Northern Italy, mid-1960s. Carla is a novice architect and is called to supervise the construction sites of a series of public works in the countryside. Carla meets with a team of construction engineers, tasked with making structural measurements. Locked in the laboratory they reproduce scale models of buildings and landscapes. Their dedication is alienating, as they reproduce life in scale like aliens from another dimension. The more time passes, the less motivated Carla is to work with them. For her, building means being among people, in the world. She dreams of knocking down walls, rather than raising them, and seeing the sky. Instead the engineers are locked in the laboratory, where there is no sky and the sun cannot shine.