“We need a new idea of beauty,” says Michele De Lucchi, the Italian architect who talks us through certain stretches of “Architecton,” a singularly imposing and sonorous new documentary from Russian non-fiction auteur Victor Kossakovsky. His argument is that the earth can no longer sustain the kind of hefty architectural grandeur, built from the fabric of the Earth itself, that we’ve asthetically prized for centuries, and nor can the cycle of more disposable concrete construction continue without devastating environmental impact. It’s a sound point, even as Kossakovsky’s film trades in entirely classic ideas of beauty to jaw-dropping effect. Whether gazing in rapt widescreen across wondrous ancient structures, ruined recent cityscapes or the oceanic shift and shake of a stone quarry in action, this is blatantly dazzling, epic-scale filmmaking that nonetheless invites viewers to consider the implications of our awe.

What is it about man-made landmarks that moves us: the very effort of their creation, or the way they reshape the world immediately around them? Should architecture seek first to beautify its site or to efficiently serve its inhabitants, and which of those objectives is more ecologically ideal? These are big, knotty questions, and “Architecton” — wordless outside of De Lucchi’s occasional narration — doesn’t impose any answers on its audience. Instead, Kossakovsky gives us ample space to absorb his repeatedly stunning images at a gradual, mesmeric pace, and to sit with our response to them as initial startlement unfolds into more lateral thought. It should go without saying that this A24-produced doc, premiering in Berlin’s main competition, is not suited to laptop screens. Potential distributors would do well to position it as unusual event viewing.

In feeling and form, this is closer to 2018’s “Aquarela” — Kossakovsky’s similarly spectacular sensory essay on water in its panoply of earthly forms — than it is to his last, Neon-backed feature “Gunda,” a more intimate, nominally more narrative-based study of a pig’s maternal journey on a Norwegian farmyard. (Kossakovsky, meanwhile, considers “Architecton” the concluding third of a trilogy with “Aquarela” and his 2011 antipodal travelogue “¡Vivan las Antipodas!”) The throughline between all these works, however, is a concern with man’s disruptions of the natural world for his own purposes, influencing not only surrounding ecosystems but subsequent generations of his own kind.  “We don’t just design buildings,” De Lucchi observes as he reflects on a current construction industry in flux. “We design the behavior of people.”

Those designs can be fragile, however, as shown in the film’s haunting opening images of Ukranian apartment blocks torn craggily open by Russian bombing, the camera tracking down a cross-section of kitchens now exposed to the elements, depopulated and turned inside out: an efficient, communal design for life that couldn’t withstand other men’s more selfish impositions on the landscape. Elsewhere, we fly over high-rises in Turkey riven not by human forces but the 2023 earthquakes. The demolition is, either way, devastating and premature, but these buildings, squarely unadorned and unlovely, were never meant to last forever — De Lucchi estimates the average lifespan of such modern concrete structures at just 40 years.

In pointed contrast, we cut to the ancient ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon, where the architect gazes upon a pair of stone megaliths so vast, so positively uncanny in their scale and the precision of their shaping, that they hardly seem man-made, as if lowered on the land by a divine entity for our eternal astonishment. They literally couldn’t be made or moved today, and yet they were. As his camera solemnly surveys them, Kossakovsky invites us to wonder what we’ve lost in our inability to forge such monuments, or if the land has gained something back. For aesthetic classicists of the “they don’t make ’em like they used to” persuasion, “Architecton” feeds such ideas to a point, before tacitly underlining the hubris of such long-gone architects. Should we ever have made ’em like that at all?

The stone work of the 21st century is smaller and more processed, as huge reserves of natural rock are tamed and chipped by man and machinery into industralized quarries of daunting, many-tiered proportions. But Kossakovsky finds a kind of otherworldly spectacle in these too. The film’s most hypnotic sequences, luxuriating over several minutes of screen time, observe in painstaking slow-motion the fall and flow of stone following calculated explosions, revealed — via Kossakovsky’s own crisp, elegant cuts — in ever wider shot until the mineral tumble takes on the appearance of water in frothy, turbulent motion. The difference is that this roiling of the elements is choreographed by humans taking ownership of the environment, rather like the fir trees felled in woodland adjacent to the quarry. But we can still marvel at this terrible control.

Other passages of the film think smaller: There’s a witty, recurring observation of a modest domestic project by De Lucchi, as he recruits a team of bemused laborers to lay out a large, stone-edged circle in the rambling gardens of his Italian home. It scarcely counts as architecture, but the intention behind it is high-minded: No man will enter the grassy interior of the circle, he dictates, as overgrowing nature and his snuffling dogs are permitted to colonize this hitherto domestic space as they will. The architect admits to feeling some shame over the transient concrete structures he has imposed on already overcrowded cityscapes, and aims to do some penance by carving out such unobstructed negative spaces.

But there’s an inescapable irony in man having to build the unbuilt, in having to dictate what designated areas the earth can take back. There is no escaping our own mastery, our own determination of what is beautiful and useful. A man-made work that is very much both of those things, “Architecton” frustratedly awaits a new world order, or at least a new blueprint.