Architecture takes Hollywood

The ruins of the Temple of Baalbek, Lebanon, as depicted in Architecton

With Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic film The Brutalist earning 10 Oscar nominations, buildings (and the people that design, build and commission them) are having a moment in the spotlight. It’s not just Hollywood that’s considering the role architecture plays in our lives: Architecton, the latest documentary from award-winning director Victor Kossakovsky, also shines a light on the topic. Premiering at the renowned Berlinale last year and out in cinemas now, this 98-minute film even goes one step further than The Brutalist, looking at the materials we use to construct buildings as well as the people that do so.

Through a series of powerful, visually arresting shots of locations across the world – from ancient relics in Lebanon, to the devasting impact of the 2023 earthquake on buildings in Turkey, via a quarry in the Italian Alps – the film puts modern materials like concrete under the microscope. Interspersed between these visuals, we watch the Italian architect Michele de Lucchi enlist a group of stonemasons to construct a small stone circle in his back garden. It’s a much smaller project than anything else on display in the film, but it serves a purpose – once built, no one can go inside the stones, in order to protect the grass they encircle.

As the circle is built, de Lucchi wonders out loud about the impact of his own designs on the cities they are constructed in, weighing up the concrete used for these buildings against the stone used by our ancestors. In examining how concrete is made, and how long it exists for, the film ultimately asks a question that many of us in our industry have been considering for some time: how can we build better, and build for longer?

Businesses right across the built world are committing vast amounts of research, resource and capital to find sustainable solutions to this question. Finding these solutions is something that is spoken about everywhere in our industry, from conferences to planning meetings, but this doesn’t always cut through to an audience outside of our world. And as we know all too well, if we are to make a long-lasting impact, we also need to galvanise more people to think differently about the world they live in and the part they could play in creating and sustaining it.

Seeing this film play to a packed-out cinema in central London, with reviews in major culture outlets like The Guardian, BFI and Variety, there’s a feeling that perhaps the tide is turning. Phrases like "embodied carbon" and "asset obsolescence" may mean a lot to those of us in the built world, but to anyone outside of it they can feel jargonistic, meaning the urgency of the message can get lost. That’s the communications opportunity for the built world, and it’s one that this film really seized.

Whether we’ll continue to see architecture and construction on the silver screen or not, it’s clear that it is no longer just those of us in our sector who are trying to think differently about the way we build. So although the film itself merely posed the question, leaving the audience to think for themselves about what the answer might be, it’s certainly a good thing for our sector. The more people see the extensive thinking that must go into building, the more they might be inspired to join this industry and work together to find creative ways to build better.