The Excitement is Building

The answer to these questions varies from film to film. Architecture per se plays no pivotal role in Jungle Fever, Clifford or Quicksand, where the main characters might just as well be pension-fund managers, real estate appraisers or executive editors at cutting-edge West Coast magazines. But powerful architectural motifs dominate all the other films. In Dream Lover, James Spader works in a large, handsome building with vast stretches of empty space inside. Clearly, the film is hinting, Spader has designed his workplace in the spitting image of his own personality. The Belly of an Architect opens with a lavish banquet in front of the Roman Pantheon, where we see a cake shaped like one of Boullée's designs. The dome on the cake is round and vast, not unlike the Roman Pantheon, and not entirely unlike Brian Dennehy. Fittingly. Dennehy's wife notes that back home in Chicago one of her husband's designs was popularly known as the Slaughterhouse, because "it was a building suffering from excess cholesterol."

Architectural themes also surface in Fearless, where Jeff Bridges is seen immediately after the plane accident in a motel: a cheap, inexpensive structure that illustrates the transient quality of life. Architecture is an important part of Indecent Proposal, where Woody Harrelson's success in landing a job as an architecture professor shows that our universities are in much deeper trouble than any of us had previously suspected. Architecture is extremely important in The River Wild, where David Strathairn is so busy diagramming buildings out in the bush that he fails to notice the attention lavished on his wife, Meryl Streep, by white-watering psychopath Kevin Bacon. And architectural themes play a major role in HouseSitter, where Steve Martin has built a big. stupid, pretentious architectural mess that symbolizes his inability to make intelligent decisions. "I like the way you've used the negative space," Martin tells Hawn when he visits her apartment So, apparently, does Kurt Russell.

The most subtle architectural themes of all surface in Sleepless in Seattle. In the opening scene, we see a somber Tom Hanks at his wife's funeral. The funeral seems to be taking place in the countryside somewhere. But then the camera pulls back and Chicago's stunning skyline rears up in the background. Chicago is the home of Louis Sullivan, one of the greatest American architects of all time. Then, as the movie progresses, the story is increasingly dominated by the New York skyline, most particularly by the Empire State Building, even though Hanks is living in Seattle and Meg Ryan is quarantined in Baltimore. In the history of motion pictures, I can think of no more savage repudiation of the architectural traditions of two municipalities than this. By artfully counter-balancing a moribund but once thriving East Coast city with a thriving but vapid West Coast city, yet choreographing events so that the film's romantic resolution takes place atop the Empire Slate Building in New York City. Nora Ephron seems to be constructing a massive, bicoastal, architectural diss: You can find work in Baltimore and you can start a new career in Seattle. But you won't find love in either of them. And you certainly won't find a skyline.

Yet, of all the movies we have cited, the one where architecture plays the most pivotal role is Intersection. Intersection, which is teeming with visually compelling architectural elements, is probably the only movie ever made in which an actor of Gere's stature confesses to his co-star that the "fenestration" in his latest project isn't quite up to snuff. He then has to explain to Davidovich, no I.M. Pei buff she, what the term "fenestration" means--info that seems to go right out the window with this dunce.

One question begging for an answer is why we should witness an explosion of films dealing with architects in the 1990s when relatively few movies dealt with the profession in the previous 75 years. Why? Simple. The reason there have been so few serious, thoughtful movies about architects in the history of motion pictures is because of the long shadow cast by King Vidor's 1949 epic The Fountainhead. After The Fountainhead appeared, the public was so terrified of films about architects that few dared touch the subject for al-most 40 years, Until now.

The Fountainhead, based on the hugely successful novel by the popular crypto fascist Ayn Rand, is one of the weirdest movies ever to come out of Hollywood. One of the things that makes it so strange is that it is a movie that is almost entirely about architecture. The other thing that makes it so strange is that it features horse-opera matinee idol Gary Cooper as the architect. Yup, Frank Lloyd Coop.

The Fountainhead opens with the Coop-meister, not very convincing as an intellectual and even less convincing as a young, rebellious intellectual, getting kicked out of architecture school because of his iconoclasm. He soon lands a job with a maverick architect whose motto is: "The form of a building must follow its function." Then the old coot has a heart attack while gazing at New York's skyline and dies. After 18 months without a commission, Coop lands a job designing a super-modern bank building. But the bank officers insist that he mongrelize his project by inserting a Greek temple on the ground floor and some other frills. Cooper tells them to stick it in their ears.

Alas, it is Coop's ear into which the proverbial "it" is stuck. Turned away everywhere, blacklisted and shunned, he is forced to seek work operating a pneumatic drill in a stone quarry. While blasting away, Coop's muscular forearms draw the attention of his female employer (Patricia Neal), who happens to be the Number Two architecture critic for a newspaper called the New York Banner, which is obviously supposed to be the New York Daily News. The woman, who never goes anywhere without a riding crop, keeps having flashbacks about those bronzed forearms, though what she's really angling for is a fast rip with that jackhammer.

Neal's wooing technique is direct, if a mite unorthodox. Attired in a man's shirt, a tie, tight jodhpurs and a riding crop, she visits Coop at the stone quarry and gets into an argument about his perceived insolence. But she soon gets over that and invites him up to the house to repair her fireplace. Coop inspects the premises, then delivers a lengthy discourse on the aesthetic qualities of various types of marble, ultimately explaining why the fireplace makes him puke. Eventually, he gets a bit fresh and she whacks him one across the face with the riding crop.

Incidentally, Neal's character is named Dominique.

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