“We live in the age of cement and sugar”: Victor Kossakovsky on Architecton, his gargantuan vision of rock and ruin

Man assails mountains in Victor Kossakovsky’s latest geology symphony, a film that makes majestic, mysterious cinema from the turbulent dance between humanity and the rock beneath our feet. Where 2011’s ¡Vivan la Antipodas! straddled opposite ends of the earth and its habitats, and 2018’s Aquarela showed the weight of water under planetary pressure (Kossakovsky then had a more intimate hit with 2020’s farm-life fable Gunda), Architecton etches the movements of stone, and our attempts to master it, on multiple time scales.

Deploying dazzling drone shots, slow motion and high frame rates, Kossakovsky and his director of photography Ben Bernhard scope the ancient Baalbek megaliths in Lebanon and modern-day mining and cement processing, earthquake-felled cities in Turkey and war-torn tower blocks in Ukraine. There are Ozymandias-like scenes of empty concrete cathedrals and a sci-fi desert shot straight out of Dune; the architect Michele de Lucchi’s construction of a symbolic reworking circle in his Lombardy garden offers a change of scale. 

Edited to Evgueni Galperine’s resonant, reverberant treated-instrument score, it’s a virtuosic vision of construction and ruin, human power and folly, and a call to new architectural ways of seeing.

The film is remarkably cinematic – images and sounds first and very few words. How did you articulate what you were making?

Victor Kossakovsky: I’m from St Petersburg, where there are many buildings and monuments you couldn’t build today – the Alexandrovski column, for example, 600 tons and perfectly symmetrical, which stays in place without any support. I don’t really get how it was possible. With all our technology, we can’t do that now.

Then I began travelling, searching for understanding. In Turkey, there are 700 amphitheatres in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, not listed in any architectural or history books, with 5,000 to 25,000 seats cut from stone. Can you imagine 700 theatres in one country today? Not football stadiums!

Look at Plato, with Socrates talking about reading Homer’s Iliad to 30,000 people at a theatre. Not football, not pop stars. There must be something we are missing.

There are pyramids in four continents, not only Egypt, made with the same polygonal walls. We used to have common knowledge; people could cut stone like we do paper, and put it together in any configuration.

Look at the Baalbek monument in Lebanon. The heaviest stone in Rome is 60 tons. The Baalbek rocks are 900, 1,000, 1,600 tons. Today no one can lift it, let alone cut it with the precision they did. They say slaves made it: absolutely wrong. Only masters could do it.

All that is sustainable architecture. You build it once, it’s for ever; we don’t need to pay again. Today people say it’s easier to build fast from cement, and cheaper: for who? For our grandchildren it’s expensive, because they will destroy it and build something new. Roman cement lasts 1,000 years. Modern cement doesn’t last 100. In Britain you demolish 50,000 buildings a year, and their average age is 40 years. Even a bus runs longer.

And when you build fast you don’t have an emotional connection or responsibility. What does it matter what it looks like? It looks horrible, we have no emotional connection. We cannot measure the emotional depression of boring architecture, of boxes copied and pasted everywhere – but, psychologically, it’s worse than cancer. If we find a substitute for cement and stop building irresponsible, boring architecture, in my opinion life will be 10 years’ longer.

We live in the age of cement and sugar. Sugar in every food, cement in every building. Already, just the production of cement causes 18.5% of CO₂ emissions. And we need to build a Manhattan-sized city every month for the 2 billion extra people on the planet by 2050. How? From cement?

It sounds like you conducted a kind of casting call for architects. Michele de Lucchi was the only one who passed?

I originally wanted to film in the UK – I was sure I had some great characters – but it turned out much more difficult for visa reasons and the pandemic.

But I believe I made the right decision, because I cannot believe any of the great British architects would have allowed me to do what I did with Michele. There are many architects in the UK who articulate beautifully, who have ideas, but in cinema a character must also be interesting when he doesn’t speak. Silence is another quality, right? Michele looks like a prophet, even if you only see his back.

I brought him to Baalbek, to the back of this 1,000-ton megalith, with his eyes closed and my camera was behind him when he opened his eyes. Even from there, and before he saw it was 20 metres long, he was shocked, because he knows that humans today cannot build this. And he started to cry.

He was the only architect I spoke to who answered my question: what would you put in the centre of a new city if you could build anything? European cities used to have the same concept: a cathedral, for a few centuries. [Barcelona’s] Sagrada Familia is probably the last of those. No one had any idea. Offices – who needs them now? A library? Shopping centre? Fitness centre? Plastic surgery? No one could see a future.

Only Michele had an answer. He said: why not give it to nature? Not a park, just nature, so we remember we are not alone. It was so simple and idealistic. Everybody knows the Dostoevsky quote ‘beauty will save the world’. But in the same book there is a much better one. The main character says: I don’t understand how you can be unhappy if you can go out and see a tree.

Michele was also the only one of all the biggest architects on the planet I spoke to who said: I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed I built a skyscraper in the middle of Milan. All the rest were so proud.

How did you talk with Ben Bernhard, your cinematographer, about your toolkit and shot choices?

I love to talk about Ben. I used to do camera myself for almost all my films, before I found him as a focus boy, and started to delegate the job to him. I’m happy that now he’s working at a different size and scale.

We decided we wanted to make images similar to [those of the Italian archaeologist, architect and artist Giovanni Battista] Piranesi, who made drawings of ruins about 300 years ago, which were so precise and graphic, almost like a photographer, very black and white, that no one believed them. I decided to find those sites, but we also looked for camera filters to achieve the same high contrast images.

Second, we varied the film speeds to show that time is relative. The life of a mosquito is just one day, but it can probably write [its equivalent of] War and Peace in its time. And our life is very short compared to the life of a rock. So we decided to show that rocks could be alive – they can dance, for instance.

Our idea was the last minute in the life of a rock. We see mountains and a blast, which looks like the creation of the universe. Then we see the rocks approaching the 1,400C fire like Dante’s gate of Hell.

Did you find any parallels between architecture and cinema?

Yes! I was building the film like a multi-storey building. You’re on one floor, you see one floor; the next, you see something else. You go higher and see different horizons.

The relationship between film and architecture is interesting. In architecture, you start from the outside and first see the shape of the building, then move to the details, the interior, and the views from the windows. A film is different: you start with details and only see the shape at the end.

I always believe that to make a film you have to know 10 times more about the subject – you see the tip, but the understanding is 10 times bigger below the surface.

When I started the film, I was naive. I thought it could be a comedy, following a talented British architect’s artistic idea becoming real: drawing something nice, how much you lose, how much it changes. I thought it would be a tragedy as much as a comedy, but when I started to think about the film I realised it is a tragedy, but much deeper; and not a comedy at all, unfortunately.

Did you look at any other films about architecture?

This year? People are talking about [Brady Corbet’s] The Brutalist, but personally, I support the Coppola [Megalopolis].

I understand when people see Architecton, they are shocked and don’t know what it’s about. They’re not inside this movie. You need to perceive it and maybe read, think a little; then you know the scale of the catastrophe. Megalopolis is surprising for people too.

There are not many filmmakers who can surprise today, right? We know the patterns. You see a name and can imagine what he’ll be doing. But new ideas? Not many filmmakers on the planet can do it. People need time to get [Megalopolis], and people will get it.

Why did you choose Evgueni Galperine to score the film? Was his Russian-Ukrainian background important?

That’s simple. I was looking for him for many years, because he was making scores for good filmmakers [Andrey Zvyagintsev, Asghar Farhadi, Barry Levinson]. Then I found his album [2022’s Theory of Becoming]. For the film he only wrote the final pieces for the credits; most of the music was written before.

Unfortunately for documentary filmmaking, we have a problem. Big composers, we are not able to pay. There are five composers in the UK I’d love to work with, but they say if you have a million [pounds/dollars], we can talk. I don’t have a million. To work with a really big composer who can bring something to your film, it’s impossible.

Do you feel you’re working at a different scale now?

I think I realised what my goal is. Everyone talks about humans. All our literature, all our films, they’re about ourselves. For me, after Dostoevsky, after Dickens, Gogol, Flaubert, I guess we’ve written everything about ourselves. We know about what is human. Humans are nice, beautiful, good, aggressive, ugly animals who can kill. And our main activity is to kill: one billion pigs a year, 60 billion chickens, two trillion fish. We destroy mountains and don’t care.

But there is more besides humans which we don’t understand. Until we understand that we are not the only ones who matter, we will keep on killing and destroying. The future is to think that the life of others who live on this planet is also important, not only our lives.

Architecton is in cinemas from 10 January 2025