In ‘Architecton’, Russian documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky spans a wide arc from building to the stability and aesthetics of life. His witness is the architect and designer Michele De Lucchi.
Stone circles and arches, quarries and temples. Breathtaking images of nature remind us of the life cycle of stone. It begins in nature and ends in the landfill. While modern buildings collapse due to wars and natural disasters, ancient ruins in the remotest corners of the world remind us of a stability and aesthetics of life that seems lost. For Russian documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky, architecture is much more than the design of buildings. For him, it is ‘a spatial art that determines the scope of our actions, our politics, our being’.
For Kossakovsky, the architect Michele De Lucchi is an idealist in his profession. In his buildings he manifests ‘an indestructible faith in the goodness of man’, but is forced to design artless skyscrapers. Today’s concrete architecture is not only ugly and polluting, it is also extremely short-lived. On average, it lasts no more than 40 years. In this way, the documentary filmmaker portrays ‘a disillusioned representative of our time and his attempt to defy man’s ruthless war against nature’. Kossakovsky asks what people of a future civilisation will find of our time. He condenses possible answers into a visual cinematic experience that, according to the announcement, ‘allows us to feel the fragile structures of the world at close quarters’. Everything revolves around ‘the dream of sustainable architecture and the search for a new understanding of beauty that can show us a way out of this labyrinth of concrete’.
The director found the title of the film – ‘Architecton’ – in Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’: At the end of the book, the main character looks up to the sky and says: ‘Great Architect of Nature, please help me get out of this labyrinth of lies. According to Kossakovsky, when many architects are working on a project, the head of the architects is called ‘Architecton’. In other words, he is the architect of architects. But the term is also used for someone who ‘creates this universe’. Not God, but the ‘Architecton’ of the universe.
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