Wait, has A24 gone TradArch?

The Manhattan offices of the film studio A24 occupy several floors of a slender concrete office tower, at 31^st and Broadway, that was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 2019. That’s another way of saying that the irony hung thick inside the small screening room, tucked away on the ninth floor of that building, where I watched “Architecton,” financed and distributed by A24 and its first foray into architecture, earlier this week.

The movie, the kind of film for which the phrase “a meditation” might have been invented, is a nearly wordless documentary that sets the eternal appeal of classical architecture against the expediency of the 21st-century variety, especially where the wasteful use of concrete is concerned.

Did I say nearly wordless? It’s also nearly peopleless. There’s an ant in “Architecton,” marching deliberately across a block of stone, that gets more screen time than all but a half-dozen human beings; the same is true for the tortoise that shows up later. This is no surprise in a picture whose overarching message is that the only time people take a break from destroying the planet is when we are busy destroying one another.

The writer and director, the Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky, remarks in the press notes that “Tolstoy said at the end of his life that the next step for humanity should be to accept that we are not the only life that exists.” This acceptance plays out in “Architecton” in exquisite and relentless fashion. (The title, a word meaning “master builder,” more or less, is another nod to Tolstoy, lifted from a line in “War and Peace”; Malevich also used it to describe some of his sculptures.) Ben Bernard’s cinematography, propelled by Evgueni Galperine’s sometimes jittery and more often ominous score, moves us from extended closeup sequences of falling and crumbling rock to drone shots of Greek temple ruins and Turkish earthquake damage and on to eastern Lebanon, to see some of the biggest pieces of stone ever quarried. Kossakovsky shoots those limestone behemoths as if he can never quite squeeze them into frame.

Interspersed with those scenes is a separate narrative, a fable of sorts, in which heavily bearded Italian architect Michele De Lucchi, a Memphis veteran, is shown supervising the addition of a circle of rocks, maybe twenty feet across, to his own garden, a project that’s executed by two stonemasons as a light snow begins to fall. The circle, once complete, becomes a space that people, per De Lucchi’s dictate, aren’t allowed to enter—only his dog, Ugo, and other animals and insects.

Later scenes show it thick with tall grasses even as the lawn around it is trimmed by robot mowers, Roombas for the outdoors. The suggestion is that after a career of making structures for people that despoil nature, the architect has performed a kind of penance, carving out room for the planet to reestablish itself without our ruinous touch. This self-flagellating spirit may also explain why he chooses to install the rock circle on a raw and frigid day, a fact the stonemasons bear with remarkable equanimity.

If the architect and the director had left it there, with the last rock clinking heavily into place as the credits began to roll, and the men heading inside for a much-deserved drink by the fire, the film could have maintained its considerable mystery. It might have stuck in my head as a sort of runic experiment, short on self-awareness, sure, but majestic and even mesmeric in its way—a work of cinema proudly opaque if not impenetrable, like the stone monoliths it celebrates, and in conversation with everything from the Land Art movement to the writing of John McPhee and the saccharine globetrotting film, “Postcard from Earth,” that Darren Aronofsky made for the opening of the Sphere in Las Vegas. Instead Kossakovsky tacks on an epilogue in which he appears in De Lucchi’s garden on a sunnier day, leaning against a tree next to the sacred ring while the two men talk gravely about Where Architecture Went Wrong.

“Why do we build ugly, boring buildings,” the director asks, “if we know how to build beautiful ones?”

This argument, phrased just this way, will be familiar to anyone who’s read President Trump’s 2020 Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture (“Greek and Roman public buildings were designed to be sturdy and useful, and also to beautify public spaces and inspire civic pride”) or scrolled a TradArch message board. It arrives like a record scratch, turning what had been a ruminative film into a didactic one. 

De Lucchi, answering the director as one would a priest, admits he’s “ashamed” of a new concrete skyscraper he’s recently designed, worried that it will be “just another box in the center of Milan.” But we can’t tell if the architect’s regret has mostly to do with the tower’s carbon footprint, its ugliness, or its disposability. (To extend the confessional metaphor, these are three different sins.) His willingness to prostrate himself seems to appeal greatly to Kossakovsky—the director has said that all of the architects he interviewed in preparing the film, De Lucchi was “the only one with humility”—but it turns to the film’s larger argument to mush.

The idea that an architecture of concrete is dubious on climate grounds is hard to dispute. The notion that it’s equally suspect for bringing eyesores into the world, in great contrast to the timeless stone beauties we used to build, when we knew better, is dependent on a different logic, one that suggests Kossakovsky is better versed in neo-trad rhetoric than in the particulars of contemporary architecture, to say nothing of the wide range, from the soul-crushing to the sublime, of recent concrete buildings.

“Architecton” is at first blush nothing at all like last year’s “The Brutalist.” The first hates concrete architecture and the second thrills to it. But the movies have two things in common: a taste for solemn (if often moving!) grandiosity and an understanding of 20th- and 21st-century architecture that turns out to be about an inch deep. “Architecton” seems happy, visually and otherwise, to conflate buildings destroyed by war or natural disaster with those blithely razed to make room for new construction. It also ignores all the ways that classical architecture was weirder and less conventionally beautiful—Joan Didion is very good on this in her essay on the original Getty Villa—as well as more exploitative, of people and to a lesser extent of planet, than those who rhapsodize about its eternal appeal tend to acknowledge.

To look at the classical ruins that have survived to the present day and assume that all Greek and Roman architecture was so stately and refined, and so hardy, is like going to a game at Dodger Stadium and concluding that every American arena built in the early 1960s was a masterpiece. Survivorship bias, I think it’s called.

Kossakovsky’s film, so strenuously emptied of people for so much of its running time, so aloof from an architecture of shelter or community as opposed to pure heft, has vanishingly little interest in the humanism that stands at the core of the more persuasive versions of neotraditionalist rhetoric. Instead it relies on an argument that is itself so easy, expedient, and endlessly malleable—things were so much more beautiful, so much better made, back then—that it might as well be the concrete of architectural complaint.

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