Architecture has always been entangled with power, with communities, with the ways people decide to live together and change the conditions of their daily lives. That understanding sits at the heart of Victor Kossakovsky’s new documentary Architecton. It is not simply a film about buildings or monuments. It is a meditation on what it means to shape space and time, and on how the materials we wrest from the earth end up shaping us in return. Near the end of the film, Kossakovsky appears on screen in conversation with the Italian architect Michele de Lucchi, who reflects that architecture is a way of thinking about life itself, and that every design choice quietly scripts how people will behave. It is a simple idea, but in Kossakovsky’s hands it carries tremendous weight, because for the previous stretch of the film he has been showing us, with grand patience and poetic clarity, how stone, metal, and concrete teach us who we are.
Architecton begins in a place of ruin. The first images hold the gaze on the hollowed remains of two apartment buildings in a Ukrainian city. The camera floats with a calm that feels almost mournful. Walls are torn open like flesh. Concrete sheets hang at strange angles. Rooms that once contained kitchens and bedrooms now spill their contents into open air. Black stains mark the places where explosions scorched the facades. There is no voiceover to tell us what we are looking at or how to feel about it. There is simply the stark truth of broken homes. From there, the film enlarges its view. We move outward to the earth itself, and then to the many places where human ambition meets the stubborn materials of the planet.
Kossakovsky’s recent films have been studies of fundamental forces. Aquarela from 2018 dwelled on water in all its changing states, finding beauty in its light and danger in its motion, while also acknowledging the way human activity unsettles glaciers and coasts. Gunda from 2020 stayed close to the daily lives of farm animals, especially a sow and her piglets, stripping away the usual narratives to let viewers encounter livestock as living, feeling beings. Architecton feels like the culmination of that line of inquiry. If water and animal life were the first two elements, the new film turns to the matter that humans turn into shelter and city. The result is a thunderous and contemplative portrait of the power that raw materials exert over our existence and the tumult that follows whenever we try to bend them to our will.
The film builds its language from patient, carefully composed images. Many shots are still, allowing forms to settle into your mind. There are extended aerial passages that drift and circle like birds, making quarries and mountains read as both natural structure and a kind of geometry. Sequences move in slow motion, not as an empty trick but as a way of seeing weight and force in more detail. Kossakovsky often works in a restricted palette that isolates contrast. In black and white, rock becomes a mass of light and shadow, and dust becomes a kind of weather. We watch as blocks are cut from the mountains and moved on enormous vehicles. We watch as walls collapse with the controlled fury of planned demolitions. We watch as workers guide slabs into place with tiny gestures that carry tremendous consequences. These actions are simple and astonishing at once. The transportation of a single stone can feel like a ritual, and the destruction of a structure can feel like an admission of our limits.
There is grandeur everywhere in the film, but never idle spectacle. Mountain ranges rise like ancient cathedrals built without a human hand. The camera travels through forests where trunks accumulate like columns, and light filters down through the canopy in pools and streaks. It peers into quarries cut deep and flat, where the earth looks like a book opened to a page with careful lines. It lingers on ruins where arches and pillars are both testament and warning. This sweep is global. Kossakovsky guides us to Italy’s Valley of the Temples, where traces of classical civilization rest on hills facing the sea. He looks at the modernist buildings of Nuova Gibellina, a town remade in the last century after a devastating earthquake, where the optimism of new forms strains against the present. He flies over the Eye of the Sahara, a vast circular formation that gives the illusion of design even though it belongs to geology and not to us. Everywhere the film goes, it searches for the border between what humans make and what the planet already is. That edge is not only a line in space. It is a question about time.
Words are rare in Architecton. The film trusts images, and it trusts music. The score by Evgueni Galperine gives shape to the weight of what we see. Galperine released the music separately in 2022 under the title Theory of Becoming, and it feels like a map of transformation. Strings gather and swell until they feel like weather pushing across a valley. Cymbals tremble at the edge of eruption. In the brass there is anxiety and grandeur, a clutch of alarms and a promise of muscles at work. The music often mirrors the actions on screen. When we see controlled charges sending clouds of soil outward in waves, the orchestra bursts and then recedes, the way sound does after a detonation. When we watch cranes lift and lower their loads, the themes rise and fall with the same purposeful rhythm. Music in this film is not mere accompaniment. It is the emotional register of gravity, mass, and the human urge to place a hand on both.
Even as the film transfixes us with beauty, it never lets us forget the price of making and unmaking. The sequence of ruined apartments is not unique. Later we see other sites marked by shock and loss. Earthquakes in Turkey rip open streets. The war in Ukraine leaves not only walls shattered but lives unsettled in ways the camera cannot directly show. In Austria, mining operations chew away at mountainsides, carving terraces that are orderly and violent at the same time. None of these images are presented with scolding. They are presented with a steadiness that asks us to look closely and decide what we see. Kossakovsky seems to trust his audience to understand that creation and destruction are twins in the story of architecture. We build to protect and to express, and we tear down to start again or to assert control. The planet answers, often indifferently. Weather erodes. Earth shifts. Metal rusts. Concrete cracks. And yet, in this back and forth, meaning accumulates.
This is one of the film’s most striking achievements. It shows how the most inert materials produce feeling. A mountain face, seen from a distance, might be only a form. Seen in a prolonged shot that tracks its strata and the talus at its base, it becomes memory. It becomes the record of pressures over ages and floods that came and went long before us. A slab of stone being set on a base might be only labor. But with attention, that act becomes an index of trust between people and an act of faith in a future that will use this building in ways we cannot fully predict. Kossakovsky’s camera does not hurry. It offers time like a gift. In that gift, we come to understand how the things we call lifeless can govern us. Roads guide our habits. Stairways choreograph our movement. The height of a window can make a room expansive or claustrophobic. When Michele de Lucchi speaks about architecture as a way of thinking about life, these images give his idea a body.
There is another reason the film lands with such force. For all its sophistication, it is not abstract. It is attuned to the politics of building without reducing architecture to a set of slogans. The opening devastation in Ukraine is not simply an example of war. It is a reminder that homes are where politics is most intimate. Destroying an apartment building is not only a military act, it is the tearing of social fabric, the scattering of families, the forcing of memories into new and unwanted shapes. Showing modernist structures in Nuova Gibellina is not simply a tour of a style. It is an opportunity to ask whether optimism can be housed in concrete, and whether the ideals of a moment can survive the long weather of time and change. The Eye of the Sahara is not simply a geological wonder. It is an image of scale that humbles human ambition. Against that ring, our stadiums and highways can look like toys.
Kossakovsky has long been drawn to images that are clear and large, but the clarity in Architecton works in service of humility. The visual grammar is clean because the world is already complicated enough. There is, moreover, a tenderness in the way workers are shown. They are not nameless figures moving in front of machines. They are people paying attention, coordinating, anticipating, sometimes failing, sometimes solving problems by feel. There is also a tenderness in the way ruined places are seen. Broken walls are not reduced to symbols. They are surfaces with texture, edges that once met other edges in careful joins. The film sees them as the remains of care. You can feel that Kossakovsky wants to remember what they were meant to shelter.
This sympathy is why the brief conversation between the director and de Lucchi near the end lands so hard. After all the images of careful design and accidental destruction, Kossakovsky asks why, if we know what beautiful buildings look like, we keep making ones that are dull and ugly. It is an honest question, and de Lucchi seems to struggle to give a satisfying answer. He speaks about constraints, about economics, about the difficulty of producing work that is both durable and alive to the present. Yet the question lingers because it is not only about looks. It is about what we choose to value. Beauty in this film is not ornament. It is the felt integrity between a place, its materials, and the people who will live with them. The modern world is full of shortcuts. Concrete poured fast, plans borrowed from elsewhere without thought, facades that hide weak ideas and cheaper decisions. To ask why we settle for so much mediocrity is to ask why we accept a poverty of imagination in the places where we spend our days.
If the film has an argument, it is that architecture should help us live in a way that honors both time and nature. To endure is not only to resist decay. It is to belong. The Valley of the Temples belongs because its columns carry both engineering and geometry, because it faces the sea as if it had always stood there and will always be there. The new buildings in Nuova Gibellina belong only if they continue to invite life, if their plazas and courtyards welcome gatherings that are not nostalgic but present tense. The quarries belong because, at their best, they admit their own violence and provide the materials with which cities can learn to be patient again. Even the sites of strip mining, seen without judgment, ask us to wonder how we might balance need and harm. The earthquakes in Turkey and the bombs in Ukraine remind us that no balance stays still forever. But the film suggests that to build in communion with nature is to accept that unpredictability and to design for it.
Kossakovsky’s way of looking makes this hope credible. You cannot watch the film without feeling the pull of deep time and the urge to create on a human scale that still respects it. The score by Galperine helps. Violins gather into a sound like wind that does not stop. Brass growls and then sings. Drums appear like footfalls from far away, or like the heartbeat of a machine. The music does not tell you what to think. It gives you courage to endure long looks at processes most of us usually ignore. We do not normally see a block of stone go from mountain to foundation pillar in such patient detail. We do not usually witness every step of the chain that leads from quarry to cathedral or from ruin to cleared lot to new frame. Watching those steps here turns what could be technical into something almost sacred.
That sense of the sacred does not come from religion. It comes from attention. Architecton pays attention to matter and to the choices we make when we engage it. It treats architecture as a verb rather than a noun, as a way of thinking and deciding rather than a collection of prestige objects. That stance matters at a time when headlines are full of crisis. The climate shifts. Conflicts burn. Cities struggle to house people with dignity. There is a temptation to treat buildings as either saviors or villains. Kossakovsky’s film resists that. It sees architecture as the arena where our values are tested. We cannot build our way out of everything. But how we build tells the truth about what we love and what we are willing to neglect.
By the end of the film, after the conversation with de Lucchi, the question about ugly buildings still hangs in the air. Perhaps that is the point. There is no single answer. There are only better questions, and then there are choices. Do we ask what a place needs? Do we ask how a wall gathers light in winter and breaks heat in summer? Do we ask how a public stair can invite strangers to pause together without fear? Do we ask how a roofline can recall the land while also sheltering the new forms of life that emerge in our time? Architecton does not preach. It imagines that if we looked with the same careful attention that Kossakovsky and his collaborators bring to their images, we might make different decisions.
The film returns, again and again, to the stubbornness of the physical world. Stone is heavy. Steel is strong but needs care. Concrete sets on its own clock. These qualities are not obstacles. They are teachers. They remind us that to build for the long term is to accept that we are part of a world that does not revolve around our wishes. In the film, slabs crack and are replaced. Hills erode. Human plans change. But there is a humility available in facing these facts. Architects and builders who work with the nature of things rather than against them can produce places that invite us into better habits. For the ordinary person, that might mean a window that brings morning light without glare, a bench that is there when you need to rest, a street that encourages walking rather than speeding. For a community, it might mean a plaza that makes gathering effortless, a school that gives children a sense that learning has a shape, a hospital that protects both vulnerability and dignity.
Architecton encourages these thoughts without laying out any manual. It succeeds because it is cinema before it is argument. The airborne shots are not just survey. They are dances made by machines in thin air. The static frames are not just careful. They are acts of respect. The slow motion is not indulgence. It is a method for seeing force in time. The score is not decoration. It is a conversation partner. In the collective presence of these elements, an ethic emerges. We are asked to consider what kind of makers we are, and what kind we want to be.
There is a long tradition of films that marvel at the built world and at the raw materials that make it possible. Architecton stands among them, but it feels singular because it refuses to separate beauty from responsibility. It finds images of overwhelming power in both ancient columns and in the cold geometry of open pit mines. It carries the grief of demolished homes and the thrill of a new wall rising in alignment with the sun. It hears in a single cymbal strike the echo of a blast and the shimmer of a new beginning. It is not a film made to solve anything. It is a film made to change how you see. After spending time inside it, you may find yourself looking differently at the nearest building. You may notice a seam where concrete meets stone and feel a new respect for the craft that brought them together. You may step onto a sidewalk and feel the city beneath your feet as a living assembly rather than a fixed backdrop. You may hear the question about ugly buildings and quietly make a different choice the next time your city votes on what to fund, or the next time your own home needs repair.
In the end, Kossakovsky gives us neither despair nor comfort. He gives us an invitation. Look closer, he seems to say. Watch how the world is undone and remade, how the earth yields and resists, how our best intentions falter and then find their way. Listen to the music of weight and motion. Remember that every building teaches a lesson, and that every lesson can be revised. Architecture will always be political because it will always be about what is possible for people who share space and time. The miracle is that beauty remains within reach. The responsibility is ours to make it with patience, with knowledge, and with care for the larger world that will outlast us.
