Whether or not you saw the movie The Brutalist this year, 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. Critics 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 Hubble, and this is Atlas Obscura, a podcast about the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places. Today, editorial fellow Roxanne Horn 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.

More after this.

Music More after this. Think back on some of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance. Titian in Venice, Raphael and Urbino,icelli in Florence. Their individual styles varied,

but a lot of their subject matter is the same. The Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus, the 12 disciples,

or several centuries worth of Catholic saints. And there's one obvious reason for this.

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