At the end of Architecton, director Viktor Kossakovsky and Michele De Lucchi, an Italian architect and the film’s wizard-esque docent, stand over the stone circle that De Lucchi built in his garden and have a conversation that feels like the capper of a different movie. “Why do we build ugly boring buildings if we know how to build beautiful ones?” Kossakovsky inquires of De Lucchi, who responds by sharing that his firm has been working on a skyscraper that he’s ashamed of and wishes they could step away from. “It’s just another box in the center of Milan — it’s not symbolic at all, it has no meaning. It’ll last for 40 to 50 years,” he says. “I hate concrete.” Before that moment, I hadn’t thought of Architecton as particularly on the side of the world’s most widely used building material. The film does depict concrete’s creation in mesmerizing industrial montages of cliffsides being demolished, rocks blossoming out in slow motion like galaxies forming, and debris dancing across a conveyor belt to be ground into particles. But the documentary’s gaze is equally aloof when surveying mountains, urban decay, the destruction of war, or ancient ruins. The idea that it was mounting a critique of modern aesthetics and wastefulness came as news to me.
It seems to have come as news to Kossakovsky as well. The Russian filmmaker is known for visually lush, narrator-less docs that exist in a political context without feeling the need to mount an explicit case. His dazzling 2018 Aquarela hopped continents to capture different angles on humanity’s relationship to water, with the effects of climate change overshadowing everything. His 2020 Gunda, executive-produced by Joaquin Phoenix, made a quiet case for veganism simply by capturing in beautiful black-and-white the life and personality of a sow on a Norwegian farm. Architecton seems similarly intended to diminish humanity’s vision of itself as the entitled center of existence — aside from De Lucchi and the two men he hires for his garden project, the Dutch artist Nick Steur (who performs impossible balancing acts with stones) and Baalbek quarry site caretaker Abdul Nabi al-Afi, people are barely present at all. And yet the film opens with images of man-made destruction. A drone glides around crumbling Ukrainian apartment blocks that have been bombed by Russia, and cinematographer Ben Bernhard’s camera travels along the side of a building split open like a dollhouse to reveal abandoned kitchens, a sewing machine, a TV still sitting on a countertop.
The present protrudes like a rupture into Kossakovsky’s more general vision of architecture, which he began shooting before the invasion, then altered to include an acknowledgment. Architecton remains a stunning experience, balancing footage of the still-standing stone remnants of long-ago civilizations with present-day structures that have been abandoned or destroyed by the war or the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes. A stray dog clambers up stairs in a deserted village where plants and trees are reclaiming buildings, while pieces of millennia-old pillars lay scattered across a landscape like enormous gears from some giant machine with unknown function. A broken tower sits out in the woods, while an enormous oblong stone rests in the middle of a Roman quarry, the methods with which it was cut lost to time. Elsewhere, mountainsides are terraced like gigantic stairs by the harvesting of stone, a ceiling vent sits above a bulldozer at the top of an industrial hill like a halo, and a machine 3-D-prints out shapes with cement as though creating decorations with gray icing for an immense cake. The production of concrete consumes enormous resources to create structures that will never last as long as the ancient ones the film contrasts them with, but that’s not a context the impassive footage conveys.
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Instead, Architecton comes across as a more plaintive depiction of our desire to imagine ourselves able to leave a lasting mark on this planet. On those colossal slabs of rock in eastern Lebanon, one of which De Lucchi lays hands on like he could use it to commune with another era, a few more recent visitors have carved their names. Over the course of the movie, De Lucchi has his small stone circle constructed in the middle of the lawn outside his house, with the idea being to allow the interior to grow wild, like a portal, with no humans allowed to step foot inside (though his dog has permission). But, Kossakovsky asks, how will he know his attempt at a collaboration with nature will be maintained by his family after he’s gone? Kossakovsky loves to show people dwarfed in the frame, if he shows people at all, but his efforts at putting humanity in its place in this film end up undermining that final message about sustainability and building things that can last. Our lives are all so fleeting, on the scale of the earth, and are potentially cut even shorter by our conflicts with others. Architecton may want to show the ways in which we squander what we have to construct ugly structures not intended to stick around, but it ultimately emphasizes that all things will pass — including all of us.
