A few years ago, filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky made the beautifully photographed and extraordinary Gunda, a documentary about the lives of farm animals that has stuck with me since I first saw it. Perhaps slightly less tragic, but no less compelling, he’s following that work with Architecton, a hypnotic and lyrical look at the primary materials that make up modern-day habitats: concrete and stone, the latter of which he considers the great ancestor of the former.
We look at various structures of these materials, both ancient and more modern, in various stages of decay and destruction from different vantage points and in a variety of contexts. It all gives us a more complete sense of how architecture is capable of making some of the most beautiful and some of the ugliest buildings out of the same materials. We see Roman ruins in Lebanon while a man moves through its immensity with a wheelbarrow collecting who knows what. In another sequence, construction and demolition equipment moves slowly through block after block of bombed-out apartment buildings in Ukraine. An elderly Italian architect makes a relatively small garden in his yard in the shape of a small stone circle, along with a pair of patient landscapers forced to work in the worst weather conditions until it's finished.
This architect asks most of the questions we’re meant to consider about where tomorrow will take us in terms of the legacy of buildings—things that were once designed to last thousands of years, whereas today people build structures that last only 40-50 years. He’s not just confused by the trends; he’s genuinely troubled by it. Kossakovsky juxtaposes long, slow-motion aerial shots of acres of land with more intimate, up-close shots of people constructing and deconstructing with painstaking attention to detail. There are moments that feel like they’re in black-and-white that might just have looked that way because the landscape was so chillingly colorless.
The film may not have the emotional resonance of a work that shows baby farm animals being separated from their mother, but for those concerned about where the world is headed in the long run, Architecton should provide plenty of anxiety fuel to last you a few years.
The film is now playing theatrically at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
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