Architects in film

Today sees the general release of Deyan Sudjic’s How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?, a documentary on the life and work of Norman Foster, probably the most successful architect alive today.

The film takes its title from an ecological question posed to Foster by Buckminster Fuller, the eccentric architectural visionary who was once his friend and mentor. It explores Foster’s tremendous body of work and discusses the ideologies that drove the designs, visiting iconic projects such as the Gherkin and the Reichstag along the way.

However, it is also revealing in the way it sheds light on Foster’s personal as well as professional life. We see the child-like enthusiasm with which he plays with a model boat with his young son, and its most poignant scenes show him speaking candidly of the death of his first wife, Wendy, and his own battle with health problems in recent years.

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster? follows hot on the heels of 2003’s critically acclaimed My Architect, a blisteringly raw and personal account of a son’s attempt to understand the dead father he never knew, in this case legendary American architect Louis Kahn. Both films therefore are crucial in helping humanise and demystify architects and shed light on a profession that for much of the general public remains shrouded in anonymity.

Significantly, the two films are both documentaries. But fiction can often be as revealing as fact and cinema, like architecture, acts as a dynamic cultural lens through which society projects an image of itself. Compared with lawyers or doctors, for instance, architects make relatively few appearances in films. And of course dramas, unlike documentaries, chiefly exist to entertain rather than inform. Nevertheless, each on-screen architect provides a tantalising glimpse of how the profession is perceived in popular culture and ultimately, by society as a whole.

So here we pick five fictional architects from the world of film and see how close perception comes to reality.

The Fountainhead: Warner Bros., 1949

If ever there was a fictional architect whom most architects would secretly aspire to be, Howard Roark is it. In the eponymous Ayn Rand novel on which the film is based, Roark is loosely modelled on Frank Lloyd Wright. On celluloid he is brought to life by legendary screen idol Gary Cooper, who, along with James Stewart and Gregory Peck is probably the most virtuous character actor Hollywood has ever produced.

Accordingly, Roark is principled and incorruptible, an enigmatic genius waging a valiant moral crusade against the twin evils of corporate oppression and ideological totalitarianism. Even his name sounds reassuringly impregnable. Howard Roark does not strive for profit but for freedom and justice - he is basically Jack Bauer with a set-square.

Although The Fountainhead was made in the forties, many of the issues Roark grapples with are still acutely relevant to architects today: fashion vs non-conformity, ethics vs profit, tradition vs modernity, individuality vs collectivism. Crucially it also casts Roark in a role architects rarely find themselves playing: the hero. And he’s a sex symbol to boot.

But the key to Roark’s enduring appeal lies not only in his indubitable honour and integrity, but also in his flaws. He is stubborn, egotistical, idealistic and arrogant. “I don’t care what the public thinks about architecture,” he booms.

“I don’t build in order to have clients, I have clients in order to build.” Most memorably, when rivals interfere with the design of his project he blows up the construction site. All of which, good and bad, enables Roark to achieve a depth of characterisation that resonates powerfully with popular perceptions of architects.

Buoyed by the film’s ability to provoke stirring philosophical debate, Roark remains the most compelling cinematic depiction of an architect to date.

White Noise: Universal, 2005

Architects rarely make appearances in horror films, presumably because for many of them, the genre is far too close to reality. Michael Keaton sets the record straight in this initially intriguing Vancouver-based shocker. Like Liam Neeson’s drooling draughtsman in Love Actually (2003), Keaton plays a recently widowed architect grieving over the loss of his wife. We know he’s an architect because he lives in a slick, if soulless, concrete bunker that appears to be a joint venture between Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and DFS.

Keaton is approached by a mysterious man who claims he has been contacted by the dead wife via EVP (electronic voice phenomena), a paranormal phenomenon that involves the transmission of the voices and faces of the dead through TV and radio static. Predictably, it is not long before the film descends into higher Hollywood lunacy.

Keaton’s characterisation, however, does reveal a stereotype that appears to be more prevalent within American society than our own: the successful corporate architect. Keaton wears suits, drives an expensive car, lives in a flash apartment and, initially at least, appears suave and sophisticated. Here, the architect is firmly placed in the businessman (as opposed to artist) camp. However, other than this, unless we view the film as a supernatural allegory that depicts architects being besieged by shady antagonists from the project team, or in this case voices from the grave, it sheds little light on how architects are perceived, other than the fact that they might harbour obsessive tendencies, as implied by Keaton’s psychological immersion into the world of EVP. And of course, it does provide definitive proof as to why it’s always important to engage an architect. If anybody ever needs convincing of the perils of doing otherwise, watch Keaton-free and unreservedly moronic White Noise 2: The Light (2007).

Inception: Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures, 2010

Last year’s mind-bending blockbuster very nearly did something that no other film has ever been able to do before: make architects look cool. For one thing, the architect here is sexy, young and (astonishingly!) female. Even more remarkably, Ellen Page’s Ariadne barely bats an eyelid when cerebral interloper Leonardo DiCaprio essentially hires her to design a dream. Naturally, as she is still a student, we can only assume that her spirit and imagination have not yet been crushed by the inevitable cycle of despair and disappointment that awaits her upon qualification.

Early in the film DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb visits his lecturer father-in-law in France and, without a hint of irony, asks for “his best and brightest student”. We know it is France because a sketch of Brunelleschi’s Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence is visible on the blackboard. Whereas anyone who has been subjected to an architectural education in England since 1990 is far more likely to have been lectured on the Highway Code than classical domes.

Ariadne’s luscious dreamscapes quickly prove that her tutor’s confidence was more than justified. Without so much as pirated copy of AutoCAD she can make Paris fold in on itself like urban origami. She can summon quasi-brutalist alpine ski lodges brimming with sixties Bond-villain chic. And in the film’s most stunning sequence, she crafts a stylish hotel suite that floats as if suspended in space.  

That the fruits of Ariadne’s labours often turn out to be monumentally depressing isn’t the point. Her anodyne, rain sodden version of downtown Los Angeles is hardly the Emerald City. Equally, Cobb’s attempt at masterplanning becomes a crumbling coastal high-rise dystopia. Even more annoyingly, we are invited to believe that Ariadne is capable of creating cityscapes of meticulous detail with little more than what appear to be a couple of 1:500 polystyrene models and some tracing paper. Ariadne is clearly more interested in product than process but to be brutally honest, which architect isn’t?

Nevertheless, what Ariadne does prove is that architecture is not about creating fantastical, Dali-esque landscapes. It is simply about making the ordinary extraordinary. In so doing she reaffirms what has remained the principal fascination of architecture for architects and laypeople alike for centuries: its infinite creative possibilities and its enormous power to transform our environment and exhilarate or crush the human spirit in the process. Her efforts therefore enable Inception to stand as the most visceral cinematic exploration of the power of urban landscape to drive a dramatic narrative and demand an emotional response since David Fincher’s phenomenal Se7en (1995).

Indecent Proposal: Paramount, 1993

Woody Harrelson’s hapless, lovelorn architect in this preposterous 1993 melodrama is arguably the closest Hollywood has come to a realistic portrayal of an everyday member of the profession: pitiful, powerless and poor. Harrelson’s David Murphy begins the film in promising form, identifying within minutes the required attitude for a career in architecture: “A life without risk is like no life at all”. But such prescience deserts him entirely when he agrees to let his wife sleep with billionaire businessman Robert Redford for $1m. Unsurprisingly it is not long before Murphy is left alone nursing nothing more than asinine reflections on Louis Kahn and a cardboard model of the film’s genuinely indecent proposal: his dream house.

In short, Murphy is portrayed as so weak a character that Howard Roark would have been forced to pummel him into aggregate with his bare hands on sight. Yes, he is sensitive and artistic, recurring stereotypes where architects are concerned. But he is also depicted as a victimised dreamer of poor judgment, qualities too that may well marry with popular perceptions. Moreover, he embraces the role of human doormat with a conviction that one suspects neither the audience nor producers would expect of a lawyer or politician.

Despite strenuous efforts to the contrary, there is one other significant area where Murphy’s predicament resonates with reality: his portrayal of an architect whose life is destroyed by the recession. He loses his job, his home and his wife as a result and it is his dire finances that compel him to make the Faustian carnal pact around which the film revolves. Sadly, it is this all too topical depiction of an architect driven to loneliness and desperation, rather than the ludicrous storyline, that brings the film one step closer to the post-modern capitalist parable it is so desperately trying to be.

The Towering Inferno: Warner Bros./Twentieth Century Fox, 1974

Which architect wouldn’t want to be played by Paul Newman? In 1974 the irrepressibly cool Hollywood legend donned his hard-hat for The Greatest Disaster Movie of Them All. Like all the best disaster films, the premise is childishly simple: in San Francisco, the tallest building in the world (a pre-Burj Khalifa 138 storeys) catches fire on its opening night. Released just months after the opening of the observation deck on the world’s then-tallest building (Sears, now Willis Tower), the film was based on novels inspired by the recent construction of New York’s World Trade Centre. Filming also finished on 11 September 1974.

Eerie brushes with reality aside; the film is pure white-knuckle fantasy. It also (thankfully) reveals how far building codes have progressed since the seventies. Firemen happily instruct panicking guests to exit the burning building via lifts. Fleeing party-goers plunge to their deaths through plate-glass windows rather than safety glass. Paul Newman’s architect has an intimate knowledge of electrical wiring. And in the film’s last and greatest line, surly fire chief Steve McQueen growls to Newman: “You know, one of these days, you’re gonna kill 10,000 in one of these firetraps and I’m gonna keep eating smoke and carrying out bodies until someone asks us how to build them.” Steve McQueen had clearly never heard of Part B of the Building Regulations.

The prickly tension between Newman and McQueen throughout the film not only reflects their off-screen animosity (this was their first and only film together) but the architect’s frequent real-life position as construction industry punch-bag. In an earlier exchange between the two, Newman sighs sarcastically, “yeah, it’s all our fault”. Actually, it wasn’t. The cause of all the mayhem was the electrical engineer and his dodgy specifications. And who says art doesn’t imitate life?