Many people recognize Kogonada as a popular video essayist who made his debut feature film, Columbus, with John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Parker Posey, and Rory Culkin. He’s the kind of filmmaker whose approach to cinema changes how you watch movies. Naturally, he oscillates from the role of film critic to that of a raconteur. He does this with real confidence.

Watching a film that feels so personal is a bit strange, especially when its creator has influenced how you see the world. But before you can make art seriously, you have to learn how to see and appreciate it, and Columbus makes that clear.

The film doesn’t use architecture as a background or a setting. It treats space as active, as a way of thinking, almost, and a way of shaping emotion. How do people live in certain spaces, how do such spaces shape the individuals in return, and how does meaning come from what people do and from how people experience rooms, streets, doorways, and buildings?

Early in the film, Casey has a philosophical discussion with another librarian, which follows Jim Jarmusch’s filmmaking style, displaying silent moments and uncommon pacing, and shows ordinary human thoughts. His character, therefore, broaches the distinction between attention and interest, maintaining that a lack of real interest is the real issue. At one point, he asks, “Are we no longer interested in everyday life?” It’s a question that speaks directly to the audience, but it also drives the whole film, which is clearly invested in the textures of everyday life.

It is where spatial theory helps make sense of things. Everyday life is about space. People move through neutral environments and exist within designed spaces, and such spaces shape how people think, remember, and feel. The film keeps coming back to such an idea in a patient, understated way.

Columbus takes its name from a small town in Indiana. Surprisingly, it has a big reputation in architecture. Often called the “Athens on the Prairie,” the town of around 40,000 people was ranked sixth by the American Institute of Architects as one of the most important cities in the U.S. for architectural innovation, just behind places like New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. It is especially noted for its modern buildings bearing the designs of architectural figures such as I. M. Pei, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Richard Meier, and Harry Weese.

All of these matters because the film treats architecture as a kind of argument. The modernist design in Columbus creates a new lifestyle that affects the movie’s depiction of relationships and distance and demonstrates how structure and vulnerability interact. From a spatial theory perspective, space is socially produced, and the film makes the idea visible in almost every shot. The buildings guide movement, direct attention, and shape moments of intimacy.

Not everyone realizes it about Columbus, Indiana. Regardless of the runs through the film, the feeling of newness gives the town’s name a double meaning. It’s part of why the film feels like it’s about discovery, but not in the usual heroic sense of crossing oceans and claiming unknowingness. It’s a much quieter, more personal type closer to rediscovery, about noticing what’s always been right in front of you and finally seeing it clearly.

At one point, a character says, “You grow up around something, and it feels like nothing,” and the line hits for anyone who grew up in a small town wanting to leave, only to realize later what seemed ordinary held a whole world. In the architectural phenomenology study, place exists as an experience which people perceive through their bodily senses, the accumulated memory, the learned, and the daily life activities. As if for the first time, the film is about returning to a familiar place and seeing it.

Columbus tells a story, but it feels almost like a documentary about architecture and the natural world. The film’s sense of discovery comes from an attentive gaze, one that focuses just as much on the spaces the characters inhabit as on the characters. It pays attention to the objects the characters touch and use, such as clothes, chairs, cars, mirrors, red steaming kettles, and the small daily tasks, like fluffing pillows, taking out the trash, slicing tomatoes, or showering.

Kogonada and cinematographer Elisha Christian meticulously capture background life, such as the furniture, lamps, trinkets, trees, traffic, and the sounds of trains. Nearly, the mise-en-scène in every shot feels as composed as Chloé Zhao’s, with a natural, lived-in attention to detail. The reason it matters is that the film shifts the average into significantly meaningful ones. The body is always already connected to the spaces it occupies.

Then, there’s the architecture. Most films don’t get analyzed by architecture critics, but Columbus makes its buildings feel alive in a way you see. The movie opens with the First Christian Church, designed by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen in 1942. Kogonada’s camera maintains its focus on the cross, which possesses an asymmetrical design yet maintains an equilibrium on the front face of the building.

Later, we see the famous North Christian Church, designed by Saarinen’s son, Eero, the modernist master also behind the St. Louis Arch. Other key buildings include Eero Saarinen’s Miller House, I. M. Pei’s Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, James Stewart Polshek’s Quinco Mental Health Center, Deborah Berke’s Irwin Union Bank, Myron Goldsmith’s Republic newspaper plant and offices, and Jean Muller’s Second Street Bridge, all hands in prayer.

All the structures matter not for the way everything links form and feeling. In architectural phenomenology, people experience built spaces from the inside, and Columbus to sense the architectural elements of each building through their experience of moving through the structure.

Although architecture isn’t the only art form Kogonada highlights, the film also works as a kind of tribute to cinema itself, drawing from and referencing many of his favorite directors. Still, the architectural side can’t be separated from the others. Film frames start to feel like rooms, cuts feel like passages, and choices like distance, angle, and stillness come across as different ways of inhabiting space.

The film’s language treats environments as such, which shapes how we see. It is why spatial theory fits so well here. Space trains the eye, directs attention, and either allows or limits connection. In the film, the environment changes as soon as one goes inside a building, basically creating a different atmosphere and way of looking at things.

Paterson by Jim Jarmusch and the films of Hong Sang-soo are the nearest analogies to Columbus, at least as far as structure are concerned. Like Jarmusch’s film, Columbus follows its characters who experience disconnection to show the daily lead to developing a connection persists after the film ends. And like Hong’s films, it leans on long, thoughtful conversations, with characters drifting through spaces while talking about art, philosophy, relationships, and everyday concerns.

But what stands out is how such conversations are always grounded in specific places, never feel abstract or detached, happen next to glass walls, under concrete overhangs, in library aisles, in echoing public spaces, and inside homes filled with personal history. From a spatial theory perspective, the dialogue becomes less about conversation for its own sake and more about sharing and inhabiting space together. The environments shape the intimacy between the characters, and such intimacy, in turn, changes how such spaces are experienced.

Another filmmaker you can feel is Abbas Kiarostami. The film’s quiet pacing, its reflective and minimalist tone, its cross-cultural encounters, and its focus on the small, everyday details of a place all carry a Kiarostami-like sensibility. The approach works especially well here because the setting never feels generic or interchangeable. The town has its own identity, and the camera brings it forward.

The building exhibits its historical past through its architectural design elements because every hallway produces a particular type of silence, while its outer walls display different forms of light and weather conditions and surface materials to create an impression of experienced use. Since it focuses on how places are actually lived and felt before they are turned into theory, it keeps returning to such a raw level of experience, the feeling of being before you even start trying to explain it.

You can also feel a bit of early Andrew Haigh in Columbus, especially films like Weekend and 45 Years. Its major sources are found in the focus on intimate everyday relationships, the ephemeral, and the baggage carried from history, which weighs heavily on the people. The film carries the same kind of restraint. The rise of everyday weight or the ways in which unsaid, unresolved feelings occupy the film image across quotidian spaces, private or public. Houses, sidewalks, parking lots, and public buildings all turn into spaces where grief, responsibility, and hope hang in the air.

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s influence is all over the film. Kogonada’s research about Hou’s spatial techniques and his application shows through his work in Columbus because he uses long camera shots to observe hallways and schools and hospitals and hotels and library aisles and alleyways. Hou’s tendency to hold on longer takes and let everyday life unfold within a fixed frame is echoed throughout the film. It spends a lot of time sitting in quiet, domestic moments, and such a sense becomes central to its meaning.

Passageways are important because spaces in between don’t fully belong to one room or another, transition zones where movement becomes noticeable, where the body becomes aware of shifting from one atmosphere to the next. It seems to understand it instinctively. Hallways and corridors never feel empty, carrying tension, possibility, memory, and a sense of pause. Even when no one is talking, the frame still communicates through how space is arranged.

The way Kogonada’s camera moves through architectural spaces, especially how such spaces with nature, feels a lot like the later work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul after Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. In his films, environments always blur the line between the built world and the natural one, creating grounded, slightly otherworldly spaces. Columbus does similar. Its spaces bring out the tension between what exists and what might be possible, between nature and culture.

Modernist architecture came out of a time when religion was losing its grip and meaning felt harder to pin down, so it tried to find spirituality in a more secular world. Therefore, it ends up feeling close to sacred, which helps explain why the Saarinen churches stand out so much in the film. Almost zen-like calm to such buildings, a sense of how it can heal or at least hold the things still for a moment.

In the film, it actively shapes what happens. The process of “healing” occurs through connections between people, the body moves according to the established structures that create pathways that separate different types of interaction, and the system creates a break that allows people to experience release.

How does modernist architecture actually help people feel things like healing? In a way, it works like any powerful art. Order can still be possible in a world that continually appears unmanageable. Our senses become more acute because the film activates our ability to see better through the use of advanced technological equipment, and the present age challenges because technology, consumerism, and perpetual interruptions make it difficult for people to maintain concentration.

Since architectural phenomenology looks at how a well-designed space can bring the body back into focus, when an individual steps into a place with good proportion, light, and balance, the body usually reacts before words even come in, breathing slows down, the eyes settle, and the mind doesn’t feel as restless. The film understands the physicality, and it doesn’t explain it directly.

Technology tends to pull experience away from place. It flattens distance and makes the local feel less important than what can be searched or accessed instantly. Columbus pushes against it by making place feel vivid again. It keeps reminding you that where you are actually matters. A library isn’t the same as a search bar, a bridge isn’t just a set of coordinates, and a church isn’t just an idea. The film brings back the texture of lived space.

Casey’s steadfast preference for an older flip phone is a pretty regressive stance in defiance of all talk of conventional tech-love; she even calls it a “dumb phone” because it doesn’t have internet access. She’d rather spend time in libraries and try to remember things on her own instead of immediately looking them up on Google. Therefore, she seems happier, more present, and more aware of the beauty around her. She experiences the same level of travel desire and social status concern as in the modern world, so she becomes a source of opposing force to current norms.

She’s also connected to her surroundings. Her intelligence is tied to place. She doesn’t know the town as information, but as things lived and experienced. Acting as if the woods are all but her backyard, with a childlike curiosity-guided sense of awe laden heavily with the step, she breathes it into the film.

At a time when more people are starting to notice the psychological and dehumanizing effects of technology, the movie shows that a completely different world exists in the present time for one who wants to discover it. The world functions through spontaneous meetings, replacing fast Google searches, while finding contentment without shopping interruptions, and prefers actual experiences over digital interruptions. The physical things right in front of you feel more meaningful than the abstract stuff hidden behind a screen.

In spatial theory, life actually happens in specific places, not in such abstract “nowhere.” In architectural phenomenology, we feel places with our bodies long before we try to explain them with our minds. The film explores fundamental elements of its story.

Cinema is always talked about as a form of escape, and sure, it can be. People watch films to drift into other places, other times, other lives. But at its best, and “Columbus” is one of the films, it doesn’t just help you get away. Seeing with one’s own eyes, with just a little surrender, the existence of things to your attention.

Kogonada’s film works in such an invisible way. It treats architecture not as things to look at, but things to live in. It turns space into feeling, into memory, into presence. And in doing it, the everyday was never ordinary to begin with; it’s layered, alive, and full of possibility, just waiting to be seen.

References

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  • Casey, E. S. (1997). The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. University of California Press.
  • Haigh, A. (Director). (2011). Weekend [Film]. Glendale Picture Company.
  • Haigh, A. (Director). (2015). 45 Years [Film]. The Bureau.
  • Hou, H.-h. (Director). (1989). A City of Sadness [Film]. 3H Productions.
  • Jarmusch, J. (Director). (2016). Paterson [Film]. Amazon Studios.
  • Kiarostami, A. (Director). (1997). Taste of Cherry [Film]. MK2 Productions.
  • Kogonada. (Director). (2017). Columbus [Film]. Depth of Field.
  • Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell. (Original work published 1974)
  • Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980). Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. Rizzoli.
  • Pallasmaa, J. (2012). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (3rd ed.). Wiley.
  • Relph, E. (1976). Place and Placelessness. Pion.
  • Weerasethakul, A. (Director). (2010). Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives [Film]. Kick the Machine.