“It's about a little village. This little village was in the grip of fear, fear of divine rages and of human passions. One of the men in the village started to build a construction. When he finished his surveils, he came back and told the group that a building he had erected was in the shape of the universe. Then, using a rod that he took from the temple, he made a circle around the village, and with the help of others, he encircled it with a high wall built of earth and stones. That construction he called his home, but the villagers called it the palace. Some people say that this was how architecture started.”

Argentinian-American architect Emilio Ambasz is a wilfully obscured figure in his own documentary. Appearing in stylised visages—almost as if to cast the effect of a memory or a dream—and seldom facing the camera, Ambasz, called the ‘the father, poet and prophet’ of ‘green architecture’ by Tadao Ando, narrates the fable above, believing mythmaking and storytelling to be an essential driver for his architecture. While signalling the very genesis of an architecture in this fable, unsurprisingly mired in contradiction between the master-builder and the village, Ambasz also hints at an interplay that defines his global body of work, his tenets in earmarking a ‘green architecture’ for the world, as well as the experience of watching the remarkably made Green Over Gray: Emilio Ambasz, directed by Francesca Molteni and Mattia Colombo.

The architecture film by Muse Factory of Projects traverses four definitive projects by Ambasz that lay a pin on the eponymous ‘green over gray’ in the film’s title that Ambasz came to be known for and pioneered: Casa de Retiro Espiritual in Seville, Spain, Acros Fukuoka Prefectural International Hall, Japan, Ospedale Dell’Angelo in Venice, Italy and the Lucile Halsell Conservatory in Texas, United States. "We designed a path through the elements of architecture surrounding human beings, starting with the House (Casa de Retiro Espiritual) and the Enclosure (Lucile Halsell Conservatory), followed by the City (Acros Fukuoka), ending with Care (the Ospedale dell'Angelo). They witness the importance of a well-balanced environment for better daily lives of human beings", states Molteni in conversation with STIR, outlining the process of selecting the four projects for the film. "The selection of the four projects was owing to both architectural merit and filming directives. Besides that, [it was] the diversity of the contexts, scale, typology and function", she opines.

Featuring interviews, accounts and anecdotes from his closest aides, clients, stalwarts, contemporaries and most importantly, building residents and staff, years after these buildings were constructed and opened, the film seems to place Ambasz himself at the centre of a fable unfolding. From the choices of framing his mostly ‘subterranean’ architecture, often marked by a brute, signatory beacon above-ground, to the music, grading and rare but inspired shots at surreality, the film seems to closely mirror the intended impacts of Ambasz’s architecture. Interestingly, while that classification juggles between terminologies, misnomers and even jargon at times—eco-brutalist, ‘proto-green’ architecture, simply sustainable and organic, among others—defying not just convention, but also singularity or affirmative bucketing, Ambasz seemed to just be taking a radically different approach to postmodern responses to the architecture of the time.

In that, it sought to move away from stylistic identity building over the shell of Modernist architecture, identifying architecture (and construction), first and foremost, as an act of defilement against the natural landscape. Ambasz’s body of work, and ‘style’—microscopically so—is then perhaps best looked at through the lens of restitution rather than reparation. Where a lot of modern (and to a lesser extent, postmodern) architecture professed achieving a certain harmony with natural systems while still being largely extractive in their conception, Ambasz wished to substitute, quite directly, what was taken from the land. “Every act of construction is a defiance of nature,” he acknowledges in the film, while bearing cognisance of the need to still build for a rapidly expanding world. Whether we did so meaningfully or not—with the greens and the grays—was the chief quandary here.

My work is a search for primal things. Like being born, being in love and dying. – Emilio Ambasz in Green Over Gray: Emilio Ambasz

No prominent architect or architecture has offered (or even can offer, for that matter) a definitive response to this dichotomy, rendering most discourse around sustainable architecture and the looming question of whether we should build any more to appear in a snake-biting-its-own-tail loop. Context, thus, is extremely crucial to reading Ambasz’s work, in and outside the film, especially when seen in the now. More than the architectural obsessions of form, space, facia and style and expression at large, it was this approach of natural repatriation—of returning to nature (read both ways) and of not divorcing the built from the land it delicately stood on—especially in the 70s and 80s that, one could say, firmly positioned him as a pioneer in this sphere, and as the ‘prophet’ of an ever-dubious ‘green architecture’. The term still vehemently defies any fixed definition or expectations, still manifesting in grass terraces and walls and stunted trees on skyscraper terraces in much of contemporary architecture, and for that reason alone, it shall continue to appear stringently within the quotation marks for the remaining length of this text.

That is not to say that Ambasz’s architecture is entirely gentle in appearance or inconspicuous in its presence. A number of his structures are marked by strong profiles—some wholly and some in vestiges—and the film captures these expansively. But their (natural) subtext is stronger. Natural systems are emulated and eventually—sometimes over years—brought alive in Ambasz’ architecture, lending it its veritable identity. In a living forest on the edge of a cascading building in Fukuoka, set within a public park but marked by an absence of any other urban greens in the building’s immediate context; in a self-sustaining biome outside a hospital in Venice, doubling up on pioneering medical research establishing links between nature, architecture and psychological recovery; in a conservatory where rare flora is on display and every system tends to their conservation; and in a weekend retreat where natural elements coalesce rather theatrically, enclosed by a pair of orthogonal walls projecting an apparition of a building; the green prevails.

"Mythmaking is very specific to Emilio's architecture and poetics, no doubt about it. Reading his book of fables has been part of the research behind the film. But it's true that the technique and representation of the fable are the opposite of theory and ideology, and this is my method", states Molteni, on striking a balance between Ambasz's fables and her own medium of storytelling in a film documenting his work. "Archetypes and universal feelings are incorporated in our films through different languages", she continues. "The power of visuals is enriched by the milestones of creative thinking". On being further probed on a potential clash of agencies between the filmmaker and architect, she states, "I think that these agencies are always in dialogue in filmmaking. Pure creation is a chimera! Especially in a documentary film, we have to be respectful to our subject and to its deepest truth, setting aside our ego and finding the right expressive language. A tireless commitment and a wonderful challenge!"

Going back to the film’s title, and the initial fable by Ambasz on the origins of architecture itself, an interesting provocation emerges, wherein architecture is fittingly positioned in response to hysteria. It is also markedly divorced from the primitive idea of the shelter that is often prescribed to architecture—it is enclosure; designed, built, assimilated. The ‘divine rages’ are the greens and the ‘human passions’, to be contemporaneously rendered in concrete, the grays. Whether in the moss gathering on precisely cut stone or the vine clinging to brutal concrete, green over gray supersedes its connotations as a manifesto in architecture to be a ubiquitous fact.

Green Over Gray: Emilio Ambasz will be screened at a special Curtain Raiser marking the launch of the Architecture & Design Film Festival in London by STIR, to be held at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, on Saturday, September 13, 2025. The event is presented in collaboration with the London Design Festival (LDF) and with the support of the British Council. As part of LDF's Global Design Forum, the screening will be followed by a conversation with director Francesca Molteni.

The ADFF:STIR Curtain Raiser is made possible with the support of Molteni&C, Occhio, SOLUS Ceramics, and LOCO Design.