The film's subject is the 65-year-old artist Anselm Kiefer who in 1993 left his native Germany and settled in Barjac in France, where he bought a derelict silk factory, transforming it into an extraordinary artistic centre, a Gesamtkunstwerk, or complete artwork: at once the place where his paintings and sculptures are housed and displayed, and a colossal, evolving architectural artwork in itself.
(This is what Ayn Rand got wrong in "The Fountainhead": the ultimate romantic-colossal statement of romantic architectural colossalism could be built only by a timid corporate conformist; Howard Roark, like Frank Lloyd Wright, would have ended up with an automobile showroom and a smallish museum).
The museum's auditorium had little in common with the Met, but it did boast some architectural flourishes like colossal arches and vaults, which survived two subsequent renovations and will be highlighted in the new project.
And like several other peripheral architectural elements in the colossal structure, they escaped destruction 50 years ago.
Often taking hundreds of years to construct and sparing no effort or expense, these colossal undertakings became genuine, shining masterpieces of architectural grandeur.
The Crystal Palace contained important innovations in mass production of standardized materials and rapid assembly of parts, but its chief architectural merit lay in its cadence of colossal spaces.
As the Baroque became established in areas such as Mexico and Peru, paintings increasingly inspired by Rubens once contained within architectural frames of retables were now presented on freestanding colossal canvases.
The mosque's southern entrance, the colossal gateway Buland Darwaza (Victory Gate; 1575), is one of India's greatest architectural works.
Apart from the colossal conception of the pyramids themselves, the temple complexes attached to them show great mastery of architectural forms.
