Malcolm is an Australian film released in 1986. I’ve been thinking about it for years. Maybe it automatically rates because it is full of homemade Rube Goldberg machines and nerd contraptions, because I grew up around those, but there’s also the enjoyable fact that they’re all produced by a naive and strangely appealing mechanical savant played by Colin Friels. Sadly, scenes of the contraption which brings in his mail and boils his egg can’t be found on YouTube but you can get the movie here.Malcolm won the 1986 Australian Film Institute Award for Best Film.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, has probably appeared in more Hollywood films than any other notable modern house and has also been heavily used for ad and fashion shoots, music videos and television. The house is currently for sale at US$15 million, hence these new photos by Tim Street-Porter for Christie’s Great Estates. The building is strange enough on its own – Mayan temple meets Arts & Crafts meets deco meets baronial – without the additional fact that it posed as Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner. Living in this house would be - well, you’d be an actor in someone else’s movie. The exteriors of Wright’s houses are unarguably impressive, but the style of the interiors, which Wright designed and decorated himself, seem stylistically confused and – despite all the natural light – weirdly ornate and heavy. Unless one has been inside a house one isn’t really supposed to comment, and of course architectural photographs, no matter how good, never give a true impression of a place. But the historical styles and references of Wright’s interiors are plainly evident from photographs, and by any standards they’re a very odd mix. The Ennis House interior suggests the palatial, the hobbity, the occult and the medieval all at once; it’s a bizarre hybrid of Arts & Craft leaded glass, concrete tiles molded in a deliberately pre-columbian style (“textile blocks”), persian carpets, Alhambra-ish wrought iron chandeliers and chairs, and heavy furniture in both early Renaissance and English medieval styles. Personally I would have just limited myself to Mayan temple. I sympathize with Wright’s interest in craft, artisanal excellence, and the kind of painstaking hand-production that references the land and environment, but these virtues can belong to any number of aesthetic styles. Why this medley of styles in particular, why this Lord of the Rings grandeur - in the middle of LA? It’s sort of a megalomaniac architectural fantasy and it’s no wonder so many Hollywood films have been shot at the house, particularly films on the noirish end of the moral continuum. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been shot here, further belying Wright’s quasi-spiritual intentions for the house. See below for a long but not exhaustive list of movies filmed in the house, compiled by a moderator on pushpullbar as part of an interesting thread on architecture in the movies. It’s a fairly sombre list.
Both photos above from Blade Runner, 1982, via loftlifemag.
More films shot in the house (additional photos to be added… please check back):
Female, aka The Violent Years (1956)
House on Haunted Hill (1958)
Terminal Man (1974)
Day of the Locust (1974)
Blade Runner (1982)
The Howling II . . . Your Sister is a Werewolf (1984)
The Annihilator (1986)
TimeStalker (1987)
Remo Williams (1987)
Karate Kid III (1989)
Black Rain (1989)
Twin Peaks (1989)
Calvin Klein’s Obsession, commercial by David Lynch (1990)
Predator 2 (1990)
Grand Canyon (1991)
An Inconvenient Woman (2 part TVM 1991)
The Rocketeer (1991)
Fallen Angels (1993)
Murder, Obliquely (1993)
The Glimmer Man (1996)
House of Frankenstein (1997)
Rush Hour (1998)
The Replacement Killers (1998)
The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
I’ll admit right off the bat that this is not strictly an architecture post; it’s technically a moment of retro 70s nostalgia. The 1976 movie Logan’s Run, a dark sci-fi dystopia about escape from a domed post-apocalyptic society which euthanizes its citizens at age 30, completely occupied my late childhood imagination. The movie was shot entirely in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas and most of the film’s key action takes place in the “Great Hall,” which turns out to be the fairly bizarre and also recently demolished Dallas Market Center Apparel Mart, not a great piece of architecture but one that did conveniently feature a quasi-sci-fi interior. If someone has the correct terminology for this style of interior, please advise – my guess is 60s mall rendition of Corbusier, Notre Dame du Haut era. The novel the film is based on was written at the height of 60s youth culture and student unrest, and it was explicitly written with a screenplay in mind. Though it was published in 1967, like Dune the process of turning the novel into a film was fraught with problems, and by the time the film was made, the decor and costumes were reflecting the 70s. The film’s commentaries on totalitarianism, a Brave New World-style docile populace distracted by pleasures, and youth-oriented culture are pretty heavy-handed, but I loved it when I saw it around age 12, too young to notice how wooden Michael York’s acting was but not young enough to avoid total infatuation.
Above, scenes from the film. Below, the mart as it was in reality and then during its demolition. Its destruction is strangely fitting considering the film’s ending. Oddly, the building is part of the vast trade complex JFK was headed for when he was assassinated – he was on his way to a luncheon for 2400 people, in a setup very similar to the one shown below. This particular part of the complex, however, was built a year later, in 1964.
All photos and information in this post are from racprops, aintitcool and snowcrest. The film’s “Love Shop” (image at top, with the odd, oozing brown leather seating, and the mall shot with somewhat anatomical neon sign) was the Oz Restaurant/Nightclub in Dallas. Other locations: Sandman HQ was Zales’ International Headquarters; the Sandman gym was the Arlington Health Center and the living units were the Burton Park Building. The video below was a long promotional trailer for the film intended as a preview for theatre owners, and it gives a sense of the futuristic 70s sets and costumes.
I’m not sure where the strange compulsion to assemble this inventory comes from but it’s hard to stop, especially when people start adding their suggestions to the list. The house above was suggested by swedestralian. It’s by architect Jeff Kovel of Skylab Architecture for Nike executive John Hoke and his family and appeared in the 2008 film Twilight. swedestralian also suggested The Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry, below, which as everybody has probably noticed made a key appearance in 2008’s Get Smart:
The climax of the atrocious Get Smart unfolds here, and while I’m not a huge fan of this building, I can only imagine the ambivalence Gehry must have felt if he saw the movie.
The much-photographed Villa Malaparte by Adalberto Libera, on the island of Capri, appeared in Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt). That’s Brigitte Bardot on the roof.
The Guggenheim Museum (New York), designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1959, appeared in 2009’s The International. It was suggested by archdaily via twitter, who also suggested the Mies van der Rohe towers in Chicago, which appeared in Batman. I haven’t seen the new Batman movie, but boerhaus says that the two Chicago Mies vander Rohe buildings in the film are the IBM Plaza (1973), which was the site of the Wayne Enterprises Boardroom, Harvey Dent’s office, the Mayor’s office and the Police Commissioner’s office, and One Illinois Center (1970), which became the main living area of Bruce Wayne’s new penthouse. The building at center below is One Illinois Center, by photographer Lee Bey.
IBM Plaza, below.
Feel free to send in your suggestions. Unless otherwise noted all photos are from Flickr, with the exception of the shots of Villa Malaparte from Wikipedia.
This list, inspired by an interesting thread on pushpullbar, is a small selection of great modern buildings that have appeared in 20th C film. Above, Charles Deaton’s Sculpture House, which appeared in Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper. All photos gratefully borrowed from Flickr.
Ricardo Bofill apartment building, seen in Terry Gilliam’s 1975 film Brazil.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, 1924, has appeared in the following films: The House on Haunted Hill, 1958; The Day of the Locust, 1975; Blade Runner, 1982; Black Rain, 1989.
Neutra’s Lovell House, above, appeared in LA Confidential, 1998.
John Lautner’s Elrod House of 1968. The 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever was shot here, shortly after the house was built.
John Lautner’s Chemosphere of 1960. Appeared in Body Double, 1984.
And finally, Corbusier’s Villa Savoie, which appeared in the film French Postcards, 1979.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay about the strange, hybrid, and surprisingly impure histories of objects and buildings. It is skewed toward the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, it's the same upside-down as right-side-up, it refers to both zeros and ones, and it is pronounced uno. My name is Lindsay and I'm open to your complaints, disagreement or general crankiness. Free free to comment or email. This is an anti-intellectualism-free zone and around here we don't try to dampen critique by calling it negativity or whining. We call it thought!
