ARCHITECTON
Director: Victor Kossakovsky Distributor: A24 Year: 2024
"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?" - Victor Kossakovsky, BFI Interview
