Has anybody in the film industry ever seen an architect in real life?

Over the past year, we’ve seen no fewer than two films built around the epic of the architect. One is The Brutalist, arguably the cultural case of the year, capable of pulling audiences from the most terrifying aspects of postwar roaring America to a completely unhinged combination of the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Paolo Portoghesi and the Italo-disco duo La Bionda – One for You, One for Me – blaring over the end credits.

The other, more recent and with a slightly more arthouse tone – it premiered at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section – is The Great Arch by Stéphane Demoustier. It’s based on a novel. After all, what story could deserve a novel if not that of the Grande Arche de la Défense? Paris’s third triumphal arch, the one François Mitterrand, through his Grands Projets, wanted aligned with the Tuileries and the Étoile to celebrate the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, and, not incidentally, his own presidency: the first democratically elected socialist government in the Western world that wasn’t subsequently overthrown. It is the story of Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, a Danish practitioner and academic, virtually unknown outside his narrow habitat, who wins the competition with a pure, absolute idea of a white cube – and is then inevitably pushed by the worlds of French construction and bureaucracy toward peaks of tension, especially emotional ones, that are hard to withstand.

From a design perspective, there’s plenty to be grateful for. In the interiors of the Élysée Palace, for instance, we recognize the furniture Pierre Paulin designed with the Mobilier National in the 1980s specifically for Mitterrand – a second chapter after an earlier collaboration under Pompidou. From a historical standpoint, too, the film delivers: Paul Andreu practically gets a movie within the movie. We’re talking about a pivotal figure in French architecture, the author of Charles de Gaulle Airport and the Paris Métro stations of the 1970s. It is Andreu who takes on the burden of the Arche’s executive development, together with Peter Rice, the engineer who worked at the Beaubourg with Piano and Rogers.

The novelistic approach – the one the film is based on – is compelling, bringing us closer to the extraordinary scale of the story. Equally compelling is the audacity of translating to cinema, in this form, a figure that is inherently difficult not to make boring for a general audience: the architect.

From here on, several moments in the first film, reappearing in a much more restrained way in the second, spark a major doubt: has cinema industry ever actually seen an architect?

To better explain this question, The Brutalist perhaps gives us the clearest example. Peak fun is reached within the first hour (of four), with an exchange between the protagonist and his immensely powerful client: a back-to-back of near-lunar monologues on the theme of “why architecture?”, accompanied by poetic piano notes and a kind of lyrical rapture of the interlocutor. Then comes the mystique of marble, when time comes to go to Carrara (as it should be) and choose the stone for the new, never-quite-specified great building. A building that, at least from the title, we expect to be brutalist. Epic scale, divinity – some welcome references to anti-fascist resistance, thankfully – and a writing style that goes beyond mere rhetoric in portraying the esoteric, intimate relationship between architect and material.

It’s something of a violent surprise to encounter a very similar kind of writing – and almost the same scene, complete with eyes-closed caresses of a freshly quarried marble block, somewhere between D’Annunzian primeval ecstasies and soft-core sensuality – in the story of Spreckelsen as well. Jean-Louis Subileau, the urban planner played in the film by Canadian director Xavier Dolan, stated after reading the script, according to Urbanisme magazine, that if all the Grands Projets had taken on that tone of a grand work for a monarch, “the Arche would have never been built”.

What remains, in short, is an almost otherworldly rendering of certain dialogues and relationships, hard to imagine in a profession that, in reality, is made up of meetings, negotiations, and exchanges that are dramatically – yes – earthbound, especially when the stakes and the scale of the projects are extremely high. “Cinematic architects” come across as novelistic characters, with a boomerang risk of slipping into soap-opera territory. Now, this is not about taking the side of some kind of disciplinary self-narration. Architects, in particular, have already managed to exhaust everyone with theirs, especially over the last few decades, turning themselves into meme fodder or marginal actors in processes of spatial transformation. Rather, this is about siding with the intelligence of the audience, which may deserve something less stereotypical than a sort of melodramatic bohemian artist, enough to make one miss Frank Gehry as portrayed in The Simpsons.

In a recent conversation, I came across an interesting opinion: the only profession cinema has ever managed to portray with any real sense is that of the gangster. But there, real-life gangsters themselves ended up conforming to the icon, to The Godfather or Scarface, as the case may be. Take doctors, for instance: aside from the Copernican revolution of E.R., which focused more on procedures, most of the rest of the output is closer to Guiding Light, in narrative terms, and by now even in number of seasons. And the same goes for other disciplines.

When it comes to architecture, let’s not go too far back to earlier idealizations like Howard Roark / Frank Lloyd Wright, the neoliberal titan of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, or Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect, so seductive to postmodern intellectual souls.

Let’s return instead to the present, suddenly so dense with novelized architects. Architects themselves have already said more than enough about who they are, filling pages, documentaries, and more-or-less crowded lecture halls. Now we wait for cinema, for narrative, to find a solution. Perhaps it will continue to act as a cruel thermometer of a discipline’s role in the world – but not all fevers are meant to last.

Opening image: Stéphane Demoustier, The Great Arch, 2025. Photo Julien Panie ©2025 Agat Films, Le Pacte. Courtesy Movies Inspired