Diana Hubbell: Whether or not you saw the movie The Brutalist, you’ve probably heard a lot about it. In the film, Brutalist architecture serves as a metaphor for resilience and transformation. And because of all of the Oscar buzz around it, all of a sudden this architectural movement born out of the ruins of the post-war United Kingdom is back in the zeitgeist. Viewers of Brutalist architecture over the years have accused it of being drab and utilitarian. They’ve said these hulking concrete buildings looked more like fortresses. More than a few have accused them of being ugly. And while I can kind of see their point, there’s something powerful about these buildings when you consider them in the context they were made. These structures were a violent rejection of the past and everything that came with it. And clearly that resonated all over the world in the 20th century. If you look through the Atlas archives, there’s a Brutalist Soviet-era hotel in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. There’s the Brutalist Barbican Estate, which feels like an entire secret city hidden in London. There’s even the Rio de Janeiro Cathedral in Brazil, which can hold 20,000 people and looks like something that Mayans from the future left behind. I’m Diana Hubbell, and this is Atlas Obscura, a podcast about the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, editorial fellow Roxanne Hoorn and I would like to take you to two places on opposite sides of the world that both evoke deep reverence and appreciation for an architectural style not usually associated with beauty.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Diana: Think back on some of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance. Titian in Venice, Raphael in Urbino, Botticelli in Florence. Their individual styles varied, but a lot of their subject matter is the same. The Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, the Twelve Disciples, or several centuries’ worth of Catholic saints. And there’s one obvious reason for this. Artists have always required patrons, and in the 16th and 17th century, the Vatican had some of the deepest pockets around. There’s a reason why you’ll find original oil paintings by Caravaggio in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, or why Michelangelo’s frescoes decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Times and artistic movements have certainly changed, but artists have continued to play an important, sometimes unexpected role in religious spaces. Pablo Picasso painted 18 murals all over the walls of a chapel in the south of France in 1952. Henri Matisse designed virtually every element of the Rosary Chapel, which was completed the year before on the Côte d’Azur. More recently, American artist James Turrell created a permanent light installation in a chapel in a Berlin cemetery. A couple years ago, I visited the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, and it challenged my idea of what a church could be.
In true Brutalist fashion, it bears more resemblance to a bunker than a Gothic cathedral. The stark exterior is an irregular octagon done up in rose stucco. There are no visible adornments, or even windows. And it gets even stranger when you walk inside. Whereas most cathedrals are all about light streaming through stained glass, entering this chapel feels like being swallowed whole. A single skylight illuminates the space. On each of the walls hang 14 enormous paintings in somber black and deep mauve tones. These are the final works by the American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko.
Rothko’s work only really makes sense when you see it in context. If you look at a photograph of the chapel, all you’ll see are big, flat rectangles of color. It’s kind of gray on gray on black. And it seems like it would be boring. But the effect of standing in front of them was almost overwhelming. When I first walked into the chapel, the entire group I was with went silent in unison. And as I stared at the paintings, I felt as if I was about to start crying, but I couldn’t say why.
How did all these paintings by one of the most important American artists of the 20th century wind up in Texas? It all started in 1964 when a pair of extremely wealthy Houstonians named John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Rothko. The Wall Street Journal called the pair American Medicis after the powerful Florentine family that funded so much Renaissance art. They tasked Philip Johnson, the renowned architect, to design the building itself.
Rothko once said that the real subjects of his paintings were, quote, “basic human emotions.” And I never really understood that until I came here. Over the course of his career, Rothko’s signature color field paintings became progressively darker. When he painted these final site-specific works, he was mired in a deep depression. He ultimately took his own life in 1970, one year before the chapel opened to the public. It makes sense to me why so many people in the throes of grief have found solace in this space.
On the 10th anniversary of her mother’s death, author Jacqui Shine took a spontaneous flight to Houston. In an essay for The New York Times, she wrote, “These canvases are nothing like his more luminous color studies, paintings so full of depth and light that it almost feels as if you can enter. The Houston canvases are dark purples, maroons, black. The colors of old sorrows are ageless ones. I had wanted something I could disappear inside, but these colors seem to come from inside me.”
It seems appropriate to me that the Rothko Chapel isn’t really a church in the traditional sense. Although the de Menils who commissioned it were devout Catholics, this place is non-denominational. Great art has the power to move anyone, regardless of their faith. In the ’90s, it was one of the only places in the area that would hold funerals for the victims of the AIDS crisis. In subsequent years, it’s hosted countless weddings for the LGBTQ community.
The chapel is also very much a place of resilience, now more than ever. In July 2024, when Hurricane Beryl ripped through Houston, it tore through the roof of the chapel. The Brutalist structure may look like a fortress, but even it couldn’t withstand the storm. As the chapel’s executive director, David Leslie, remarked bitterly, “Hurricane Beryl came in like a barrel.”
Four of Rothko’s paintings were damaged, along with the structure itself. That August, it was announced that the chapel would be closed indefinitely. But then the community of Houston and beyond rallied.
What really struck me is that the donations to repair the chapel came from all over. There were larger checks from foundations and wealthy donors, of course, but there were also smaller ones from local churches and little towns. As David Leslie said in an interview with The Houstonian, “We know, but we were reminded, in a new way, of what the chapel means to people. And some who have never been in the chapel, they just understood the importance of the place,” Leslie said in an interview with The Houstonian. And then there are also those who understand the impact of the loss of artwork, damage to artwork. It’s not just a thing, but there’s something existential to art.
On December 17th of 2023, the chapel reopened once again. There is still a great deal of work to be done, but it once again is there to offer refuge and a space for contemplation and transcendence for all.
A handful of years after the Rothko Chapel was completed in the ’70s, another Brutalist structure was being built, this time on the other side of the world. Roxanne Hoorn brings us that story.
Roxanne Hoorn: Shrouded by the forest and perched on a sloping hillside in northwest Bosnia and Herzegovina sits a massive marble structure. Split down the middle, its two towering concave walls reaching as high as a basketball court is long. They curve inward, reaching for one another, shadowing the two-story atrium between them.
Today, this place sits abandoned, moss growing from its cracks and graffiti marking its marbled walls. A once-pristine reflection pool sits stagnant at the structure’s base. Despite its impressive size, the abandoned, Brutalist structure isn’t easy to find in the dense forest. And for good reason. The monument marks what was once the site of a secret hospital, operated by the partisan resistance during World War II.
During the war, Axis forces, including Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, took over much of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the time. In the fall of 1942, local resistance fighters began taking back territory from Axis military control in the People’s Liberation War. To keep their forces going strong, they set up a series of five hospital complexes, hidden in a freed zone within the forest on the steep slopes of Grmeč mountain range. But the sites were more than just a hospital.
The largest of the complexes had 19 buildings, from bakeries to workshops, with the hospital at its center. During its two-year operation, the medical center served some 2,800 wounded soldiers and typhus patients. Healthy and strong, the resistance continued to gain land back from Axis forces that stole it, forming a large freed zone. But this victory wouldn’t last. In 1943, German forces infiltrated the free zone in a strategic plan called Operation Case White. Seeing the site’s size and complexity, Axis commanders thought, incorrectly, that the hospital grounds must be the resistance’s headquarters, making it a prime target.
Fortunately, the employees and patients of Grmeč’s hospital were able to evacuate before their site was burned to the ground, leaving only rubble and scorched earth where the buildings once stood. For a long time, the site sat undeveloped, nature quickly reclaiming the landscape. Until, over 30 years later, when the people of Yugoslavia wanted to commemorate the resistance soldiers and medics who served at the site. A well-known Serbian designer and sculptor, Ljubomir Denković, designed the hulking but elegant Brutalist memorial. The monument was officially named the “Monument to the Revolution,” though to this day, people call it by many names.
On July 27th, 1979, the anniversary of the World War II uprising of the people of Bosnia, the complex was unveiled. Two 50-foot tall, semi-spherical marble block walls enclosed a courtyard, intended to represent a flower bud. At the time of its unveiling, the two-story interior space was full of inscriptions. A copper diorama of the local mountain landscape and a model of the hospital facility also sat in that inner atrium. A 60-foot wide reflection pool sat at the structure’s base, reflecting not only the massive structure, but its impressive past. Winding trails led visitors to other monuments and plaques commemorating different buildings in the expansive complex. The site once hosted ceremonies, musical performances, and was teeming with life in a whole new way. But war would wreak havoc on the peaceful place once more.
Over the years, Yugoslav and Bosnian wars have led to the abandonment of the memorial, leaving nature to overtake it. Now coated in moss and graffiti, the Brutalist structure sits stained with the passing of time. Few visitors find their way to the long-forgotten site, now solely inhabited by birds and creeping vines. The copper diorama is gone, and vandalization has obscured most of the wall’s inscriptions. The reflection pool sits murky, like people’s memories of the now-forgotten place. Trails have since overgrown, hiding the massive structure within the forest, just as the hospital it honors once was.
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Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Camille Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manola Morales, Baudelaire, Amanda McCowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.