B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Howard Roark is, up to a point, a plausible-enough name for an architect, but I am less convinced by Stourley Kracklite, the lard-tub protagonist of Peter Greenaway’s Belly of an Architect, played by Brian Dennehy. Gary Cooper’s Roark in King Vidor’s schlockfest The Fountainhead (based on Ayn Rand’s novel of the same title) is a picture of toned muscle and angst, handy with a rock drill and brutal in his wooing of the boss’s daughter, Dominique Francon, when he takes a job as a day labourer in a quarry. Dennehy’s Kracklite comes fully equipped with a waistline that authentically overwhelms his belt in the manner pioneered by the twenty-something-stone James Stirling. They are both films that have always fascinated me. In the case of The Fountainhead, it’s not so much Roark, a tortured genius somewhere between Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, that was the special attraction, although it’s hard not to warm to an architect who, rather than see his work compromised by lesser talents, breaks into the building site and lays the dynamite charges to blow it up, appalled at the decorative frills that lesser hands have tacked on to the sheer walls of his thrusting tower. Even if you might not want to actually hire him, he gets your attention. But what makes The Fountainhead irresistible is that its villain-in-chief is an architecture critic. The silkily evil Ellsworth Toohey is portrayed undermining his proprietor by luring away his star columnists, and inciting his readers against Roark. If only.

Kracklite, even without the same virile menace as Gary Cooper, was equally fascinating as a kind of awful warning of the worst things that can happen to a curator. I saw the film when, much like Kracklite, I was curating an architectural exhibition in Italy. In his case, it was on the subject of Étienne-Louis Boullée in Rome. For me it was the Venice Architecture Biennale, although I managed to get through the experience without being poisoned, which was more than Kracklite did, even if the undercurrents of architectural politics at the biennale had a somewhat sinister reputation. ‘Be careful of the people of the lagoon,’ Renzo Piano told me. ‘On the surface it’s all sunshine, but below the water they bite.’

Cinema and architecture, on and off screen, have a relationship that goes back a long way, and which is both superficial and profound. Half a century before Brad Pitt started hanging around Frank Gehry’s studio, and working on sustainable low-cost houses for New Orleans, Alfred Hitchcock was already fascinated by architecture. He filmed it, he designed it, he evoked it. North by Northwest, a film that I can watch again and again, is full of architecture, starting with Saul Bass’s titles, which begin as an abstract grid that is gradually revealed as Wallace Harrison’s glazed façade of the UN building in Manhattan. In the film, you see Hitchcock’s version of the UN’s lobby, recreated in a Hollywood studio, which through the lens looks much like the kind of buildings Zaha Hadid is designing today (she confesses a weakness for North by Northwest). Later in the narrative, there is the Vandamm house, allegedly in North Dakota, which looks more like Frank Lloyd Wright than Frank Lloyd Wright, but which was actually a set built by Hitchcock. Camille Paglia pointed out Hitchcock’s continuing architectural obsessions years ago, even if the nearest that he came to an architectural hero was Eva Marie Saint’s industrial designer. The architectural critic Steven Jacobs documents Hitchcockian architecture in minute detail. Jacobs has painstakingly examined, shot by shot, all of Hitchcock’s key domestic interiors, and used his research to draw each of their floor plans. He published the results as a book entitled The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. It’s an exercise that shows the precise point at which physical reality overlaps with dreamlike images, and demonstrates the unpredictable interaction between the kind of spaces that can exist only in film and those that are more physical and can be realized in the architectural world.

We know what the flat in the Maida Vale crescent that is the setting for Dial M for Murder ought to look like on the basis of the exterior shots. Jacobs’s drawings show that the simple orthogonal plan, implied by how the spaces looked through the camera lens, would actually have had to have been overlaid by wedge-shaped projections that were required to achieve the shots that Hitchcock wanted in his films. Two different forms of architectural notation create what appears to be a version of the same implied architectural experience, but which demand a different physical plan.

There are other connections between film and architecture worth pursuing. They are activities that require both introversion and extroversion of their practitioners. To design a building, just as to make a film, demands a creative impulse as well as the business acumen to assemble the necessary finance, and the personality to stand on a building site or a film set and impose their will on sceptical construction workers, actors and crew.

What is not always clear is the precise terms of the comparison. Is the architect playing the part of director, or of the star - the headline name that can get a development funded, in the same way that signing up Colin Firth or George Clooney can green-light a film? It does happen occasionally when a developer, looking for a degree of visibility or an easy planning consent, commissions Norman Foster or Frank Gehry, and the bankers come up with the mezzanine finance to build a business park or a block of flats or a skyscraper on the strength of that architect’s involvement. But a more plausible analogy for the architect is with the script writer, whose work is written and rewritten until everything that made it distinctive has dissolved under layer upon layer of mush.

Simply because a film has an architectural theme does not necessarily mean that it will tell us much about architecture. Watching a life-size replica of the spiral at the heart of the Guggenheim Museum getting obliterated in a firestorm of automatic gunfire in the beyond-dire thriller The International is more architectural product placement than spatial insight. Michael Caine’s walk-on performance as an architecture professor at the beginning of Inception is no more helpful as an insight into the mother of the arts than the random job description of Woody Harrelson’s character as an architect in Indecent Proposal.

It’s not simply a question of the distinction between art house and blockbuster. Both can cast light on architecture. My Architect, the art-house documentary, tells you a lot about the inner life of the son of an architect, and the architecture that ultimately deprived Nathaniel Kahn of his father, Louis, the revered American architect responsible for Bangladesh’s Parliament building and the Yale Center for British Art, who managed to combine modernity with monumentalism. It is a sharply observed, witty film in which Nathaniel scrutinizes his father’s life with a forgiving, sad, sweet eye, assessing his shortcomings and his creative achievements. It is also an emotional rollercoaster as Kahn asks his two half-sisters, his mother, his father’s surviving lover, his aunts and an assortment of taxi drivers, rabbis, former employees, clients, critics, famous architects and, most of all himself, a series of searching, impossible questions.

Louis Kahn had a complex relationship with Harriet Pattison, Nathaniel’s mother. He would arrive, announced only by a last-minute phone call, at her house once a week. He would play with his son on the lawn, stay for lunch and dinner, and drink a chilled martini or two. Then Harriet would drive him into town and drop him at the end of a darkened street, with Nathaniel, wrapped under a blanket, watching as his father vanished into the night, back to his wife. Kahn does not spare us his mother’s humiliation at his father’s hands. The door to her office at the studio would be locked when Kahn’s wife visited. She had to cajole Kahn’s secretary to find out where he was. She was crossed off the guest list for the opening of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, one of the greatest triumphs of Kahn’s career, where she was responsible for the landscaping.

After leaving Yale, where he studied philosophy, and finding himself continually exploring the monumental spaces of the two art galleries his father designed for the campus, Nathaniel Kahn became an actor. He recognizes his father’s self-dramatizing tendencies in himself. ‘He was always playing the part of an architect; his outfit was a bit of a costume,’ he says of his father’s trademark floppy bow tie and occasional cape. ‘ “You know, even when I get a haircut, I’m an architect,” he would say. That says so much about my father’s sense of identity. Architecture was more than a profession for him. It was, in the romantic sense, a calling. And, in a practical sense, it helped with the ladies; it’s an enormously attractive profession to have.’

Nathaniel brings his mother to the edge of tears when he asks her why she never married. He sits down with his two half-sisters to talk about their father’s funeral, at which they met for the first time, and from which Louis Kahn’s wife tried to exclude two of his children and their mothers. ‘I wonder if that really is true,’ muses her daughter, hinting at years of anger and betrayal.

There are unbearable moments. Nathaniel meets the site architect of a research laboratory his father designed for Jonas Salk, the discoverer of the polio vaccine. ‘Did you know my father well?’ asks Kahn lightly. ‘Oh yes, he used to spend Christmases at home with us, playing with my kids.’ The camera stays on Kahn’s face. You see him jolted, white-faced, as if reeling from a slap, but not missing a beat.

At one point, Nathaniel reads to camera what he calls the first letter that he has written to his father after all these years. ‘Did you ever really mean to come up to Maine to spend the holidays with us, or was it just something that you said to get my mother off the phone? Because I have to tell you, Lou, that we waited for you.’ Despite everything, My Architect is neither a bitter nor an angry film, and nor are the people in it. It paints a lyrical and affectionate picture of Louis Kahn, just five foot six inches tall and terribly disfigured by burn scars from his childhood in Estonia, his fingers black with charcoal from his drawings. In one memorable sequence, Nathaniel Kahn goes rollerblading in languid, effortless loops across the sublime courtyard of the Salk Institute. Kahn’s architecture seems to hang over the lip of the Pacific, water trickling across its courtyard, and his son looks like a small boy showing off a new skill to his father. The film shows archive footage of Louis Kahn with his students, sitting on a table, hanging on his every word as he delivers his most famous aphorism about the need for an architect to listen to the brick and ask it what it wants to be: ‘Hello, brick.’ ‘The brick business was embarrassing for me. The kids in my class in high school, when they really wanted to annoy me, they would go and put an ear to a wall and go, “Shhh, I’m listening to the bricks,” ’ says Nathaniel.

Hollywood producer Joel Silver (who collects Frank Lloyd Wright houses the way some people collect vintage cars) represents the blockbuster end of the depiction of architectural space, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Nathaniel Kahn. In the first two Die Hard franchises, he took his audience deep into the entrails of skyscrapers and airports, to demonstrate how buildings and complex spaces work, drawing a much less two-dimensional portrait of them than he achieved of his human character with Bruce Willis.

In the Australian thriller Heatwave, director Phillip Noyce provided another take on The Fountainhead. Richard Moir plays Steve West, an idealistic but ambitious architect with a ruthless property-developer client, on the verge of his breakthrough project, a housing complex called Eden, in a run-down part of Sydney. ‘Why are you doing this?’ asks the community activist, played by Judy Davis, who is trying to stop the project from demolishing her neighbourhood. ‘Because if I didn’t do it, somebody with half my ability would.’ Later, West echoes Roark: ‘It’s not what I designed.’ In real life perhaps, most architects would be more cautious about spelling out such unshakable self-confidence, no matter how much of it they might possess.

Some films can capture a shift in architectural mood even before architects are aware of it. Bladerunner really did detonate an interest in dystopia, and an exploration of the city of the future as messy and dark with machines dripping steam, and backstreet DNA analysts. It became the subject of seminars and conferences at architecture schools around the world. Others, such as Antony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering, manage to convey something of the essential nature of city life, in the way that a city is multilayered, an environment in which very different groups of people exist side by side in the same space but hardly acknowledge each other’s existence. Jude Law’s landscape architect has his office in a sandblasted brick warehouse in the midst of London’s King’s Cross redevelopment, which by night is overtaken by Albanian drug dealers and Nigerian cleaners.

It’s not the film namechecks or the plotlines that can really tell us something new about architecture any more than Frank Sinatra’s portrayal of Sam Laker, furniture-designer-turned-hitman, tells us about Charles Eames - even if Laker’s studio is set in what later became Jeffry Archer’s apartment. Of course, there is a certain narcissistic flutter when Maria Schneider in Michaelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger makes her appearance as an architecture student - would anybody else be discovered lurking in quick succession both outside the brutalist raw concrete of the Brunswick Centre in London, and on the roof of Gaudí’s La Pedrera in Barcelona? But there is more to it than that. The real architectural quality of the film is in the climactic, uninterrupted, seven-minute continuous take that begins inside Jack Nicholson’s hotel room in southern Spain, moves round the room and through the window to make a circuit of the square outside. It’s the same sort of crystallization of space that Bertolucci’s cameraman Vittorio Storaro achieved in The Conformist, when Jean-Louis Trintignant is lost in the endless spaces of some fascist minister’s office, and the screen is suddenly filled by a vast bust of Mussolini’s head that is carried across from left to right. This is the kind of magic that architects always wish they could work, but their buildings are static, and they can’t impose their viewpoint on the people who experience their buildings. Though it doesn’t stop them from trying.