[The Great Arch]
Demoustier | 2025 | France

Something about doing a PhD focused on design thinking has turned me into a soft touch for all matters of design (which permeate all of life – la vie – of course). Stories about ‘visionary’ designers have a tendency of either obfuscating the relationship between a design and the self of the designer or leaning so hard into that relationship that the design process comes off as something like magic. There is no magic in design but there is absolutely a nonzero amount of the designer, no matter how untraceable or ineffable the link.

What this film does exceptionally well is refuse to separate design and designer. Indeed, this inextricability is the very heart of the plot. [French] bureaucracy is played for dark but knowing laughs and dodgy actors on the periphery infuse tension into the proceedings but, at the end of the day, this is a story about somebody who did a thing and refused to compromise.

On a personal level, this film highlighted a few shifts in my thinking that have come on in middle age. Specifically, the value of a life and how it’s constructed. Not so long ago, I probably would have found this a rather dreary and uninspiring story of somebody who couldn’t beat the system. Moments that are inarguably heroic would have been interpreted as sad or bleak. Fortunately, I’ve come to recognise agency as perhaps the primary goal in life. A life well lived is a life lived the way you’d care to live it. In this way, such a life is the quintessential design.