’s talent, the opportunity that follows becomes a test of integrity. The film’s tension lies in that exchange: between art and power, authenticity and assimilation, the longing to belong and the need to remain true to oneself.
For audiences in the Finger Lakes—especially those familiar with Kahn’s Unitarian Church—the film’s questions resonate on a deeply local level. Kahn himself was born in Estonia to a Jewish family that fled to the United States when he was a child. His work, often defined by raw materials and monumental forms, emerged from that history of displacement. His buildings, including Rochester’s Unitarian Church, are not simply structures but meditations on survival, the transformation of suffering into structure, of exile into belonging.
Brutalism and the honesty of materials
Brutalism, the architectural movement that inspired both Kahn and the fictional László Toth, takes its name from béton brut, or “raw concrete.” The style is often misunderstood. To some, its weight and severity feel cold or uninviting. But to those who live with it, to those who see the light play against those coarse surfaces, it reveals something essential about truth.
In Kahn’s hands, concrete becomes a medium of revelation. The Unitarian Church’s surfaces are unfinished, its structure exposed. Every joint and beam is visible, every imperfection accounted for. It’s an architecture that refuses disguise.
Inside, the effect is luminous. Natural light pours down from hidden clerestories, catching the concrete walls in a soft glow. It’s as if the building itself breathes, a sanctuary not of ornamentation but of essence. Here, simplicity becomes sacred.
In The Brutalist, László’s designs echo that same impulse: to build something that cannot lie. His buildings are not meant to soothe but to endure. They bear the marks of history and the fingerprints of human labor. Each one seems to ask, Can beauty exist without comfort? Can honesty itself be a kind of grace?
The Finger Lakes as landscape and metaphor
To live in the Finger Lakes is to understand the beauty of endurance. Our hills and lakes, our stone barns and repurposed factories, all speak to the passage of time and the persistence of community. We are surrounded by the relics of past ambitions—industrial, agricultural, artistic—and by the quiet resilience of those who remain.
The First Unitarian Church belongs to this landscape not by imitation but by spirit. Like the gorges of Ithaca or the stone viaducts of Letchworth, it reminds us that what is enduring is often what is unadorned. Its Brutalism is not harshness but honesty, the same kind of honesty that animates Corbet’s film.
Both the church and The Brutalist explore how community is built, not only through inclusion but through struggle. Who gets to belong? Who gets to build? And what must be sacrificed in the process? These questions are as relevant in architecture as they are in art, faith, and civic life.
Concrete as memory
For Kahn and for Corbet, architecture is an act of memory. Every wall, every beam, carries a story. When László designs his buildings in The Brutalist, he builds not just for the living but for the dead—for those whose stories were erased before they could be told.
In that sense, Rochester’s Unitarian Church is also a kind of memorial. It honors not through inscription or symbol, but through form. It stands as a physical embodiment of faith, not in doctrine, but in humanity’s capacity to create, to gather, to endure.
The Brutalist is not an easy film, just as Kahn’s architecture is not easy to love at first glance. Both ask something of us. They require patience, attention, and humility. But what they offer in return is profound: a vision of beauty that does not depend on comfort, and a definition of community that does not depend on conformity.
In the final moments of the film, László stands before one of his completed structures—a vast, austere space that feels both sacred and scarred. It is unclear whether the building belongs to him or to the forces that shaped him. But in that ambiguity lies the film’s truth: to build is to believe, to make meaning out of the materials life gives us.
When you stand before the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, you feel that same truth humming through the concrete. It’s there in the weight of the walls, the silence of the sanctuary, the play of light on unpolished stone. It’s a reminder that faith need not be decorative to be deep, and that beauty, in the Finger Lakes and beyond, often reveals itself in what endures.
George Cassidy Payne is a Rochester-based nonprofit leader, educator, and advocate for sustainable economic development. With a philosophy and social work background, George has spent over two decades addressing issues of equity, public policy, and crisis intervention. His community development and environmental sustainability expertise informs his commitment to strengthening Rochester’s regional economy.