Music and architecture are inextricably linked. Both are dependent on rhythm, composition, and emotion—one built with sound, the other with space. The relationship has progressed from concert halls and public squares to visual culture, and specifically music videos. Directors often use buildings not just as backdrop, but as active players in the action, turning architecture into a stage that amplifies the music's message.

In the last few years, brutalist architecture has been the hip choice for music videos. Built primarily between the 1950s and the 1970s, brutalist buildings are marked by hardscaped concrete finishes, sheer scale, and dramatic geometric forms. First intended to convey social progress and public intent, they later became synonymous with urban dislocation and decay. This layered history makes them powerful visual tools: hip-hop and grime artists use them to express strength, struggle, and resistance, while pop and electronic musicians use their starkness to create surreal, cinematic contrasts. Brutalism has moved beyond architecture—it has become a cultural symbol, shaping how music videos look and feel as much as the music itself.

“Architecture must first of all be useful. If I had the choice between something neutral and useful and something that is novel or beautiful but useless, I prefer the first.”

– Marcel Breuer

Bad Bunny's latest single NUEVAYoL carries on this dialogue between music and architecture to previously unachieved levels. The video establishes a colorful quinceañera within one of the less well-known Brutalist monuments of New York City: Marcel Breuer's Meister Hall. The ribbed concrete walls, the overhanging cantilevers, the heavy, monolithic bulk of the structure are made over into an unexpected but cinematic backdrop, their brutal ugliness counterposed to the cheerful, party-happy atmosphere of celebration.

NUEVAYoL, Bad Bunny | image via YouTube

The art direction takes back the Statue of Liberty from its recent far-right co-opting and reimagines Brutalism as bold and desirable. This comes at a moment when federal policy pushes for “beautiful civic architecture”—a phrase widely criticized as a coded, exclusionary ideal—and when many Brutalist landmarks by Breuer and his peers face demolition or neglect.

Meister Hall, completed in the early 1970s, demonstrates Breuer's classic Brutalism style: solid, functional forms realized in exposed concrete, with structural elements as sculptural forms. Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian-born architect and Bauhaus graduate, was known for taking modernism in new directions after World War II. Originated in such ventures as Whitney Museum of American Art (now the Met Breuer) and St. John's Abbey Church, Breuer's buildings prized material honesty and monumentality, at times appearing less real buildings than abstract sculpture.

By situating a quinceañera—a ritual tied to community, family, and identity—within Meister Hall, NUEVAYoL reinterprets Breuer’s vision. The video uses the building not just as a backdrop but as a character: its heavy forms juxtapose with a moment of personal transformation, celebration, and cultural heritage, visually tying urban history to contemporary Latin music.

Metronomy’s Month of Sundays, directed by Callum Cooper, transforms London’s Barbican Estate into a dizzying architectural dreamscape. The camera spins and spins, creating a kaleidoscopic vision of the Barbican's typical shapes—its concrete walls exposed to the air, walkways suspended in mid-air, and swooping, curving staircases. The band members are small in this gigantic setting, their movements punctuating the building's gigantic scale and geometric pulse.

"The actual form of this video is an extension of a sculpture and video work that I was commissioned to make for the Map Making Exhibition, which was presented at the Barbican in 2012,"

– Callum Cooper

The Barbican Estate, designed in the 1950s by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon and officially opened in 1982, is Britain's most ambitious example of post-war Brutalism. Built to regenerate a war-damaged area of London, it combined housing, arts facilities, and parks under a single, visionary vision of city living. Its chaotic concrete facades and theatrical lines were a symbol of optimism and modernity in their day, even if the fortressed layout of the estate caused controversy for decades.

Cooper's video recontextualizes that history, with reason to celebrate the Barbican's sculptural virtues but also amplifying the surreal mood of Metronomy's music. The whirring camera produces the sense of inconstancy in the viewer's look, translating into the urban environment disorientation of our era but also highlighting the harmony hidden within the dense Brutalist geometry. To that degree, the video doesn't simply use the Barbican as a backdrop—transposes the architecture into an active, quasi-musical figure in its own right.

"This exhibition was a response to the OMA/Progress exhibition and the work was presented concurrently. The OMA exhibition was really my first step into thinking about architectural philosophies and concepts."

– Callum Cooper

In Jalousie, Belgian pop singer Angèle brings to life Oscar Niemeyer's 1971 Old French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris as a dreamlike space for motion and reflection. A relic of late modernism, the building is marked by sweeping, sinuous lines, circular corridors, and opulent but confining spaces. The video navigates the spaces like a choreographed fantasy, highlighting Niemeyer's space-age design vocabulary and its sensual, organic geometry.

Jalousie, Angèle | image via YouTube

“I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man.”

– Oscar Niemeyer

The building's most theatrical feature—the domed subterranean assembly chamber, a gleaming, white void that seems to hang outside of time itself—is the visual centerpiece of Angèle's performance. Midual gestures here echo the song's repetition of duplicity in emotions and self-reflection, taking Niemeyer's democratic idealism and turning it into an intimate, pop-infused rendering.

Image via Espace Niemeyer

Its fluid, sinuous surfaces and avoidance of rigid, hierarchical forms embodied his belief in openness and communal sharing. In Jalousie, these ideals are subordinated again with a pop aesthetic: once political architecture as location for individual narrative and latter performance, illustrating how musical space can newly symbolize in music videos.

Kendrick Lamar's N95, released in the pandemic, uses architecture as metaphor and ground to explore power, alienation, and moral posturing. The video moves through a series of effective modernist spaces in Texas, in which materiality and angular lines echo the song's commentary on exposure and cleansing in an ambiguous setting.

N95, Kendrick Lamar | image via YouTube

A key backdrop is the Fort Worth Water Gardens, a Brutalist landscape designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee in 1974. Its stepped concrete planes and rushing water constitute an immersive setting where Lamar's descent is made to feel ritualistic—a sort of cinematic baptism. Here, the interplay between hard concrete forms and fluid water becomes a visual metaphor for vulnerability meeting resilience, mirroring the song’s emotional register.

“In the design of the Active Pool, Johnson intended a sensation he described as “pseudo‑danger,” immersing visitors in an experience that is at once disorienting and exhilarating.”

In deliberate contrast, Lamar is also shown at the Renzo Piano Pavilion, an airy, light-filled extension to Louis Kahn’s 1970s Kimbell Art Museum. Surrounded by glass, wood, steel, and natural light, Lamar appears silhouetted at a grand piano, a moment of quiet reflection that tempers the Water Gardens’ monumental severity. By positioning these two spaces against one another—one elemental and rough, the other refined and introspective—the video uses modernist architecture as more than mere aesthetic backdrop but as an instrument of narrative. These are spaces that pose questions about what is lasting, what is performed, and what it means to be cleansed of the "mask" of virtue in a post-pandemic era.

In the video for The Chemical Brothers' Go, director Michel Gondry captures Paris' Front-de-Seine quarter and transforms it into a rhythmically surreal stage. Seven women, each carrying two poles over their shoulders, march in exactly choreographed unity, their steps echoing the repeated geometries of the surrounding buildings.

Go, The Chemical Brothers | image via YouTube

The Front-de-Seine quarter, in Paris' 15th arrondissement, is among the city's strongest post-war expressions of Brutalist urbanism. Built in the late 1960s and refined over the early 1970s, the complex aimed to completely transform a pre-existing factory and warehouse area along the Seine into an icon of modern-day living. Instead of the traditional Haussmannian blocks, the master plan introduced a galaxy of 20 high-rise skyscrapers, each nearly 100 meters tall, built primarily by architects Henri Pottier and Raymond Jules Lopez.

At the district's heart is a elevated pedestrian plane—a sleek concrete surface raised above street level, segregating pedestrians from automobiles and creating a unique, multi-level urban environment. Perforated by a chain of angular geometric designs and plazas, the platform is a vision of future public space that captured the age's fascination with technology and new forms of urban life.

The towers themselves take Brutalism's raw materiality and modular form, with concrete facades broken up by repetitive grids of windows and insistent vertical lines. Aerially, the overall composition reveals a consciously choreographed urban ballet: high-rise slabs and cylinders ascending over open voids, greenery, and linear corridors, presenting an image of vertical density that exploded unequivocally from the low-rise, historic core of central Paris.

“People who know Michel Gondry say he prefers working with real, tangible spaces you can physically interact with. Brutalist architecture, with its raw concrete and bold, sculptural forms, offers a kind of honest physicality that he believes digital effects simply can’t capture.”

Gondry's clip does not simply use these buildings as backdrop. The dance itself echoes the repetition and structure of the architecture, as if human motion is being folded into the rhythm of the built world. That visual dialogue intensifies the track's pulsating energy and situates Brutalist architecture not just as static backdrop but as an active participant in the video's energy and storytelling.

Brutalist architecture's raw, monumental forms have been provided with a new voice within music videos, being recontextualized from formerly shamed urban blight to powerful signifiers of identity, resistance, and emotion. As directors such as Michel Gondry and artists such as Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar continue to appropriate these concrete environments, they challenge us to reconsider the way that space orders narrative and emotion in our contemporary culture.

But as the city advances and architectural taste evolves, one might wonder: In an era that is becoming ever more dominated by the virtual fake, can the unvarnished rawness of Brutalism—and its application in storytelling—live on, or will it prove to be another fossil of times past?

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Words: Simone Lorusso