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".

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Yale_University's_Beinecke_Rare_Book_and_Manuscript_Library by Gordon Bunshaft

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Colorado

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Photos by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

The Stones, Pablo Neruda

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In celebration of National Poetry Month, Pablo Neruda's The Stones:

Stones, boulders, crags ... Perhaps they were

fragments of a deafening explosion.  Or stalagmites that were

once submerged, or hostile fragments of the full moon, or

quartz that changed destiny, or statues that time and the wind

broke into pieces or kneaded into shapes, or figureheads of

motionless ships, or dead giants that were transmuted, or

golden tortises, or imprisoned stars, or ground swells as thick

as lava which suddenly became still, or dreams of the previous

earth, or the warts of another planet, or granite sparks that

stood still, or bread for furious ancestors, or the bleached bones

of another land, or enemies of the sea in their bastions, or

simply stone that is rugged, sparkling, grey, pure and heavy so

that you may construct, with iron and wood, a house in the

sand.

Pablo Neruda, The Stone

from The House in the Sand

translated by Dennis Maloney & Clark Zlotchew

Project photos by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

M. Gerwing Architects anniversary

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M. Gerwing Architects has been in existence for six years as of April 1st. No foolin'. In that time we have executed a number of interesting projects, ones that benefited from that remarkable alchemy of open-minded clients, intriguing sites and managed budgets.

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(Photos of projects by Boulder architect M. Gerwing Architects) Of course, along the way, like most practices, we have seen a few projects that did not get built. This is sometimes due to the vagaries of the national economy, sometimes a change of mind on the client's part, but most often it is evidence of never really finding the proper alignment of a property owner's goals and their budget. Nine times out of ten we can identify this within the first week or so of a project, but at times it is more elusive and only reveals itself further down the line.

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So while I am proud of our achievements over the last six years, it is difficult for me to simply shake off the vision of the projects that might have been.

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It is however in the nature of architects to look to the future. We are charged with imagining a thing-yet-to-be, a vision of not just a building, but the lives lived within it, the human drama that our buildings set the scene, draw out the landscape, create the stage for the action to ensue.

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