A Sydney family’s connection to ‘The Brutalist’

The Brutalist won Adrien Brody the Best Actor’s Oscar for his mesmerising portrayal of its central character, Hungarian Jewish architect Laszlo Toth. Although Toth is a fictional character, the film’s director said he was drawn from two real-life Hungarian architects, Marcel Breuer and Ernő Goldfinger, predominantly based on the more celebrated Breuer.

For me Breuer is important for another reason: he was part of my extended family. Marcel Breuer and my great uncle Laszlo Buchwald were cousins – their mothers were sisters. But the connection between the two men extends beyond the family tree.

Both Buchwald and Breuer trained in Hungary to be apprentice cabinet-makers. Breuer was two years older than Buchwald and the family doesn’t know if they studied together. However, the training shaped the careers of both men’s lives.

Breuer went on to join the Bauhaus architecture school in Germany and emigrated to the US just before WW2. He became a renowned designer and architect, credited with creating the tubular chair, and famed for designing the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan.

Laszlo Buchwald’s life took a different turn, carving out a prominent career as an artisan furniture maker in Australia. In his early twenties Laszlo went to Milan to join a furniture design and construction company. In 1929, at the age of 25, he left for Australia with his sister and her family, arrived in Sydney and changed his name to Leslie Buckwell.

Leslie’s son Peter, who is the source of this information, does not know why his father decided to leave Hungary or choose Australia, other than that they were rejected by Canada. It was “seemingly on a whim,” he told me.

Leslie arrived in Sydney with his bag of tools at the start of the Great Depression. He set up a small workshop in Redfern and gradually became established as the only maker of bespoke European furniture in Sydney. As the business prospered, he expanded the factory and later moved to a larger space in Annandale, where he mentored apprentices and his factory became known as the pre-eminent place to train.

In 1951 the factory was destroyed by a massive explosion and fire in the dead of the night. Leslie rebuilt it and continued to run a factory until 1962, then took a sales position at Artes Studios, a high-end furniture retailer.

Through his career, Leslie worked with many prominent émigré architects and designers. They included Jean Fomberteaux and Partners, George Reves, Stephen Gergely, Hugh Stossel and Reg Magoffin. Leslie also fitted out the newly-built Wollongong Council Chambers in conjunction with architect Reg Magoffin. The building is now used as the Wollongong Art Gallery, and most, if not all of the furniture is still in use there. Some of his furniture, including a table and liquor cabinet, are in my home, as beautiful now as they were when he made them in the 1950s.

Having grown up surrounded by furniture and designers, Peter Buckwell also became an architect and told me the fact that Marcel Breuer was a relative was a contributing inspiration in his career choice. (Peter’s brother Robbie chose to make furniture with his father in the factory.)

Although Marcel Breuer never came to Australia, he did complete one commission here – the Torin factory in Penrith, in Sydney’s west, completed in 1976, and designed in collaboration with Harry Seidler, who acted as the on-site supervisor.

By that time Breuer was established in New York as an internationally renowned architect. When Peter was starting out, he went to meet Breuer in New York to see if he could get a job at his firm. Peter was told Breuer “wasn’t available”, and he never got to meet the man who helped shape his career.

In this respect, if not others, Laszlo Toth’s uncompromising nature in The Brutalist was firmly rooted in reality.