Found this paper when I was looking for something else...Figured I would post it. This was written in 2001, so I didn't include the new Star Wars Films.


BAD GUY MODERNISM:Modernism as perceived in mainstream film


When I was a child growing up, I lived in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. My father worked for NASA as a rocket scientist, and so in that environment I gained an appreciation for technology. Not just what technology can do, but how things looked.
It seemed to me that if something was shiny or metal (or better still, shiny metal) and if it was large then it could definitely do great things. I remember when the first computers showed up at my school back in 1977, something called a P.E.T. (personal education terminal, I believe it stood for) and I was sold. It was a one-piece unit, white plastic, curvy, and had a monochromatic green screen. It looked like the future was here. And I was more than willing to be a part of it.

That same year a movie came out called Star Wars. Again I was hooked even though the events in the film supposedly happened "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." The evidence of the future was here. Modern sleek imperial starships, personal body armor, swords made of light and "Droids", walking computers who could talk to you in British English no less!

The same went for Rosie the robot on the Jetsons cartoon show of the 1960's. Rosie and the rest of the Jetson universe promised a grand future of sleek lines, bubble shaped cars and houses that could actually elevate themselves up above the pollution below. The kids were geniuses and took classes in Esperanto on video screens.

So here it is the year 2000, and what do we have to show for it? We have the same houses and environments we've had since the 1950's. The cars are smaller and more fuel efficient, but they sure aren't as attractive. Homes are the same with the addition of a computer, microwave, satellite TV, and VCRs. Construction techniques are still pretty much the same except that we sue more people if something goes wrong. So why have we not progressed in 50 years? Why are we still making stuff that looks traditional? The answer can be found in the movies.

MODERN BAD GUYS

In film modernist architecture is almost always perceived as being evil or bad. The bad guys always seem to have the modern office buildings, industrial complexes and homes. An example of this most recently was in Mission Impossible 2 (2000). In this John Woo directed film the good guy super-spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his two partners have their headquarters on a farmhouse in the Australian outback, complete with windmill and sheep, no air conditioning and a rickety, rusted metal gable roof. Meanwhile back in Sydney the bad guy lives in his Frank Lloyd Wright/ Le Corbusier style, flat roof, cantilevered rectangle shaped, panelized stone covered, house underneath a cliff on the beach. The bad guy's place of business is the largest skyscraper in Sydney, which is made of golden glass and metal. In it everything is mechanical and digitally controlled, including the louvers for the 40-story atrium space, which help to bring natural light into the interior space of the building. Action ensues, and the good guys win. Another interesting thing about this movie is the fact that they show the Sydney Opera House every time they go back to Sydney, for the establishing shot. It may be modern, but it is well known.

Another recent film to do the same thing was Charlie's Angels (2000). In the film, the bad guy, a Bill Gates type tech-wizard billionaire lives in a house in the Los Angeles hills that looks suspiciously like John Lautner's Chemosphere (also known as the Malin house) of 1960. This is in contrast to the Angel's modestly traditional townhouse office where they meet with their bosses before going out on their missions. The formula of modern equaling bad guy has been used so much, that even though it appears in the beginning of the film that he is not the bad guy, once we see his home we know he's a bad guy. Incidentally, the Chemosphere was also used on The Simpsons TV program as the home of out of work actor Troy McClure (voiced by Phil Hartman) as a comment on the "Hollywood lifestyle" of the character. Other movies use the modern versus traditional look to separate the good guys from the bad guys. This is especially true when the bad guy is a corporation or large business. In movies such as GATACCA (1997), Tron(1982) and Rollerball(1975), Corporate America is seen as evil. The good guys are usually one or two individuals who are trying to buck the system. The contrast of the corporate spaces and the spaces where the heroes live and work, reflects the idea that modern equals bad and wood paneling equals good. GATACCA uses the Los Angeles County Civic Center by Frank Lloyd Wright as the headquarters for the evil people Ethan Hawke works for. The Encom Building in Tron is a skyscraper cubicle farm inspired by Mies Van Der Rohe. In Rollerball, The pristine white room filled with shards of glass windchimes serves as the meditation room of the bad guy, played by John Houseman. By contrast, Ethan Hawke lives in a house nicely integrated into the landscape, Flynn from Tron lives above his video arcade in a renovated brownstone. James Caan lives on a traditional ranch in Rollerball. The reverse of this was found in the 1999 film Entrapment, with Sean Connery playing a thief who lived in an old castle, while planning on robbing a bank vault found in Cesar Pelli's twin tower office building in Kuala Lumpur. This was done so the viewer could identify and help sympathize with a character that has a different value system.

MEGAPOLIS: METROPOLIS/THINGS TO COME

The film Metropolis, by Fritz Lang, was made in 1927. This film shows the world of the future: skyways, personal flying transports and gigantic skyscrapers challenging God like in the biblical story of the tower of Babel. The plot centers on the freedom of the oppressed workers in the underground, who toil to make this metropolis a place for the upper class to have leisure time. This vision of the future is almost an exact opposite to the ideal living conditions presented by Le Corbusier's radiant city. Exhibited in Paris in 1922, Corbusier's urban project entitled "A Contemporary City for Three Million People" presented the idea of people living and working together in condensed space, living high above the ground in a clean and positive environment. He also talks about a "hierarchy of administration" in which groups of people are represented by someone and they report to a higher someone, and so on until the top is reached. This syndicate or union allows the people to work more efficiently, like machines and therefore order the world. Metropolis shows viewers the worst case scenario of what could happen if the ideal world of Le Corbusier actually came to pass. People become machines; the workers are treated like property instead of people. In other words, they become expendable and easily replaceable. The person at the top (in this case Joh Frederson) does not care about the needs of the people below, and it is not until the city stops functioning like a machine that he begins to worry about the needs of the people.
McSherry 4The architecture of Metropolis is not stylistically completely modern, but like today is a combination of styles, mostly gothic and neo-classical, with a bit of modernism thrown in for good measure. However, it still takes the modernist concepts of Le Corbusier and communicates the idea to people that they will not work the way society is set up today. Metropolis also stands against the work of the Italian Futurists of the early 1900s. The use of multilevel streets, elevated trains, and autogyro landing pads on rooftops are fixtures in both Metropolis and in futurist architecture. The film questions how people could live in this environment that is beyond human scale. The factory underground that houses the machines running the city is a giant multistory complex that is completely open. The workers move around on a series of catwalks that are too small to be seen when the entire machine is shown in the camera. The Building housing Frederson's office is also of massive scale. Shots of the building show that it dwarfs the planes that fly by it. Writer Helmut Weihsmann says “the Vision of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is immersed in an atmospheric framework switching from apocalyptic allusions to a city losing itself as a subject to a metaphorical "new age" civilization reminiscent of a biblical epoch." This powerful vision of fear of a possible future that reduces an individual to a number must have had an effect on moviegoers in the 1920's. While the revolution at the end of the film promises hope, I believe Lang wants to warn us, as a large majority of science fiction films do, about what our society has the potential of becoming. Lang wants moviegoers to make sure our society doesn't become the Metropolis. In the Post-WWI era context when Lang was making this film, his wariness of Corbusian ideals suggest an understanding of human psychology and the possibility of what the people at the top of Corbusier's "food chain" might do to the general populace.

As a rebuttal to Metropolis, in 1936 H.G. Wells became involved with producing a film based on his book The Shape of Things to Come. The film Things to Come takes the opposite path of Metropolis commenting on how strange and odd contemporary society is and the promise that the future would be much better. Directed by William Menzies, the film begins by looking at a town in the English countryside in the year 1936. Fast forward to the year 2036 by way of a devastating war (interesting that this was pre-1945, before the invention of the nuclear weapon.) The war was followed by decade after decade of disease, poor leadership and general suffering and finally, society has gotten it right. They have succeeded in erecting "Everytown", a place where technology and reason have gotten to the point of creating a virtual paradise. The conflict of the film arises when a group of scientists wish to launch a rocket to explore the moon.

The Architecture of Things to Come is adopted straight out of Le Corbusier's book, Towards a New Architecture. In fact, Le Corbusier was offered the job of designing the sets and future city of Everytown, but declined. The task of producing the future world went to Vincent Korda, who used Corbusian ideas found in his book to design the city of the future: gigantic subterranean caverns with inverted skyscrapers built down into them. They are pristine white concrete and glass structures, with catwalks and glass elevators. Technology allows them to create their own sunlight, so everything is extraordinarily bright and well lit. This is in contrast to the dark catacombs of Metropolis. The lack of ornamentation and uniformity of the structures reflect the plans for Paris that Le Corbusier had. The world above now has the potential to become a new Garden of Eden in contact to the Tower of Babel seen in Metropolis. Bauhaus artist Laszo Moholy-Nagy worked with Korda to show the construction sequence of Everytown.

This film was recognized as an astounding visual achievement, but audiences found the movie extremely boring, and was really nothing more than a heavy-handed morality play about the wonders of technology and reason solving all of our ills. A film critic of the time called it "intolerably prosy" and also called this version of the future "the dullest subject on earth". While this film may have been pro-modernism visually, because of its poor writing and heavy message, it turns viewers off from those concepts. However, the interesting thing about this film is that it seems to foreshadow some of the architectural concepts seen twenty and thirty years later during the cold war, such as massive underground dwellings to preserve society from nuclear holocaust. Also, Architect Paolo Soleri and his philosophy of Arcology, where nature and architecture are in harmony with one another, seem to be inspired from this film. If one looks at Soleri's massive underground dwellings, one cannot help but think of this film.


BOND, JAMES BOND

A protege' of William Menzies, Ken Adam did design work for several of the James Bond films, including Dr. No (1962), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), Diamonds are Forever (1971), The Spy Who Loved Me (1976), and Moonraker (1977). Adam is probably one of the influential designers in the history of film who is responsible for creating the look of places in which good and bad guys reside. Adam creates modern high technology fortresses for evil masterminds to reside in. The large, spherical floating platform of the villain's headquarters in The Spy Who Loved Me is a perfect example. Steel interiors and a convenient shark pit in the center of the control room (wheelchair accessible, no less) are just the touches of industrial non-traditional design methods. The entire place seems cold and sterile, allowing the viewer not to be able to feel sympathy for the bad guy in the black and white world of James Bond. Spectre's hidden volcano headquarters seen in You Only Live Twice has a similar feel to it. Monolithic and technical, it stretches 400 feet in diameter and 126 feet high at Pinewood Studios in England. According to Donald Albrect, this allowed Adam to create an

"architectural folly offered him the opportunity to emulate the designers he so admired in his youth. The great dystopian city of Fritz Lang's Metropolis had been an early aesthetic touchstone. As the designer of the vast new 007 Pinewood soundstage as well as the volcano setting within, Adam finally had the facility in which to build a set of comparable scale and scope to Metropolis." (Albrect,126)

These massive sets of steel and aluminum create an image of grandeur and hyper-reality. This lets you know that these villains mean business. They are not afraid to step on a few toes and kill a few people to get what they want. The architecture comments on their character. It is sterile and cold, and looks uncomfortable, even though it does look high tech and cool. The same commentary could be said for the works of Architects such as Frank Ghery, Norman Foster, and Santiago Calatrava.

In contrast to the cool looking stuff the bad guys have, Bond's offices are extremely traditional and well, yes, British. Lots of wood paneling, fabrics, and wall coverings, columns with capitals and cornices, and lots and lots of crown moulding. The good guys represent England, God and Country and all that, so they are seen as maintainers of the status quo. Even Q's gadgets always look like something relatively normal, such as a watch or an Aston Martin automobile with an ejection seat disguised and built into it. This use of traditional elements emphasizes the fact that the hero is doing what is right. If Bond were American, we would say he was doing it for "apple pie, baseball, and Chevrolet." In effect, Bond is saving the world from the modernists.

Ken Adam also uses these techniques in another movie. Dr. Strangelove: Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) has the war room set which is completely different from any other place in the film. Adam was forced to invent the war room from scratch, because the U.S. government wouldn't allow director Stanley Kubrick to access government facilities. The huge room with the computer screen and oval shaped steel table lit from above makes a commentary about "the post atomic landscape of limitless power." It detaches itself from reality, making matters of life and death seem like a video game on the large screen. It is also similar to the Nazi designs of Albert Speer. This contrasts with the rest of the settings in the film such as a guard station and the typical suburban house of the general who kisses his wife goodbye on the way to the war room.

IMPERIAL VERSUS REBEL ARCHITECTURE: STAR WARS

The Nazi-sponsored designs of Albert Speer also inspired the Imperial architecture found in the Star Wars Trilogy. This is seen in the opening shot of the first film, Star Wars (1977). The scene depicts an Imperial "Star Destroyer" flying slightly above so that the viewer sees the bottom of the ship's hull. Its shape is basically that of a large triangular shaped wedge that simply keeps going and going and going. This introduces us to the level of power and resources that the Empire has in order to be able to build something that large. The interior of the ship is mainly a long set of corridors and rooms, all fashioned out of pure white metal and plastic. The occupants of the ship wear suits of white plastic battle armor and are called Storm Troopers. At first glance one is not sure if they are machines or people. The same goes for the main villain of the film, Darth Vader. Darth Vader is a synthesis of man and machine, and those machines help him survive. He is literally a "machine for living." The only human looking people on the ship are wearing uniforms that are patterned after the ones Nazi soldiers wore in WWII. Small flying ships called TIE fighters surround the large Star Destroyer much like the airplanes in Corbusier's Radiant City drawings, and are also found flying through the urban canyons of Metropolis. By contrast the Rebel Ship the star destroyer attacks a few seconds later is a small bumpy-shaped, more organic looking vehicle. This is typical of the tone found in the trilogy. In general, Imperial Architecture is seen as built on a grand scale and very high tech, symbolizing power and military might. It combines elements of Speer and Mussolini's New Rome (E.U.R.) with the high tech wonder found in the works of Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, and Buckminster Fuller. Metal and sterility exist everywhere. Hard-line geometric shapes and monumentality are the order of the day. The main colors are white, black, red or gray. Lighting is done using cool fluorescent lights behind frosted plexiglass panels. One could say that the Allen Teleport Room at the University of Houston is an example of Imperial Architecture. Rebel Architecture, by contrast is more organic, more curvy, and more integrated with nature. In Star Wars the desert planet of Tatooine is inhabited by innocent people who live in adobe style huts and in mountain caves. The first hostile encounter we find on the planet is by little technology scavengers known as Jawas. They drive a large tracked vehicle through the landscape, selling stolen robots at unbeatable prices. By contrast Luke Skywalker's vehicle has no wheels at all and hovers above the desert sand with no impact on the environment. The cantina is also made using this adobe technique where even the seating appears to be carved out from the earth. This integrated, non-invasive and native style of architecture shows that these people are the good guys. Han Solo's ship, The Millennium Falcon is made from leftover and recycled parts from other starships. In reality, so is the actual model. It is made from pieces of old model kits. The Rebel headquarters on Yavin is built half underground into a cave in what looks like the ruins of an old Mayan temple. Lots of green trees surround the site and the observation tower on top only lightly touches the landscape, using one thin single pole to connect to the earth. The "eco-friendliness" of the Rebels calls to mind architects such as Alavar Aalto and Eliel Saarinen. This is in contrast to the Imperial "Death Star", a gigantic moon-sized spherical object which the Empire uses to explode uncooperative planets. The larger Rebel spaceships are designed to look more organic and fishlike, and unlike Imperial Architecture, is less about cutting through space than swimming through space. In The Empire Strikes Back, Cloud City is set up as a haven for the heroes, but because the architecture is more Imperial than Rebel, we know that the heroes are going to run into trouble. The whiteness of the public areas contrast with the black and red of the service areas. This is exactly the same dichotomy that is present in the upper and lower worlds as seen in Metropolis. The swamp planet of Dagobah on the other hand is okay because everything there is made of organic material. Yoda is a good guy because he lives in a house made from a giant tree stump. The Rebels live in ice caves on the planet Hoth while the Empire attacks them from a Star Destroyer in orbit above the planet. In the third film, Return of the Jedi, Imperial forces using high tech machines are defeated by the tree house living Ewoks, an alien race of teddy bears. The Ewoks, being the noble savage variety of alien, use low technology weapons such as catapults, spears and by laying traps in the forest for the big Imperial machines and forces. In effect, it is Corbusier's "the house as a machine for living" versus "the primitive hut" of M.A. Laugier. Unfortunately for the Empire, the primitive hut wins.

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

So what does this mean for Architecture? To me it seems that because of film, Architecture has a critical resistance to things that are perceived as "modern". I have been using this term loosely throughout this writing and when I say "modern", I am not only meaning things that look like they were designed by Le Corbusier or Mies Van Der Rohe or Frank Lloyd Wright. I am including things such as Italian Futurism, the high technology tectonic work seen with Norman Foster and Renzo Piano and the genius of Buckminister Fuller. By "modern", I mean anything that is new and different. People who do not realize that he is simply searching for new forms even call Frank Ghery "modern". The mainstream audience for architecture, that is not the critics and the professors that reside in academia, but the general public call all of this modern. This is the same general public that sometimes will eventually become clients, and guess what? They've seen the same movies I have. What these people will want will not be the house of a James Bond movie villain (unless they are one), but will want traditional things. The reason they will want traditional things is because people perceive themselves to be heroes in their own lives. These heroes always live in traditional settings with the intent to preserve the status quo. With the association of villainy with the "modern" look, people will not want to look forward or to try something different. People want to live in the primitive hut, not in the machine for living. People tolerate the little box that is a computer or a cellular phone because they are conveniences that make life easier. But, people are able to step back away from these machines and ignore them whenever possible. With the house as a machine, either literally, such as "smart homes" or just in the visual look of machine made pieces and prefabrication, is when people develop a resistance and wariness for technology. They cite Hal 9000 from 2001: a Space Odyssey or the computer from War Games. The future goal of HUD as of 1999 is to make prefabricated housing that looks exactly like site built traditional housing. Again, we see the lack of progression. Technology has become better, we just chose to use it to make traditional, status quo stuff.

The future is here. If you need me, I'll be at the movies.



Filmography

Charlie's Angels. Dir. Joseph McGinty Nichol. Columbia Pictures, 2000.

Diamonds are Forever. Dir. Guy Hamilton. MGM, 1971.

Dr. No. Dir.Terence Young. MGM, 1962.

Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley
Kubrick. Columbia Pictures, 1964.

The Empire Strikes Back. Dir. Irvin Kershner. Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, 1980.

Entrapment. Dir. Jon Amiel. 20th Century Fox, 1999.

GATTACA. Dir. Andrew Niccol. Columbia Pictures, 1997.

Goldfinger Dir. Guy Hamilton. MGM, 1964.

Metropolis. Dir. Fritz Lang. Universum Film A.G., 1927.

Mission Impossible 2. Dir. John Woo. Paramount, 2000.

Moonraker. Dir. Lewis Gilbert. MGM, 1977

Return Of the Jedi. Dir. Richard Marquand. Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, 1983.

Rollerball. Dir. Norman Jewison. MGM, 1975.

The Spy Who Loved Me. Dir. Lewis Gilbert. MGM, 1976.

Star Wars: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, 1977.

Things to Come. Dir. William Cameron Menzies. London Film Productions, 1936.

Thunderball Dir. Terence Young. MGM, 1965.

Tron. Dir. Steven Lisberger. Walt Disney Productions, 1982

2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. MGM, 1968.

War Games. Dir. John Badham. MGM, 1983.

You Only Live Twice Dir. Lewis Gilbert MGM, 1967.



Bibliography

Albrecht, Donald. "Dr Caligari's Cabinets: The Set Design of Ken Adam" Architecture And Film. Ed. Mark Lamster. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000.

Bonifer, Michael. The Art of Tron., New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

Ito, Toyo. "Architecture Sought After By Android". The Japan Architect June 1988: 9-13

Clarke, David B. The Cinematic City. London: Routledge, 1997.

Lambster, Mark. "Wretched Hives: George Lucas and the Ambivalent Urbanism of Star Wars" Architecture And Film. Ed. Mark Lamster. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000.

Leblanc, Sydney. Whitney Guide: 20th Century American Architecture. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1993.

Neumann, Dietrich. Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner. New York: Prestel, 1999.