Architecton movie review (2025) | Little White Lies

Archi­tec­ton review – taps into the short-order nature of mod­ern construction

09 Jan 2025 / Released: 10 Jan 2025

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Victor Kossakovsky

Two people walking together in an ancient stone setting.
Two people walking together in an ancient stone setting.
4

Anticipation.

We had a good time with Kossakovsky’s 2020 piggy-themed doc, Gunda.

3

Enjoyment.

A little bit of screensaver energy to the visuals, but taps into the short-order nature of modern construction.

3

In Retrospect.

By the end of the film, its whole thesis feels a tad underwhelming.

Vik­tor Kos­sakovsky takes us on a jour­ney through the con­crete and stone that makes up much of our mod­ern world.

Peo­ple tend to have a sixth sense when they’re standin­gin­side a build­ing that they know is not very robust. And it’s a sense that is leaned upon more and more reg­u­lar­ly in a world where fast and cheap is the order of the day when it comes to urban plan­ning and con­struc­tion. Vic­tor Kossakovsky’s new, sen­su­al­ly-inclined doc­u­men­tary, Archi­tec­ton, takes aim at the mod­ern age’s fetish for all things con­crete and its embrace of the ephemer­al, but in a way that prefers to show rather than tell. His cam­era glides across the mighty edi­fices of stone mon­u­ments from the days of antiq­ui­ty, still stand­ing after cen­turies of wear and tear. These images are jux­ta­posed with con­crete mon­strosi­ties that tum­ble like match­stick sculp­tures at the light­est bruis­ing from the wreck­ing ball (or, more per­ti­nent­ly, long range ene­my missiles).

The Ital­ian archi­tect Michele De Luc­chi is on hand to expound on the­o­ries for such wide­spread archi­tec­tur­al degra­da­tion as he ignores the dri­ving rain to build a stone fol­ly in his back gar­den. The film’s the­sis is often a lit­tle obvi­ous, yearn­ing for a return to a brand of archi­tec­ture whose half-life isn’t so slim, but ignor­ing the ardu­ous and exploita­tive con­struc­tion meth­ods that were used to pro­duce those grandiose struc­tures of yore. Yet there’s much ASMR plea­sure to be gleaned from the ambi­ent long shots of machin­ery lay­er­ing up long, per­fect lines of con­crete for some upcom­ing blight on the landscape.

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