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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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

Barn interior 01

house interior 01

house exterior 01

house interior 02

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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