Resources for viewing “Columbus”
Architecture as Character: A Guide to Columbus
In Kogonada's Columbus, the city's modernist landmarks are not merely settings — they function as "spatial mirrors" for the characters' internal states. For a sophisticated viewer, understanding these structures is key to deciphering the film's exploration of duty, stagnation, and "humanist" design.
Casey's Primary Inspirations
Casey's personal ranking of the town's architecture serves as a roadmap for her emotional intellectualism. (Note: While the film explicitly ranks Miller House as her #1, the Irwin Conference Center is the building where she most passionately declares her love — "This is my second favourite building" — and opens up about what truly moves her.)
Miller House and Garden (Eero Saarinen, 1953–57) — Casey's #1 The pinnacle of residential modernism. Casey regards this as her absolute favorite building in Columbus. Kogonada opens the film with lingering shots of it and later has the characters tour it together. For Casey it represents profound beauty and harmony; for Jin it feels cold and "museumified," reflecting his father's emotional absence.
Irwin Conference Center (originally Irwin Union Bank & Trust, Eero Saarinen, 1954) — Casey's #2 A transparent glass-and-steel pavilion. Casey explicitly identifies this as one of her most beloved buildings in the world. In the pivotal scene here, she tells Jin, "This is my second favourite building," and when pressed on what moves her, she lights up with genuine awe at its radical openness and lack of barriers. For her, its clarity represents a "comforting" refuge amidst her cluttered domestic life. Kogonada uses its glass reflections to visually merge the characters with their environment.
First Financial Bank branch (Deborah Berke, 2006) — Casey's #3 A luminous modern glass pavilion often likened to a paper lantern. This is the building where Casey has her most intimate conversation with Jin, opening up about her mother's meth addiction and her own caregiving burdens. She calls it "the beginning for me" — the private place she escaped to during her darkest times. It also ties directly to her stalled dreams: architect Deborah Berke personally encouraged her to apply to Yale.
First Christian Church (Eliel Saarinen, 1942) One of the first modernist churches in the U.S., famous for its asymmetrical clock tower and grid-like brickwork. This is the narrative epicenter where Jin's father collapses. Casey describes the building as "asymmetrical yet balanced" — a poignant metaphor for her own struggle to find equilibrium while caregiving.
North Christian Church (Eero Saarinen, 1964) Known for its striking hexagonal base and 192-foot needle-like spire. It serves as the backdrop for conversations exploring the "humanist credo" of architecture, emphasizing that these cold, geometric shapes are designed to evoke profound human feeling.
Narrative & Social Anchors
These buildings ground the characters in their daily realities and obligations.
Cleo Rogers Memorial Library (I.M. Pei, 1969) Casey's workplace. A heavy, red-brick structure that contrasts with the glass-heavy Saarinen designs. Kogonada frames Casey within its deep-set concrete "coffered" ceilings and symmetrical bookshelves, highlighting her intellectual potential trapped within a clerical routine.
Quinco Mental Health Center (James Stewart Polshek, 1972) A bridge-like structure spanning a creek. This is the site of a pivotal conversation about architecture's power to heal and evoke human emotion — rooted in Polshek's philosophy that even "cold" geometric forms can aid recovery. The building's literal function as a bridge mirrors Casey's role as the emotional bridge keeping her mother's life intact. (Note: Casey's mother does not work here; she is cared for at home.)
The Republic Newspaper Building (Myron Goldsmith, 1971) A pristine, white steel-and-glass pavilion. Used by Casey as a benchmark for "transparency," it represents the honesty she struggles to find in her relationship with her mother and her own future.
The Academic Influence
Miller House and Garden (Eero Saarinen, 1953–57) (See above.) In the film, it also represents the "museumified" world of Jin's father — a space of immense beauty that Jin finds cold and alienating due to his father's emotional absence.
Second Street Bridge (Jean Muller, 1999) The suspension bridge with "prayerful" cables. It serves as the literal threshold for the film's conclusion, representing the transition from the safety of the known to the uncertainty of the future.
Cinematic note: Observe Kogonada's use of "Planimetric Composition" — framing characters centrally against flat, architectural backgrounds. This Ozu-inspired technique forces the viewer to consider the relationship between the human figure and the "structure," both literal and social, that surrounds them.
Some insights
Below are review summaries (with links to the original reviews) of insightful reviews and commentaries of the film, “Columbus,” in our “State in Cinema” series. These perspectives are starting points, not answers. Bring your own reaction to the session.
In this "quietly self-assured" debut, renowned video essayist Kogonada (a pseudonym honoring Ozu’s screenwriter Kogo Noda) transforms the modernist mecca of Columbus, Indiana, into a "mysteriously capacious" stage for human connection. The film intertwines the lives of two "discontented souls": Jin (John Cho), a cynical translator returning from Seoul to attend to his comatose architect-scholar father, and Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a brilliant local library clerk whose dreams of studying architecture are sidelined by her role as a caretaker for her mother. Rather than a standard romance, their bond is "emotionally intimate and confrontational," a shared quest to rethink their places in the world. Eschewing traditional "A-plot/B-plot" structures, Kogonada uses a "warm, luscious color palette" and meticulous compositions to prove that modernist design isn't chilly, but a "utopian" vessel for deep, often wordless, human yearning. Dana Stevens, Slate
Kogonada treats cinema as a form of architecture, arguing that character and structural design are fundamentally synonymous. Set against the modernist backdrop of Columbus, Indiana, the film follows the budding connection between Kasey (Haley Lu Richardson), a local torn between family duty and her architectural dreams, and Jin (John Cho), a translator tethered to the town by his estranged father’s illness. Through symmetrical cinematography and deliberate framing, Kogonada mirrors the duo’s internal landscapes, using reflections and angles to explore the "internal symmetry" of two people at a crossroads. Anchored by Richardson’s luminous, subtle performance and Elisha Christian’s precise camerawork, Columbus is a quiet, introspective masterpiece that explores the hidden meanings of space, the burden of complacency, and the beauty of human "modernity." Brendan Cassidy, InSession Film
Columbus (2017) — Kogonada
Kogonada's assured feature debut unfolds in Columbus, Indiana, where two young people — Casey, who stays to care for her mother, and Jin, who returns reluctantly to see his ailing father — form an unlikely bond through their shared engagement with the city's extraordinary modernist architecture.
The film's visual language mirrors its themes: cinematographer Elisha Christian composes frames of precise horizontal and vertical lines, asymmetrical balance, and subtle geometric tension — formal choices drawn explicitly from the principles of modernist design. Influences from Japanese director Ozu Yasujirō surface throughout, in transitional landscape shots, unconventional camera placement, and the film's quiet exploration of intergenerational distance and duty.
Casey and Jin are near-opposites: her neglectful upbringing has deepened her loyalty and fear of leaving; his has created estrangement and longing to escape. Each offers the other exactly what they need. Their conversations — often held against iconic buildings that function as active participants in the frame — become a meditation on how we relate to the places and people that shape us.
Form follows function here too. Nothing is ornamental. What moves us, the film suggests, isn't intellectual appreciation alone — it's what a space, or a story, quietly does to us. Ben Nicholoson, BFI