Blending archival footage, sketches and stereoscopic shots, Wim Wenders’ latest documentary makes the case for buildings as living entities in their own right. The German filmmaker’s subject in From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor is the titular award-winning Swiss architect, who rose to prominence in the 1990s wielding light as his main ‘material’. Roving through a clutchful of Zumthor’s buildings with his camera, Wenders charts how each changes over time and is shaped by the people within them.

‘I’m convinced that 3D has a poetic quality,’ the director insists, when we meet at the Venice Film Festival during a roundtable. His long-gestating tenth 3D film attempts to get to grips with a philosophy of space, and took 14 years to make. True to its title, From Inside Out thoroughly dissects every interior it features and is attuned to the barely perceptible shifts created by people and the external environment. ‘We measured light in the morning and in the evening,’ says Wenders. ‘Some buildings were morning buildings and others were evening buildings.’

From Inside Out follows on from a string of other 3D architectural films that Wenders has helmed. He and Zumthor met when the director made a ten-minute short about the architect, Notes From a Day in the Life of an Architect (2012), presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale and spawning the idea for a second collaboration. ‘Peter Zumthor is not an architectural superstar,’ Wenders claims. ‘He has built [around] 20 buildings. All these [other] superstars have built 2000, and have huge offices in Asia and America and Europe.

‘He wants to build so he can be involved in each building from beginning to end, and that is quite ambitious. Also, Peter is a perfectionist. None of the star architects can afford to be perfectionists. Not many architects really penetrate the purpose of the building as strictly as Peter does.’

From a secular retreat in Devon to one of the architect’s most recent projects, the $724m Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Wenders lays out Zumthor’s ethos of accessibility. ‘Peter wanted to have the museum on one floor, in order to make this idea of no hierarchy really transparent for every visitor,’ says Wenders of LACMA, while the retreat – rentable to the public – was devised ‘by a group of people who had the idea that most people do not have access to contemporary architecture’.

In the new film, Zumthor’s designs are frequented and remoulded by their current residents, visitors and a vast celebrity cast, from filmmakers Werner Herzog and Ava DuVernay at LACMA to novelist Siri Hustvedt in the chilling, blustering witch monument Steilneset in Norway. Most poignant, though, is the appearance of Zumthor’s wife Annalisa, who died before the film’s release. After suffering a stroke, ‘she had to abandon her garden and the house’, says Wenders, ‘but Peter wanted me to film it […] Nobody in Switzerland ever built any house like this before.

‘Peter rethought the structure of a wooden house and didn’t put the weight on the walls, but he built interior towers that are basically for the staircases or for the bathrooms. But it’s the towers that carry the whole house, and the outside walls are hanging. You can take them off, and you still have a house.’

The film concludes with the newly opened Beyeler Foundation extension – housing art by the likes of Monet, Miro and Picasso – in Zumthor’s native Basel. Free to visit, the concrete structure epitomises Zumthor’s minimalist approach. ‘Most buildings that you see happening today are political because they’re hostile and because they don’t create an environment that is healthy, neither to work in nor to live in,’ reflects Wenders. According to the filmmaker, Zumthor has ‘a very moral position towards buildings. He only build[s] what he deems necessary – that excludes 90 per cent of the offers he gets. If he thinks that building doesn’t need to exist, that we have enough office buildings, [he says] “I’m not ever in my life going to build a high-rise because I don’t like it. They create density that I’m against”.’

‘From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor’ will begin to be released throughout Europe on 26 November 2026, with further details to be announced