Architecton and on and on
A new documentary, some new online events, and some more Couch to 100k non-fiction writing tips
It seems 2025 is the year of movies made for people like me: someone into modernist architecture, and how that relates to the big questions of our existence. Coming up, The Brutalist, which I am thoroughly looking forward to immersing myself in, all 3 hours 35 minutes of it. Until then, there’s Architecton, a documentary by Russian filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky, which arrives garlanded with nominations from numerous festivals.
The film itself is an impressionistic work, opening at a ruined modern town hit by some kind of catastrophe that has left gaping holes in some buildings, collapsed walls, gutted roofs, fallen masonry at random throughout the landscape. This unnamed place is in fact Turkey, where an earthquake has razed vast areas of housing. Mixed with this are shots of the ancient ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon being slowly excavated. We fly through these ruins with beautiful and alarming cinematography by Ben Bernhard, while Evgueni Galperine’s portentous music leaves us in no doubt of the gravity of all of this devastation. Soon we are watching rocks being detonated from quarry walls, and it comes clear that we are in Koyaanisqatsi territory, Godfrey Reggio’s astonishing 1982 film examining life out of balance through a sequence of accelerating montages of modern ruins, bustling cities, natural landscapes and human activity.
But suddenly, in Architecton, we are taken away from this kind of montage and transported instead to the tranquil grounds of a huge picturesque villa overlooking a lake, home of Italian architect and designer Michele De Lucchi, where he’s supervising the construction of a stone circle in his garden. These sequences are quite funny, the architect standing about being all soulful while a couple of workmen struggle to arrange stones just as he would like, nodding and acquiescing to his every whim, none of which is explained to us until the end of the film. As such, it operates as unintended class comedy, less grand spiritual gesture and more Margo from The Good Life instructing some ‘little men’ to erect a gazebo.
The film culminates in a jarring in-conversation sequence between director and architect. They begin by discussing all the waste that goes into creating concrete, bricks, cement, those epic quarry shots thrown into relief, and which is of course a powerful point. Yet, as a complete non-sequitur, the director quickly hones in on the real issue here. Why don’t we make beautiful buildings any more? And suddenly the whole film crumbles away before your eyes. All of that effort and portent comes to this: not what could we do to address the climate crisis, or how do we protect a city against catastrophic disasters, but why aren’t nice things pretty? The architect tells us how ashamed he is his practice is working on a skyscraper. Not so ashamed, it seems, that he should abandon the expensive lifestyle his work has afforded him, one that allows him to create follies in his enormous garden. His lofty position allows him to engage in some epic hand-wringing, as if he is a whistleblower and not one of the establishment figures responsible for this situation.
There is also a strange and arbitrary conflation of a city devastated by earthquakes with a notion that modern buildings are not built to last. If there was a point here, it remains unexplored. Where did we all go wrong seems to be the question these two privileged men want answering. And by all, they mean us, not them. Sorry for our need for homes and other such fripperies, it made me want to heckle. But here, like the workers on that stone circle, we are all just clueless little helpers waiting for our next instruction, for the next gnomic spiritual insight to be handed down to us.
Ultimately it feels like much of the internet. You’re pulled in with enthralling glimpses of powerful messages and intriguing imagery, which your brain attempts to assemble in a way to make it seem intelligent and interesting, compassionate even. Only for later it to be revealed that this has all been in the service of an ideal of such breathtaking naivety and dopeyness you wonder how it has managed to find its way this far into the world. I wasn’t just disappointed at the end of Architecton, though that was a feeling that weighed on me. I was astonished. It takes a lot of people to make a film like this, to fund and organise it, to fly to different locations to film it, to cheerlead and distribute it around the world. How had no-one noticed how vapid and muddled its message was? It tries to make a stab at saying what an enormous waste of time and energy and resources goes into the construction of a building. By the end I felt the same for the production of a blockbusting cinematic documentary film. Go along and enjoy the experience of the awesome cinematography and music, but prepare to feel like Dorothy when face to face with the Wizard. Or do yourself a favour and watch an old DVD of Koyaanisqatsi instead, and marvel at how remarkably moving, profound and beautifully frightening that film remains four decades on.
So I ended the last year by launching a podcast, Monstrosities Mon Amour, with two episodes: Mike Althorpe on Corby Bus Station and Helen Barrett on post-war Swindon. Thank you so much to everyone who’s listened and subscribed, I really appreciate it. And I started this year with a book quiz for Faber, which you can do here and berate me at your leisure.
I now have a couple of online events coming up. Firstly, ‘This Must be the Place’ – an in-conversation with Simon Phipps, photographer of modernist structures known for books such as Brutal London, Brutal Wales (to which I contributed an essay) and Brutal North. We’re doing an online slideshow of some of his favourite images and talking about the buildings, how he gets the photos and gains access, and the strange legacy of post-war architecture. He’s great conversation so it should be good value. Last year I did a chat with Owen Hatherley, also for Milton Keynes Literary Festival, and this promises to be just as much fun.
The second is ‘Mighty Real: The Joys and Reality of Writing Non-Fiction’ – a lunchtime in-conversation between me and literary agent Anna Pallai, hosted by Kelly Edgson-Wright for Byte the Book. If you’ve been enjoying my Couch to 100k series on non-fiction writing this might be of interest. We hope to cover how to get started, whether to write to the market or to your heart; the unique challenges (and joys) of writing non-fiction; and submitting to agents, working with publishers and promoting your book. It’s free to members of Byte the Book.
Tips for non-fiction writers #4
Will 2025 be the year you kick off that big writing project in earnest? Let’s hope so.
A big concern at the start of any project, no matter how many you’ve done, is how much should you plan? And the issue here is whether you are thinking big or small, macro or micro. To some extent it’s hard to imagine starting small, ‘taking a line for a walk’ and ending up with a book because of it, but that’s kind of what happens. And that’s because both the process of thinking and planning, and the act of writing itself are all experiments in generating something from nothing. Planning is more about how much of a safety net do you need, how much will having a plan enable you to envisage a whole book, versus how far would you get without that. I always plan, but not so extensively as to kick the joy out of what I’m doing, of stifling inventiveness as I go along.
So I’d say, set yourself manageable tasks and goals. It’s hard to write a book by thinking of the whole. Instead, can you break it down into manageable units? Chapters. Sections. One thing to remember is that your plan should not remain fixed: in the process of writing and researching it should keep developing. Your conclusions might change, your insights develop, and that should keep making it evolve. In fact, if they don’t, it suggests something may have gone wrong in the writing process. The plan should not throttle the development or creativity of your thought process. Your plan needs to remain flexible. After all, every sentence you write is a fresh connection, part of a developing idea. It’s an organic process, not the deadening algorithm of AI.
Planning chapters helps you know there’s enough to say in each. Also, planning means you don’t have to write your book in order, it releases you to be able to move about as the ideas and mood takes you.
EXERCISE: Breaking an idea down. So, let’s take a headline idea/topic from your project, one of the big themes, something that you’re imagining will be central to the finished book. Now imagine trying to explain that to someone who knows nothing about the subject, a family member or old friend. List ten things you’d need to tell them to establish what this idea is. The history, perhaps, or the people connected to the idea. The way it has changed over time, or the way it’s thought of today. How it connects to other subjects or our/other people’s day to day lives. How it has influenced ideas or the world beyond its boundaries. Places it has cropped up in wider culture. Depending on your headline idea, you should be able to think of appropriate elements to list out. These strands can help you break down a big idea into smaller units, and to see them differently from what may well be an expert perspective. And that can help you plan for what your book might need to say, to support your writing as you go along.