11650125Blade Runner press kit.]]>123200225Lynch on Lynch. p. 226.]]>3111400200Lynch on Lynch. p. 231.]]>31440050Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings. p. 225.]]>172217827City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. p. 238.]]>2125250270325300120Cyberwoman 4 in 2000.]]>1319580The Player.]]>19200502915075Thirteen Ways. p.65.]]>2526325200Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. p. 278.]]>1511810050Altman on Altman. p. 160.]]>1823440150Database Aesthetics. p. 64-65.]]>121115220City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. p. 236.]]>21717575Sunset Boulevard.]]>23234275Architecture and Disjunction. p. 100.]]>8236210150Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi. p. 136.]]>924275200Invisible Cities. p. 11.]]>211317535Sunset Boulevard]]>21217550Open House: Unbound Space and the Modern Dwelling. p. 63.]]>2211950120Coop Himmelblau: 6 Projects for 4 Cities. p. 30.]]>6213150150Coop Himmelblau: 6 Projects for 4 Cities. p. 32.]]>6226400100Thom Mayne Sixth Street House. p. 5.]]>7224400200Thom Mayne Sixth Street House. p. 7.]]>723425070Thom Mayne Sixth Street House. p. 12.]]>7222500150Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi. p. 166.]]>922198278Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi. p. 175.]]>9127300502830050Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. p. 136.]]>1125258224Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. p. 306.]]>112865100Arts and Architecture Magazine. January, 1945.]]>122175075Arts and Architecture Magazine. January, 1945.]]>1222147570What makes a bad bit? When you are shooting a home movie and the camera wanders, that's obviously a bad bit, and it's clear that you want to cut it out. The goal of a home movie is usually pretty simple: an unrestructured record of events in continuous time. -Walter Murch. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. p. 10.]]>1323920024In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. p. 57.]]>1321450120In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. p. 41.]]>1313111515021100200LIFE magazine. (September 5th 1949).]]>11317580Kiss Me Deadly]]>123400200Heat]]>22135150The Arcades Project. p. 409.]]>4215200150panoptikum a manifestation of the total work of art. The universalism of the nineteenth century has its monument in the waxworks. Panopticon: not only does one see everything, but one sees in all ways. -Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. p. 531.]]>41261302001161201602610050Fatal Strategies. p. 20-21.]]>281204060Los Angeles Plays Itself.]]>19137200185Los Angeles Plays Itself.]]>19110125135Los Angeles Plays Itself.]]>191408550Los Angeles Plays Itself.]]>191144040The Seeker]]>220125230Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture. p. 123.]]>2021945065Angelus Novus and Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, these giant wingspans, like so many grounded pterodactyls, shelter a population estranged from their once comfortable houses and seeking shelter beneath less historically determined roofs. Roof that enfold and gently offer space for a moment's respite from the storm wind of progress... -Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture. p. 189.]]>20222250100Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture. p. 197.]]>2021832575Invisible Cities. p. 65.]]>2137250200Sunset Boulevard in the film's opening credit sequence. The film is explicitly about Hollywood yet the moniker that the narrative operates under is tied to a specific, innocuous roadway. One can only assume that the symbolism of this "base" signage speaks to Wilder's bleak depiction of the film industry. The gutter is only a hop, skip and jump(cut) away from the swimming pool, another iconic symbol of "California living" that Wilder savages at the beginning of his film.]]>232120150Open House: Unbound Space and the Modern Dwelling. p. 11.]]>2213717530Blade Runner.]]>2364070The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. p. 105.]]>23238175100Transcripts always display at least two conflicting fields: first, the framing device - square, healthy, conformist, normal and predictable, regular and comforting, correct. Second, the framed material, a place that only questions, distorts, compresses, displaces. Both are necessary. Neither is inherently special; neither communicates by itself. It is the play between them that does - their distance and its occasional transgression, when the frame itself becomes the object of distortions. -Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts. p.11.]]>24153001251151005023260120The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. p. 17.]]>23124175175127200200Sunset Boulevard]]>233110130The Manhattan Transcripts. p. 9.]]>2422845125jump-cut, where space is carefully broken apart and then reassembled 'at the limits'. -Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts. p.12.]]>24210400125Thirteen Ways. p.26.]]>25238140200Thirteen Ways. p.102.]]>2513122025Sunset Boulevard]]>22821030The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. pg. 169.]]>29211200250Game Zone. p.31.]]>2621220045Game Zone. p.12.]]>26233200100play, around and against its own rules. It must extend itself to the multiple layers of man's space, cross them and produce illusions of possible worlds... -Alberto Iacovoni, Game Zone. p.14.]]>2621775130Greater Los Angeles.]]>2723175150Thirteen Ways. p.27.]]>253391001002405030The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. pg. 163.]]>29Eric Owen Moss1993Frank Gehry1978Coop Himmelb(l)au1983Thom Mayne1988Pierre Koenig1960Frank Lloyd Wright1924Craig Ellwood1955John Lautner196312GH-S1.jpg12GH-S3.jpg13LW-S1.jpg18EB-03.jpg12GH-S4.jpg12GH-S5.jpg13LW-S4.jpg13LW-S2.jpg18EB-02.jpg18EB-05.jpg11HH-S2.jpg11HH-S4.jpg14OH-S5.jpg17SH-S1.jpg13LW-S3.jpg18EB-01.jpg14OH-SEQ3-009.jpg11HH-OH_comp.jpg14OH-S3.jpg14OH-SEQ1-009.jpg11HH-SEQ2-012.jpg17SH-S4.jpg16SS-SEQ5-003.jpg16SS-S1.jpg15SG-S2.jpg16SS-SEQ2-005.jpg15SG-S1.jpg15SG-S5.jpg23LW-SEQ5.swf21HH-SEQ1.swf27SH-SEQ3.swf25SG-SEQ1.swf22GH-SEQ1.swf28EB-SEQ1.swf26SS-SEQ3.swf24OH-SEQ5.swf17SH-SEQ4-004.jpghitArea2.svg3363004412138200hitArea1.svg3892993310247500hitArea3.svg3332995110357500hitArea4.svg60041962746851559hitArea5.svg5093227515578012075hitArea6.svg4353108315686000hitArea7.svg3793409177975035hitArea8.svg490248101108108007hitArea9.svg633327113109117520hitArea10.svg4712001231010129000hitArea11.svg44631013512111380hitArea12.svg385336141812149055hitArea13.svg29326815103013159000hitArea14.svg21930716171416906177hitArea15.svg27232517115151790028hitArea16.svg419200182816189000hitArea17.svg3253001941017199056137hitArea18.svg65930220381820858075hitArea19.svg56424921151921906429hitArea20.svg409333224142022801420hitArea21.svg6072232315212390180hitArea22.svg56230124152224901300hitArea23.svg470213251523259007hitArea24.svg4412782615242680022hitArea25.svg371262272122527909797hitArea26.svg488283281526286500hitArea27.svg435299291527298200hitArea28.svg2952883018283090031hitAreaA01.svg35228431616293190033hitAreaA02.svg38827532312303290hitAreaA03.svg39130033618313390hitAreaA04.svg22216934618323480053hitAreaA05.svg225195354123335903732hitAreaA06.svg31020436616343690011hitAreaA07.svg23630237515353780085hitAreaA08.svg4562703861836388010942hitArea29.svg35220039412373985004A07.svg21.svg22.svg13.svg64.svg25.svg26.svg17.svg18.svg610.svg69.svg711.svg712.svg313.svg514.svg115.svg616.svg317.svg318.svg319.svg320.svg721.svg522.svg423.svg424.svg425.svg426.svg827.svg428.svg1A01.svg7A02.svg5A03.svg8A04.svg2A05.svg6A06.svg3A08.svg529.svgDavid Lynch1997Lost Highway is an exploration in split-protagonists and circular storytelling. In Lynch's noir, narratives and characterization melt into one another creating a plastic environment in which to stage nightmarish experiments. Lost Highway starts in the uneasy domestic space of Fred and Renee Madison. An apparent home invasion, suspicions about Renee's past and a chance encounter with a "mystery man" set in motion the rapid disintegration of the marriage. An ambiguous violent act triggers Fred Madison's transformation into the younger Peter Raymond Dayton and Lynch uses this new character to fold his original narrative back on itself.]]>Buster Keaton1920One Week was the first project that Keaton wrote and directed (alongside Edward F. Cline). The plot centers around a newlywed Keaton and his young bride who receive a house as a wedding gift. However, yhe house is not assembled and a jealous ex-suitor of Keaton's wife sabotages the labeling on the boxes which contain the components from which the house would be built. The resulting narrative documents the perils of (mis)construction and no sooner than the house is complete it is ravaged by slapstick catastrophe.]]>Billly Wilder1950Sunset Boulevard documents the obsolescence of the original era of American cinema.]]>Robert Aldrich1955Kiss Me Deadly follows the sadistic private eye Mike Hammer as he delves into a world of betrayal and espionage. Hammer becomes ensnared in the circumstances surrounding the death of a beautiful hitchhiker that leads him into a plot involving stolen radionuclide. Thinking that he is on to "something big", the detective investigates the death of this woman and eventually comes face to face with the stolen hazardous materials and a pair of villains who will do anything to possess it. The drama escalates into a gruesome endgame, the exact significance of which is debated to this day.]]>Robert Altman1992Sunset Boulevard, this Robert Altman picture conducts a scathing examination of the film industry and reveals it to be superficial and devoid of integrity. The film follows the downward spiral of Griffin Mills, a morally bankrupt film executive who murders a would-be screenwriter named David Kahain, whom he believes to be stalking him. Mills ends up falling for David Kahain's wife, and attempts to dodge the detectives on his tail while saving his faltering career. The film is rife with cameos, irony and self-reference and ends with an elaborate inside joke when Mills approves a script written by his blackmailer that mirrors the plot of The Player.]]>Michael Mann1995Heat is a character-driven crime drama that tracks the lead-up to a daring bank robbery. Michael Mann devotes equal attention to the crew planning the heist and the detectives that would apprehend them. The film climaxes in an raging gun battle that spills out into the streets of downtown Los Angeles. The sprawling narrative portrays a sophisticated network of underground economies all rendered in a gritty, realist Los Angeles. The film also delineates the domestic space of the various characters in light of their intense lifestyle choices.]]>Steven Soderbergh1999Ridley Scott1982Blade Runner schematizes a dark, dystopian vision of Los Angeles in 2019. In this hard-boiled future, humanity has enlisted the service of android "replicants" to assist with space exploration, military activity and prostitution. The film follows police detective Rick Deckard as he searches for a collective of rogue replicants. These synthetics are searching for information about their origin at Tyrell Corporation, a company on the cutting edge of replicant design and development. The film provides an intimate look at Rick Deckard's personal (and domestic) space as he moves through the dreary postmetropolis.]]>0construction.svg0mischief.svgpoolfloat.svgtest4.svgtest5.svgtest6.svgtest7.svgtest8.svg9shape.svg10shape.svg11shape.svg12shape.svg13shape.svg14shape.svg15shape.svg16shape.svg17shape.svg18shape.svg19shape.svg20shape.svg21shape.svg22shape.svg23shape.svg24shape.svg25shape.svg26shape.svg27shape.svg28shape.svgA01shape.svgA02shape.svg5A03shape.svg8A04shape.svg2A05shape.svg6A06shape.svg4A07shape.svg3A08shape.svg529shape.svgArts and Architecture magazine would host an ambitious forum for experimental residential design called the Case Study House Program. Given these examples, and the importance of film and architecture to 20th century aesthetics, no other North American city can be said to have been as influential in driving thought about space and moving images.]]>not in my backyard sentiment has always been a driving force in California social organization. This is ironic given that the West was originally a frontier, a land of opportunity as defined by windfalls like the Gold Rush and the ascent of the aerospace and entertainment industries. Despite these good fortunes, a vibrant economy and a seemingly utopian climate, Angelenos have always exhibited a paranoid protectionism in defining and regulating urban and personal space.]]>The Player echoes the fate of Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. Both of these hack screenwriters serve as messianic figures who are beaten down and snuffed out by characters emblematic of the worst of commercial cinema. Buried in the subtext of these two homicides is not only a warning to would-be screenwriters, but acknowledgment of key transitional periods in the history of cinema: the death of the Golden Age and the birth of independent filmmaking in America.]]>California Model Architect Kit, a cardboard maquette set consisting of a variety of modular parts and an "assembly grid" for easy, rectilinear dream home construction. For better and worse, Los Angeles was an ideal setting for continued experiments in Modernist design. The temperate climate and informal lifestyle would inspire a new "relaxed" modernism, that resonates with design aficionados and the general public to this day. While this legacy put the city on the map as a global design hub, it was also the historical dead-weight that the architects like Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Frank Israel and Eric Owen Moss (known collectively as the Santa Monica School) would so desperately try to shed in the 1970s and 80s.]]>Lost Highway, does not like video cameras. His perspective on memory is that he'd rather "remember things in his own way, not necessarily how they happened". This ambivalence towards exactitude eventually catches up with Fred when he forgets if he killed his wife, and then, shortly thereafter, altogether forgets himself. Shapeshifting protagonists are commonplace in David Lynch's films but even amongst the rogue's gallery of Lynchian characters Fred Madison stands out as an imposing, glacial presence. Madison is a man whose domestic and interpersonal space are so dysfunctional that he simply ceases to be.]]>Arts and Architecture magazine announced the Case Study House Program. The project was a challenge for leading architects to develop new models for post-war housing in America. The project was active for almost two decades and ended in 1966, having yielded 28 prototype homes which explored materials, domestic organization, and most importantly, space. These houses were by and large sited in the greater Los Angeles area and this fact is worth reflecting upon. The tradition of starting over, of forgetting history, was already well established in the Los Angeles architectural community by the 1940s. The city was a popular destination for European avant garde expats. Two such designers, Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra, played a definitive role in the reterritorialization of Modernism as a vernacular "Southern Californian" architecture. The influence of these designers and the Case Study program on American architecture cannot be understated.]]>Kiss Me Deadly could be considered a meditation on the notion of death by architecture. The plot revolves around the pursuit of the "great whatsit", a mysterious box that contains the key to a dangerous and unstable source of energy. Once the seal is broken on this atomic-age retrofit of the myth of Pandora's Box it flares outwards and incinerates the space around it. As the box explodes it consumes another, the prototypical beach house that the final scene takes place in. The European version of Kiss Me Deadly ends with a shot of the burning house, alluding to the death of the protagonists inside. This stands in stark contrast to the North American version of the film, which ends with Mike Hammer and Velda escaping the inferno to the safety of the Pacific Ocean.]]>Sunset Boulevard ends with a magnificent descent. As the corpse of freshly murdered Joe Gillis is fished out of the pool, Norma Desmond primps for her return to the spotlight and the gaze of the camera. Her manservant, Max von Mayerling, coaxes her into police custody by speaking directly to her delusion and states that her return to fame is at last at hand. She elegantly cuts through a throng of photographers and glides down the staircase to lights, cameras and an awaiting police escort. It should be noted that this scene features a one-to-one correlation between architectural and psychological descent. Norma's sinking into an irrevocable state of delusion is both a performance and an architectural event.]]>The Player is a venomous send-up of the commercial film industry in the late 20th century. The movie continues the legacy of Sunset Boulevard through the construction of a complex scaffolding of references and nods to important film-about-film precedents. Perhaps the most architectural moment in The Player is the incredible opening, a homage to the infamous tracking shot of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. This elaborate shot surveys the grounds of a huge film studio while introducing and eavesdropping on the activities of a number of the central characters. Laying bare the intent of the narrative, two characters discuss Welles' shot, while unknowingly participating in an equally sophisticated act of construction.]]>Lost Highway is the manner in which the trajectories of protagonists merge as characters join, overlap and fade into one another. An equally convoluted reading of identity can also be found when one peels back the veneer over the illustrious career of the architect Craig Ellwood. Born Jon Nelson Burke, Ellwood launched a general contracting firm in the early 1950s in partnership with three friends. The group named the company "Craig Ellwood" after a local liquor store on Beverly Boulevard. As the firm gained experience, they received residential commissions and Burke would assume the identity of Craig Ellwood in 1951 by legally changing his name. These issues of identity don't stop with names, but also extend into questions of authorship. To this day, there are conflicting opinions about Ellwood's involvement in the design of his most recognized work, with varying degrees of credit being attributed to Ellwood's project architects Robert Theron Peters and James Tyler.]]>One Week Keaton's antagonist is a building, his house-to-be. This structure is bent on succumbing to the sabotage of rivals as well as the relentless elements, yet the architect Keaton, unfazed by these hardships, battles on in hopes of constructing some kind of order.]]>One Week is wondering exactly what catastrophe will befall the architecture next. Try as he might, Buster Keaton never can "save" his project and live happily ever after in it. As Keaton and his bride are attempting to move it, the malconstructed house is smashed to bits by an oncoming train. This considered, One Week can be read as a kind of architectural snuff film, one which predated all the skyscraper exploding stupidity of the '80s and '90s by decades. Interestingly enough, Santa Monica legend has it that somebody actually fired a bullet at Frank Gehry's house in the 1980s. Perhaps the shot was filmed?]]>Kiss Me Deadly is a box. This vessel contained unidentified fissionable material, and the ramifications of opening this box were dangerous and absolute. As Dr. G.E. Soberin pointed out to the treacherous Velda, "what is in the box cannot be divided". It should be noted that at the center of Modernism there was also a box. A pristine, unsentimental machine for living, one which utilized new materials and technology and symbolized progress. At a certain moment late in the 20th century, architects began to wonder what would happen if they opened it. What could result from taking the box apart and reassembling the various surfaces into new spatial and volumetric configurations?]]>Blade Runner, Rick Deckard's apartment is one of the most memorable. The look and feel of this space was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House. The interior character of Wright's sprawling hillside house was reconstituted as a unit in a highrise building looming over Ridley Scott's dystopian vision of Los Angeles. Plaster casts were taken from the signature textile blocks, and new building blocks were produced to create a facsimile of the original space. This recontextualization of Wright's vision is ironic given that Deckard's apartment has probably eclipsed the original space in fame and recognition.]]>Blade Runner when we consider Rick Deckard's photo-analysis of a crime scene early in the film. In this scene Deckard uses a imagining device to scrutinize a photograph of an apartment, and the source image is broken down by a grid overlay. In both of these instances modular units are used to construct, explore and articulate space.]]>One Week is an unintentional architectural treatise. The plot of the film revolves around the newlywed Keaton and his bride's attempt to construct a build-by-numbers home. This simple goal is complicated considerably when a rival of Keaton sabotages the project by switching the numbers on several boxes of supplies and materials. Slapstick construction ensues and the house that is produced is an uncanny, oblique monstrosity that predated Frank Gehry's deconstruction of domestic space by 60 years. It is not without irony that an architectural sight gag in a silent film would eventually resonate quite strongly with the playful deconstructivism exhibited by the Santa Monica School.]]>Lost Highway, the homelife of Fred and Renee Madison is characterized by silence, alienation and passive-aggressiveness. These qualities don't only color the strained relations between the couple, but register architecturally as the house they live in is stark and unfurnished. There are several shots of Fred staring out the window where he looks more like a prisoner than an occupant. This reminds us of the fact that there is a fine line between privacy and fortification.]]>The Limey, the protagonist Wilson infiltrates a house party hosted by music mogul Terry Valentine. Wilson slips away from the gathering and conducts a "character assessment" of Valentine by scanning his bedroom and personal belongings. The camera slides along behind him as he cautiously examines Valentine's private space. Wilson narrowly avoids being discovered by Valentine's girlfriend and is about to return to the gathering when he is stopped dead in his tracks by a photograph of his daughter hanging in a stairwell. Having come to Los Angeles to discover the truth behind her murder, Wilson is further convinced that Valentine was somehow involved.]]>Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions explicitly deals with the notion of the city as a simulated phenomenon. Taking into consideration Will Wright as much as Baudrillard, Soja schematizes Los Angeles as "perhaps the ultimate urban simulation". Given the technological conundrum at the heart of Blade Runner, the idea of Los Angeles as an urban simulation is quite amusing. In Blade Runner there is no question about Los Angeles being simulated, rather its citizenry.]]>Kiss Me Deadly. In a sadistic display, protagonist Mike Hammer knocks a would-be assailant down a dramatic exterior staircase. The camera lingers on the ragdoll form tumbling down the stairs and Hammer smirks with self satisfaction. In this bleak noirscape the staircase does not symbolize transcendence, simply a weapon.]]>Lost Highway starts where it ends, with a cryptic conversation mediated by an intercom. Fred Madison learns from a mysterious voice that "Dick Laurent is dead", and this simple statement calls into question the entire narrative of the film. It is after all Fred Madison (or some variant thereof) that murders Dick Laurent. Having Fred talk to himself through an architectural apparatus is a fitting start to a film with such a vested interest in structure, narrative and its own hermetic idiosyncracies.]]>house, truss and wall became vehicles for transgression. One of the most distinguishing characteristics of projects like the Open House is an alien organicism in which structure reads as a skeletal assemblage - in what other house might you confuse a wall for a ribcage? While this aesthetic is severe, the manner in which it frames and defines space is actually quite liberating. The Open House is one continuous space rather than a string of prescribed zones. The activities of this radical residence were to be proudly displayed to the outside world. This home was to be transparent (without conservatism) and dynamic (without motion) as it reached up, pierced into and interlocked with the sky.]]>Kiss Me Deadly. Hammer's effectiveness as an investigator stems from the fact he is only marginally less brutal and corrupt than the populace of the underworld through which he moves. A small time operator, Hammer generally earns his keep by fabricating adulterous evidence for would be divorcees. His business is other peoples business, and he routinely pries and spies his way into the domestic space and relationships of others to make a buck. This ruthless demeanor make him the perfect candidate for scouring the shadowy Los Angeles underworld in search of information.]]>Heat occurs when Lt. Vincent Hanna returns home to find his wife Justine entertaining a man she has just slept with. Vincent is completely caught off guard by this betrayal and it forces him to address his wife as a husband instead of his usual role of frazzled careerist. This all plays out in front of Ralph, the bewildered interloper who sits, petrified, on the sofa while Hanna launches into a manic diatribe about his marriage to Justine, their sham life and even their sham architecture. Justine's "dead-tech, post-modernistic bullshit house" is none other than Thom Mayne's Sixth Street House. It is worth noting that this monograph worthy "house for an architect" is repurposed towards miserable ends in Heat - something has gone horribly wrong in translating this home onto celluloid. This noble prototype, which radiates ingenuity and authenticity has been reduced to sterile cliche, high design as the backdrop for a disintegrating marriage.]]>Heat is the manner in which the vocations of the protagonists infect and damages their home lives. Both Lt. Vincent Hanna and seasoned heist-man Neil McCauley find themselves in complicated domestic arrangements brought on by their obsessive, non-standard lifestyles. Vincent Hanna is helpless to watch as his third marriage disintegrates, he knows too well that his dedication to his police work has made him emotionally aloof. The career criminal Neil McCauley has trained himself to be a monk-like isolationist who abstains from interpersonal relationships in hopes to remain focused on his scores. Despite the explosive midtown Los Angeles gun battle that acts as the climax to this film, the undercurrents that permeate the narrative suggests that the "real" conflict does not take place on the battlefield, as that is simply the place where instincts play out. The real battle lies in abandoning domestic space. When the time comes you must be prepared to turn your back, walk away and never look back.]]>The Player orbits around the misadventures of Griffin Mill, a self-absorbed film executive. Mill works in the upper echelons of a fictional Hollywood studio and is charged with screening incoming pitches by writers and directors. Mill's career hinges on recognizing potential blockbusters amongst a neverending flow of scripts. More dubiously, Mill is responsible for "adjusting" the vision of screenwriters and directors and homogenizing this work in light of the market. While Mill makes a career of bleeding the life and originality out of the art around him, he unintentionally inspires a masterpieces when he murders hack screenwriter David Kahane. The slippery Mill emerges from a criminal investigation unscathed, becomes romantically involved with Kahane's wife and the film ends with the suggestion that he will produce a film documenting his own misdeeds.]]>The Player certainly provides a cliched "Hollywood ending" to the saga of Griffin Mills, but on closer inspection this conclusion is quite troubling. The entire trajectory of the film documents the disintegration of the artistic integrity of Habeas Corpus (originally an incredibly moving screenplay) into Oscar-pandering studio fodder. As that project dies, another develops as Griffin Mills writes his own screenplay of homicide and paranoia, careerism and cover up. Both of these unresolved stories have ironic endings tacked on and both play to different results with distinct audiences. The studio executives watching Habeas Corpus, the film-within-a-film, receive the ending of the film with applause and exaltation as they know their interference has created an idealized narrative. The audience viewing The Player, namely us, watch with horror as Griffin Mills drives up to an impossibly pristine suburban California mansion, greets his pregnant wife and utters the same one-liner that concludes Habeas Corpus. These layered, sardonic endings provide no resolution and leave the viewer with no choice but to revel in the intertextuality of the combined narratives.]]>Lost Highway, does not like video cameras. His perspective on memory is that he'd rather "remember things in his own way, not necessarily how they happened". This ambivalence towards exactitude eventually catches up with Fred when he forgets if he killed his wife, and then, shortly thereafter, altogether forgets himself. Shapeshifting protagonists are commonplace in David Lynch's films but even amongst the rogue's gallery of Lynchian characters Fred Madison stands out as an imposing, glacial presence. Madison is a man whose domestic and interpersonal space are so dysfunctional that he simply ceases to be.]]>The Limey is "The Seeker" by The Who. It is an ideal title track for the films central character Wilson and his relentless investigatory demeanor. Wilson is a man who moves in straight lines and has not the time nor disposition for social grace. He cuts through buildings, across the street and into people, always gliding towards the next relevant piece of information in his quest to understand the circumstances surrounding his daughters death. Watching him explore Terry Valentine's room and personal effects, it is clear that Wilson is "reading" the interior of this home as if it were a text. Wilson doesn't move through space, he interrogates it.]]>possibility. Surfaces flip, components disassemble, and key structural members dislocate. Shift, shear, spin, flex - Keaton radiates an intangible aura of disorder that causes the fixity of structure and space to melt away, leaving behind a vacuum in which true play is possible.]]>Blade Runner when Rick Deckard utilizes the ESPER machine to comb through the grainy details of a piece of photographic evidence. In a scene reminiscent of Antonioni's Blow-Up, Deckard zooms further and further into the image he is scrutinizing and eventually uncovers a reflection of a replicant and a crucial lead. This scene plays out rather self-referentially, as if Deckard was directing the camera in the scene in which he was participating. It is also worth noting the manner in which the grid is superimposed over domestic space, breaking it down into discrete parcels, each with their own secrets.]]>The Player echoes the fate of Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. Both of these hack screenwriters serve as messianic figures who are beaten down and snuffed out by characters emblematic of the worst of commercial cinema. Buried in the subtext of these two homicides is not only a warning to would-be screenwriters, but acknowledgment of key transitional periods in the history of cinema: the death of the Golden Age and the birth of independent filmmaking in America.]]>Lost Highway, it undermines our understanding of the passage of time. This inferno does not expand outwards, but contracts in on itself into some impossibly minute point of origin. A magnificent cloud of debris, charred splinters of wood, and thick billowing smoke all violently compress inwards into a perfectly intact structure. Above and beyond sinister lighting, what makes this house so dark and foreboding is the stored potential energy that it contains. Since doppelgangers figure so prominently into characterization in Lost Highway, is it any surprise that architecture is also subject to the otherness of the double? As one house is shattered, another is spontaneously assembled out of a constellation of detritus.]]>Heat is the machismo ideal that a renegade lifestyle is predicated on the ability to walk away from attachments and familiarity. Throughout the film both the police and heist-crew talk openly about the importance of being able to walk away from it all. The biggest advocate of this mentality is Neil McCauley, the mastermind behind the crew that Lt. Vincent Hanna is so aggressively pursuing. Ironically, McCauley violates his own moral code when in the midst of leaving town with his girlfriend, he decides to go settle a score with an informant who had ratted him out. The resulting scene plays out with McCauley gliding down a hotel hallway towards the room his prey is holed up in. There is a strange self-referential nature to this shot as while McCauley is deserting his lover, he is not deserting the viewer. The camera is towed along by McCauley's momentum as he hurries towards the very fate he forecasted for himself earlier in the film.]]>The Limey, Wilson crashes a party at the home of famed record producer Terry Valentine. Valentine resides in a gorgeous contemporary California house, perched on the side of the Hollywood Hills. The most distinguishing feature of this hillside house is a pool and balcony which aggressively juts out from the terrain providing a viewing platform that seems to defy gravity and float in space. While gazing towards the horizon, Wilson wonders aloud exactly what he is standing on, his companion Ed answers "trust" and then glibly adds that "you could see the sea out there, if you could see it.." This short exchange captures the essence of the tension between architecture and landscape in Los Angeles. The hillside house, an idealized "California style" home, exists in direct opposition to the topography and the horizontal logic of the built environment. It represents not only refuge and shelter but suggests that, perhaps, nature (and even physics) can be overcome. Beyond this, the hillside house offers the rarest of commodities in Los Angeles, a view - albeit one tempered by the haze and texture of the Greater Los Angeles skyline.]]>117713910233133312934525123223563682434371338154044111421443164417451846194720482349265027512853241325192122395633212258375736623263386440City of Quartz, Mike Davis outlined the fortification of downtown and suburban Los Angeles in great detail. With this polemic, Davis identified a distinctly "Angeleno" protectionist mentality that drives both the division and control of space in the city. While by no means an aesthetic treatise, he also produced a poignant reading of the earlier work of Frank Gehry, with a particular focus on the architect's celebration of urban texture and the rough-and-tumble materiality of the street. If Gehry serves as an entry point into the contemporary era of locked-down Southern California spatiality, what role can we surmise that architecture plays in providing domestic security? More importantly, what is the common ground between the Modernist villa and the postmodern safe house? The theme of fortification provides us with a new lens through which to examine domestic architecture in Los Angeles. No longer strictly an idealized dwelling, the contemporary home can be interpreted as a street smart, contextually savvy structure that simultaneously emerges from, and walls off, the surrounding cityscape. This act of using architecture to shield oneself from the world is not only about property lines and tectonics, but speaks to the inherent asocial nature of demarcating living space through the construction of shelter.]]>Los Angeles Plays Itself does an excellent job of cataloging the numerous instances in which the city is used as surrogate for alternate urban locations. This notion of "pervasive fiction" extends into the realm of design, as Los Angeles is recognized as a significant architectural hub, a city whose design vanguard is closely scrutinized by the global design community. The city has fostered an engaging climate of architectural innovation with an ingenuity and audacity that is perhaps only rivaled by the special effects and production design specialists operating in the film industry. The similarities between filmic and architectural production run deeper than this as many of the same manufacturing and prototyping techniques and digital modes of representation are engaged equally at the forefront of each discipline. This discussion does not stop at acknowledging the manner in which Los Angeles sits at the forefront of two creative disciplines. What is of interest to us, what emerges from this culture of advanced production and aesthetics is work that interrogates the creative process itself. In essence, the legacy of cinematic and architectural production in Los Angeles has inspired films about film and architecture about architecture. One only need look as far as the self-referential nature of Sunset Boulevard and The Player to see how these films move beyond "straight" narrative to address the process and economics of commercial cinema. In turn, dynamic domestic projects such as The Gehry House and The Sixth Street House are platforms for engaging materiality, typology and even the archaeological possibilities offered by architecture.]]>Chinatown, which reconstructed these events as fiction. The truth is, the myth of a "utopian" Los Angeles, a terra nova of the west, is nothing more than wishful thinking. The aforementioned water wars, air pollution, urban sprawl and bushfires all foreground the tenuous relationship between Los Angeles and its expansive horizontal environs. Even the ground itself exists in a state of tension, with mudslides and the occasional earthquake laying waste to swaths of the built environment. The sardonically titled 2002 Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) show What's Shakin': New Architecture in LA even went so far as to lightheartedly suggest a connection between plate tectonics and architectural aesthetics. This friction between California dreaming and disaster urbanism has informed much of the architectural legacy of Los Angeles. The city has nurtured a number of distinct housing typologies from the hillside villa to the beach house to the artist's bunker. All of these residential prototypes are characterized by a nuanced attitude towards urban fabric, forces of nature and the horizontality of the landscape.]]>84842452102839597611116108844741451541611444224231124426112572891555111239111032632431731433734634735437536438113973944011414411050843449115245565595685695775785711588587581060661462463116411377656657548538661066106711714707708754757681168830630529429745645846107211721073674964103711738737768765778774779785784797808417821082783783784484985108511869868868877888898907908917919911195125118810109961781611151114101441361371841982082172192210221023424725625526827828728112844411026355466610557111083111314328337348341033103783743683673743963953810389409339342007Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.]]>1992City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage, 1992.]]>2005Lynch on Lynch, Revised Edition. 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