the architecture of heros - Goodness, Nature and Vengeance

fortress-of-solitude-superman

I have written a post about evil lairs and wanted to follow that up with some thoughts on the special domains of superheros.  Of course we are not talking about real heroes here, but the pop culture protagonists of comic books and movies.  My initial impression was that these places were not as interesting as their counterparts evil lairs, as Dante's Inferno is significantly more interesting than Paradiso.  However, some repeating themes in these places are quite intriguing.

Whereas the villain's evil lair is often a secretive place brimming with technology, the hero complex (?) is most often dominated by the natural environment.  It is Nature herself that seems to be the well-spring of the superhero's powers or at least the space created by the natural world becomes both solace and solitude for the world-weary, misunderstood protagonist.

Batcave

Even the Bat Cave, thoroughly techy as it is, is still very much a cave, all dripping stalagtites and gloomy expanses.  Like Superman's Fortress of Solitude, it is within the belly of Mother Earth herself, secretive, mysterious and another world away from the evil urbanity of the city.

Even the most technological of good guys, Ironman's Tony Stark, lives resplendent in nature, perched atop a stony precipice, tapping into the elemental earth, water and sky.

Ironman house

In the latest episode of the Bond franchise we even get a glimpse into 007's maudeline past in a visit, and of course subsequent destruction of, his ancestral home.  No London Regency townhouse of course, but an isolated Scottish manse, surrounded by endless moors and made of the stones of the earth.

Duntrune Castle Skyfall

These are all maybe uniquely American responses to the heroic genesis problem, positing the natural world in a Romantic American viewpoint.  Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory speaks eloquently about these perceptions of nature and the role of the imagination in Western thought.  The villainous bad guys resort to weapons and the lying deceits of mankind, but the superhero's ultimate power resides in Nature, stems from its dark, mysterious elements.  I will step over the Oedipal Mother Nature aspect of this for a future post.

Xavier's mansion

The final photo I have is from X-Men - Xavier's stately mansion set in a typically English park-like setting, maybe the ultimate example of both the fundamental goodness of Nature and a rejection of Modernism, its rationality and anthropocentric dominance.  The X-Men afterall are not from outerspace or even some kind of unique genius, rather they are simply genetic modifications of us, a product of the same biology, same DNA, maybe some other stuff thrown in as well, but certainly not "foriegn" or "unnatural".

The hero is a man(usually) of action, he is not at home in the world of men, in fact, he should avoid the domestic sphere as much as possible as traditionally female roles of nurturing, cooking and cleaning are kryptonite to the male superhero.  He may be seduced by the sexy villainess, but he fights for everything good, apple pie (as long as someone else makes it) and Mom (but no Mamma's boy).

The man-cave trend in recent years has it right - it is not merely a private study, but a den or a cave, ensconced in the earth and the primal forces barely contained within. Where the villain may have a lair of high-tech toys and Modernist hipness, the hero's retreat is associated with nature, part of the Good Earth, unsullied by progress and the creations of mankind.

Boulder Modernists - Tician Papachristou

Sirotkin House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1959, Boulder, Colorado

Another in a series of posts of some of the remarkable architects that were working in Boulder, Colorado in the 1960s.  This was a particularly fruitful time for questioning the basis for especially residential design and Boulder's building boom allowed some of the more talented local architects to experiment with new forms, materials and most notably, new sets of relationships between the house and landscape.

Tician Papachristou briefly taught at the University of Colorado, but his first experiences in Boulder were as a draughtsman for the prolific local architect James Hunter.  As Papachristou eventually opened his own office, his work became increasingly sculptural and his early collaborations with another young Boulder architect, Charles Haertling, were to be greatly influential on the latter's remarkable later career.

Sirotkin House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1959, Boulder, Colorado

There are a pair of houses by Papachristou in the Hill neighborhood just west of the University that were designed as a duet.  The Sirotkin house sits higher to the west and looks out beyond the Jesser house.  The Sirotkin House is a fairly rigorous geometric design that features a series of curving landscape walls that run into the house, joining the interior and exterior.  Unlike the Palm Springs modernist houses which seamlessly flowed interior space with the exterior environment, here in Boulder the weather, although sunny, is quite cold and snowy in the winter.  The melding of architecture and landscape by Papachristou is accomplished by creating walls that start out as landscape retaining walls and at some point turning into house walls.

Jesser House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1959, Boulder, Colorado

Jesser House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1959, Boulder, Colorado

The curvilinear forms of the Jesser House are in stark contrast to the strict orthagonal geometry of the Sampson House designed by Papachristou in 1958.  This long, low house shares the same strategies for integration between landscape and building as the paired Jesser and Sirotkin houses - walls freely move from within the house to across the landscape.  In this case these walls are severely straight, setting up a marked hierarchy with the tilted entry plane that cuts through the house.  The roof forms are all executed as planes and their liminal extension is emphasized by extended rafters and the oddly projecting posts of the tilted wall plane.  This house strikes me as still freshly modern, maybe more so than the previous two houses.

Sampson House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1958, Boulder, Colorado

Sampson House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1958, Boulder, Colorado

A final biographical note about Papachristou:  he was the local architect consulted when the various site locations for the NCAR labs were proposed.  His suggestion of locating them atop the mesa served as the inspiration to the architect of the project, I.M. Pei.  It is hard to imagine that these buildings would have been at all successful but for their dramatic setting.  Pei was suitable impressed with Papachristou and recommended him to the famous Modernist architect Marcel Breuer in New York.  Papachristou went to work for Breuer, leaving Colorado behind - a good move for him albeit a loss for Boulder.

Evil Lairs - the architecture of imaginary bad guys

Strombergs Atlantis The Spy Who Loved Me

Modernism has a mixed reception in the United States.  Especially in residential design, it is equally despised and beloved.  There are loads of historical reasons for this, filling volumes of treatises and endless hand-wringing by architects. I have always felt that it was corporate America's embrace of the industrial aesthetic of Modernism that most distinctly became the focus of opposition for most folks image of  "home".

elrod1

However, as I have been watching the Tour de France coverage recently, one of the oft-repeated commercials depicts Alex Baldwin within the lair of some arch-villain.  Although brief and glimpsing, I am pretty sure the surround, the lair itself, is the recently renovated (but not yet open) TWA Terminal originally designed in all its swooping mid-century elegance by Eero Saarinen in 1956.  And such it is for most evil-genius hideouts - they are triumphantly, arrogantly Modern.

death star bridge

The movie-face of evil chooses Modern digs.  The James Bond movies are the prime example for this, but certainly not the only one.

Building the Paranal Residencia — From Turbulence to Tranquility

Ken Adams, the supremely-talented, architecture-educated set designer for most of the Bond movies placed almost all of Bond's foes in ostentatious Modern environments.

Even deep within Goldfinger's Kentucky horse farm, a kind of Modernist  swinging-bachelor pad lounge houses the villains and mafia cohorts.

Goldfingers lounge

It is not just their high-tech control rooms, but their living spaces as well that baddies like kickin it with their henchmen.

In the end, Bond will inevitably blow up all of these evil lairs as killing the villain is clearly not sufficient to extinguish his evil. The architecture itself, as a co-conspirator to attempted high-tech tyranny, must also be destroyed.  Bond is indeed is Her Majesty's Service, the Arch-Angel Michael, avenging Great Britain and the order of the old world against the nouveau riche excesses of technology and "progress".  Maybe Bond's campaign against Spectre is merely a thinly-veiled attack on Modernism itself, with Prince Charles and Bond extinguishing the consistently foreign, and Modern, foes.

Blofelds lounge You Only Live Twice

The popular culture attack on Modernism is not solely attributable to Bond movies alone.  Hitchcock's 1959 North By Northwest famously serves up another evil lair, Vandamm's Usonian inspired Modernist house.  Is this another attack on Modernism, this depiction clearly the American version, by a Brit?

movie-houses-north-by-northwest-vandamm

The dramatically Modern hideout of villains has of course now become part of the genre and an easy target of some quite funny renditions.

Dr. Evils lair in Austin Powers in Austin Powers Goldmember

Not much to be said of these except that no indications of traditional domesticity are allowed for evil to prosper.

I have grown up with these Bond movies and must admit there is something profoundly satisfying in the inevitably outcome of the total destruction of these environments, the complete erasure of a singular vision of money and power and hubris.

Willard Whites lounge Diamonds are Forever

As a final note, I have long felt that the best evil lair for a bibliophile villain must be Yale's Beinecke Library.  Designed by Gordon Bunshaft, it has all the trappings of that singular, Modernist vision, even to point of allowing no windows to display the less-than-perfect and frankly untidy and traditional, outside world.  You can almost hear the crazed classical organ fugues reverberating through the space.  For as much as the buildings, furniture and fittings of Modernism became the sign of evil genius run amok, the music associated with these movie madmen never strayed to Sinatra or Martin Denny's space age bachelor pad lounge music.  I guess if you need the drama to wipe out much of the human race, you prefer Bach to Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass.

beinecke-2

Yale_University's_Beinecke_Rare_Book_and_Manuscript_Library by Gordon Bunshaft

Up next: the architecture of heros - Goodness, Nature and Vengeance.

Jen Lewin exhibit, CU Art Museum

For a few more weeks there is an interactive light/movement/sound exhibit of some works by Boulder artist Jen Lewin at the CU Art Museum.

The exhibit "It's Electric", has a number of works, all of which beg for interaction from the public.  The largest, poorly photographed by myself above, is a large field of plastic lily pads that have various arrays of lighting colors and patterns.  Walking across the pads, they respond by changing colors and patterns, sometimes simply reacting to your movement, sometimes prompting you, Twister-like, to make the next move.

Another piece looks like a set of fancy pendant lights over a chaise lounge.  The lights dim in a tight pattern as you move around the piece, making your movement cast a kind of reverse shadow on the lights.  The chaise is ironically placed directly below the lights, a icon of placidity and the lack of movement.

There are a few other works that surprise and are at once whimsical and poetic so I won't play the spoiler and describe them.

The CU campus is fairly sleepy as it is summer, but hopefully your visit will be accompanied by enough other visitors that you can see their interactions with the works from a distance.  These works are pleasurable in the most basic, sensory ways that you you can't help but be in wonder at the simple joy of color, light and shadow.  I highly recommend a visit and take a crowd, especially kids, and have fun at the museum.

New Urbanism, 19th century style, Old Louisville

house in Old Louisville, Belgravia court

"New" urbanism has been criticized enough for its slightly ridiculous and myopic name.  It seems that New Urbanism has now transitioned  from an innovative design process to make walkable, more sustainable cities, to a buzz word bandied about by developers to pack more units and more density into even smaller acreage.  I live in a New Urbanist kind of neighborhood that I quite enjoy even if the mix of residential and retail is a bit light on the shops and restaurants.

On a recent trip to my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, I took an opportunity to head downtown to the Old Louisville section of town.  I wrote about this previously in terms of its formation and history, but what really struck me this time were the small pedestrian-access only areas - a series of green lanes and squares which fronted the houses.  And what impressed me the most was how gracious and carefully delineated each of these areas have become.  Certainly the passage of time - these areas are now 100 years old - have eased and softened some edges lending a composed, relaxed air to the formality of the building designs.  But it is the apparently simple things, like the distance between houses, the width of the lanes, the slightly veiled gates to gardens beyond, that are so impressive, carefully handled and now governed with a loving stewardship.

access to fronts of houses, pedestrian walk, Old Louisville

There was a time when all of Old Louisville, and certainly these pedestrian access lanes, was not so nice or well-loved.  Like most of the U.S., urban flight abandoned downtown residential districts and many of the suffered.  These houses which did not sit facing normative streets paid a particularly steep price, being cut up into so many apartments because the auto-centric culture did not value the density or access.

OL house 01

Luckily these well-built structures survived that time, both due to the quality of the architecture and planning, and most likely, because no developer or urban renewal agency had their eye on this part of town.  This district, the Old Louisville Historic District was quickly formed in the 1970's to fend off some of those early demolishing threats and because of those efforts we not only have a section of beautiful, delightful residential housing, but a remarkable demonstration of old New Urbanism.

lawn1

in Louisville

I am spending a week in Louisville with family and I slid out for a bit to take a look at a couple of buildings that I remember fondly from growing up here. The first building is really only a small structure, a park gateway that was located across the street from my Dad's office when I was little.  We only had one car, so on occasion my sister, Mother and I had to come downtown to pick up my Dad.  If we were early or he was still on the phone, we would spend time in this small park across the street, it would be called a pocket park in today's parlance.  The entrance to the little park was on the corner created by a small, white hyperbolic paraboloid.

hyper01

Of course for the early 1970s, this was pretty cool stuff for a kid, sort of space-age and strangely naturalistic at the same time.  It is surprisingly small, maybe 15 feet across and most intriguing for a small boy, you could scramble up is two dropped vertices and sit up in the saddle.  I don't how often we visited this park, but this simple structure made a strong impression on me and I was very glad to see it is still there, a bit in need of some fresh paint, but still gamely holding down that little corner as larger hospital buildings arise across the street.

Hyperbolic paraboloids are particularly fascinating from a construction point of view as these double curving surfaces can be made up from all straight members rotating around a pair of axis.

Hyperbolic-paraboloid

I'm sure I didn't know that then, but when it came time in an architectural structures class to write a research project about a specific project type, in typically geeky fashion, I jumped at the chance to learn a bit more about the shape of the little park sentinel.

image

The other building in Louisville that I felt I had to visit was the downtown main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library.  In fact, it was probably on trips back from the library that we were sitting in the little park waiting on my father to finish something up.  The library looms large in my memory not just as an institution with a world of eye-opening books and an especially fascinating globe in the children's section, but also as a building itself.  Even though a much more modern addition had been added on moving the main entrance away from this neo-classical facade, my memories are filled with hanging out amongst these fluted columns.

lfpl02

Like fluted stone columns anywhere, they are oddly hard and unforgiving and yet smooth and tactile sensuous.  But just looking at them reminds me that it was the coolness of the stone, especially in the concave shadowy flutes, that I found most satisfying.

The interior of the building has changed a lot, the children's section sensibly moved to ground level.  However, with that move kids no longer have to tread up the cool marble stair, holding on to the over-wrought iron rails and gaze incomprehensibly at the frescoes of Froebel and Herodotus.

image (1)

I guess this made a trip to the library a fairly solemn affair, but I don't remember them as such, maybe their frequency muted the stoic marble and vaguely military iron railings.

Of course it only occurs to me now that these two structures were in some ways so different and yet so alike.  I could write a number of comparisons and contrasts, metaphors of their style and construction that were so instructive to a budding architect or subconsciously absorbed to later bloom in drawings and models.  That however is mere projection, more an outcome of too many seminars and graduate school presumptions.  These buildings were part of a weekly circuit of my family, encountered by chance and remembered through repetition.  In my own self-absorbed way however, I am awfully glad they are still with us.