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Archi.Pop

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Archi.Pop
Mediating Architecture
in Popular Culture

Edited by
D. Medina Lasansky

iii
 Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10018
UK USA

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2014

© D. Medina Lasansky, 2014

D. Medina Lasansky has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Editor of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
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refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-2254-2

PB: 978-1-4725-3146-9
ePDF: 978-1-4725-8644-5
ePub: 978-1-4725-2669-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Archi.pop : mediating architecture in popular culture / edited by D. Medina Lasansky.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4725-2254-2 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-4725-3146-9 (paperback) 1. Architecture and
society–United States–History–20th century. 2. Architecture and society–United States–
History–21st century. 3. Design–Social aspects–United States–History–20th century.
4. Design–Social aspects–United States–History–21st century. 5. Popular culture–United
States–History–20th century. 6. Popular culture–United States–History–21st century.
I. Lasansky, D. Medina, editor of compilation.
NA2543.S6A623 2014
720.1’030973–dc23
2014002745

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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Contents

List of Figures vii

List of Contributors viii
Introduction D. Medina Lasansky 1

Part One Domesticating Behavior 13

1 The Cultural Meanings of the Leave It to Beaver House

Holley Wlodarczyk 15
2 “Uglying Out”: Shag Carpet and the Twists of
Popular Taste Chad Randl 29
3 Vision and Crime: The Cineramic Architecture of John Lautner
Jon Yoder 45

Part Two Playing 59

4 Dimensions of the Mass-Produced Dollhouse:

Fisher-Price Versus Playmobil Mark S. Morris 61

5 Honey, I Shrunk the Nation-State: The Scales of

Global History in the Thai Nationalist Theme Park
Lawrence Chua 75

Part Three Profligate Profiles 89

6 The Palazzo Soprano Denise Costanzo 91

7 Invitations to a Candy-Floss World Barbara Penner 105

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vi Contents

Part Four Cinematic Travels 121

8 A Place of No Return: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Undomestic Ennis

House in Film Merrill Schleier 123
9 Gidget and the Creature from Venus: Madness, Monsters, and
Dangerous Roman Ruins in Film Sarah Benson 139

Part Five Road Space 161

10 The World’s Most Popular Architecture: The Technology and

Interior of the Automobile Iain Borden 163
11 Ugly America and Architecture on the Highway: A Time-Life
View of the 1950s and 1960s Gabrielle Esperdy 177

Part Six Urban Critiques 191

12 “Life in Marvelous Times”: Hip-hop, Housing, and

Utopia Lawrence Chua 193

Bibliography 207
Index 227

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List of Figures

1.1 The front façade of the Leave It to Beaver Colonial Revival house 19
1.2 The “Leave It to Beaver house” in the music video for “Dilemma” 26
2.1 Babies and families found shag a comfortable surface for relaxation 30
2.2 Actress Jayne Mansfield’s pink shag bathroom at her Hollywood home 38
3.1 John Lautner, Garcia House, Los Angeles, CA 46
3.2 John Lautner, Elrod House, Palm Springs, CA 51
3.3 John Lautner, Sheats/Goldstein House, Los Angeles, CA 54
4.1 The Fisher-Price Play Family House 63
4.2 The grand-looking Playmobil Dollhouse 67
5.1 Map of Thailand and map of Muang Boran 85
5.2 Summit of the miniature model of Preah Vihear/Phra Viharn at Muang
Boran 86
5.3 The Churning of the Ocean of Milk monument at Muang Boran 88
6.1 “The Soprano House” 92
6.2 Federico Casteluccio “The Duke and Duchess of North Caldwell” 96
7.1 45 Park Lane, London 106
7.2 “At the London Playboy Club for a Bunny Pictorial 114
8.1 Poolside seduction, frame enlargement 130
8.2 Loren and Ennis House, frame enlargement 131
8.3 Rachel in Deckard’s apartment, frame enlargement 137
9.1 20 Million Miles to Earth, Nathan Juran 143
9.2 Gidget Goes to Rome, Paul Wendkos 148
9.3 Gidget Goes to Rome, Paul Wendkos 153
10.1 The Altra camping car 167
10.2 Semi-automated driving and head-up displays in the Fiat Mio concept 175
11.1 W. Eugene Smith, Northland Shopping Center in Southfield, Michigan 179
11.2 Michael Rougier, Speedway Boulevard in Tucson, Arizona 188
12.1 “Ecstasy Garage Disco” 199
12.2 “Protest of the film, ‘Fort Apache, the Bronx’ ” 200

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List of Contributors

Sarah Benson is on the faculty of St. John’s College, Annapolis. Her research and
publications on Renaissance popular culture include essays on the history of early modern
tourism, souvenirs of Rome, and Renaissance pornography, and a book project that
looks at how early modern media and technologies shaped new ways of seeing Rome
and its monuments. She has also written on cultural exchanges between Europe and
Siam, scientific illustration, and the ethics of animal vivisection in the Renaissance
sciences.

Iain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at the Bartlett School of
Architecture, UCL, where he is also Vice-Dean for Communications for the Bartlett Faculty
of the Built Environment. His research includes explorations of popular architecture in
relation to cities & public space, film & photography and everyday urban experiences. His
authored books include Drive: Journeys Through Film, Cities and Landscapes (2012) and
Skateboarding, Space and the City (2001).

Lawrence Chua is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History of

Hamilton College whose research focuses on the global relationships between utopia,
modernism, and fascism. His publications include articles in the Journal of Urban History
and TDSR as well as chapters in Promenade: Through The Present Future (2011), Julie
Mehretu: Black City (2006) and Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of
Decency (2002). His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the
Social Science Research Council.

Denise Costanzo is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Penn State University. She

researches the institutions and cultural frameworks that reinforce US architects’ interest in
Italy. Recent publications analyze the post-World War II American Academy in Rome,
foreign study for North American architects, and how Sigfried Giedion, Colin Rowe and
Robert Venturi present early modern Italian architecture for a modernist audience. Her
current book project is What Architecture Means: Connecting Ideas and Design (2015).

Gabrielle Esperdy is an architectural historian and critic. Her book Modernizing Main
Street investigated how modernist design transformed shopping districts and commercial
strips during the Depression. Her forthcoming book, Architecture & Autopia, examines
popular attitudes towards car-oriented commercial landscapes and their influence on

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 List of Contributors ix

architecture and planning discourse since World War II. Esperdy is Associate Professor at
the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Editor of SAH Archipedia; she blogs at
American Road Trip and contributes to Places.

D. Medina Lasansky teaches architectural history at Cornell University where her

research and teaching focus on the intersection of the built environment, politics and
popular culture. She is the author of the Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle
and Tourism in Fascist Italy (Penn State, 2004), co-editor of Architecture and Tourism:
Perception, Performance, and Place (Berg, 2004) and editor of the Renaissance. Revised,
Unexpurgated, Expanded (Periscope, 2014).

Mark S. Morris teaches architectural theory and design at Cornell University where he is
Director of Exhibitions. He studied architecture at Ohio State University and took his Ph.D.
at the University of London. Morris’s essays have featured in Frieze, Critical Quarterly,
Cabinet, AD, and Domus. He is author of Models: Architecture and the Miniature (Wiley,
2008) and Automatic Architecture (UNC-Charlotte, 2006). His research focuses on
architectural models, scale, and questions of representation. Morris is an avid toy collector.

Barbara Penner is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the Bartlett School

of Architecture, UCL. She is author of Bathroom (Reaktion, 2013) and Newlyweds on
Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America (University Press of New England,
2009). She is co-editor of Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (Temple University
Press, 2009) and Gender Space Architecture (Routledge, 2000). She has most recently
contributed chapters to Use Matters (Routledge, 2013), Handbook of Interior Architecture
and Design (Berg, 2013), and Globalization in Practice (Oxford University Press,
forthcoming).

Chad Randl is the author of A-Frame and Revolving Architecture: A History of Buildings
that Rotate, Swivel and Pivot, both published by Princeton Architectural Press (2004,
2008). His research explores the intersection of popular attitudes and building design and
alteration. He is currently writing a cultural history of post-war residential remodeling. His
writing has also appeared in the Journal of Architecture, Senses and Society, and Old-
House Journal.

Merrill Schleier is a Professor of Art and Architectural History and Film Studies, at the
University of the Pacific. Recent publications include: Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture
and Gender in American Film (Minnesota, 2009), “The Griffith Observatory in Rebel without
a Cause,” Journal of Architecture (2011), “Fatal Attractions: ‘Place,’ the Korean War and
Gender in Niagara,” Cinema Journal (2012). Forthcoming works include a chapter in Lucy
Fischer’s book on Hollywood Art Direction (2015) and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: the
Two Lincolns, Monuments, and the Preservation of Patriarchy” in QRFV (2014).

Holley Wlodarczyk received her Ph.D. in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society
at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches courses on film, television, and
x List of Contributors

suburbia. Her research focuses on contemporary visual culture and popular media,
focusing on the shifting meaning of the single-family home as a cultural marker for “the
good life.” In addition to her dissertation, “Somewhere That’s Green: Visions of Sustainable
Suburbia,” she has published on post-war suburban photography.

Jon Yoder is an Associate Professor at Kent State University where he teaches

architectural design and theory. His work on vision and visuality in Modern architecture
frequently engages other disciplines including art history, cinema studies, and visual
media theory. He is currently completing two books: Widescreen Architecture, which
analyzes the buildings of Los Angeles architect John Lautner as exemplars of immersive
visuality in the1960s; and Op Arc, which explores the “ocular” impulse in contemporary
architecture practice.

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Introduction1
D. Medina Lasansky

This volume addresses the mediation of architecture by popular culture. We all know that
buildings and sites are cleverly designed, expertly photographed and carefully discussed.
Much of this rhetoric remains within the realm of the professional designer, architecture
aficionado, and scholar. But how are spaces received and used by the general public.
What are the materials? Methods? Repercussions?
There is no doubt that a range of material helps to determine how a site, an entire
genre, or specific building is perceived and understood. Sometimes the pristine
photography of someone like Iwan Bann (the preferred photographer of many architectural
firms including OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and SANAA) sets the tone.
With illuminated night-time shots of clean, modernist, and often de-peopled environments,
the photographs (published widely in architecture journals) help to create an understanding
of how a site is seen. But more often, it is the advertisements (Shanken 2009), banal
references in tabloid magazines, popular television shows, movies, and even toys that
define expectations, interactions, and understandings of space.
This range of material, which we can define as popular, is difficult to discuss—it is often
ephemeral, not collected or archived by traditional scholarly institutions (for example, the
Ivy League institution where I teach has decided that People magazine is not worth
subscribing to), subjected to corporate whim and sometimes even corporate censorship
(famously done in the case of Playboy magazine which decides how and when illustrations
from their magazine can be reprinted) (Preciado 2004), cheap and accessible, often
anonymous, frequently collaborative, difficult to track in terms of reception, and challenging
to historicize. These issues are all too familiar to those who study material culture, folklore,
and vernacular architecture. But, for these scholars, craftsmanship still reigns supreme.
How something is made, by whom, and under the influence of what cultural values remains
key. However, for the scholar of popular mass media, this may or may not be the case.
Given that this volume is concerned with the mass-mediation of architectural meaning
it must be acknowledged that this is uncomfortable terrain within architectural discourse—
where the field continues to privilege the authority of the individual creative genius (if there
is any doubt, peruse the list of Pritzker prize winners, which until 2001 when Herzog and

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de Meuron won, included only singular figures) and architecture with a capital “A” designed
by architects (even though 95 percent of the built environment is architecture with a
little “a”—designed using mass-produced plans, by unknown architects, or even non-
architects). To proclaim that anonymous, accessible, ephemeral, even collaborative or
corporate culture determines the way in which the general public experiences space is
sacrilegious. Furthermore, such claims underscore the extent to which the user (heavily
guided by popular culture) determines its meaning. Drawing upon the theoretical work of
Henri Lefebvre this only further underscores the precarious, Lefebvre’s notion of lived
experience (of which popular culture is an important part) undoubtedly complicates a
designer(s) intention. As Lefebvre notes “The belief that. . .plastic artists, are in some way
the cause or ratio of space, whether architectural, urbanistic, or global is the product of
naïvety of art historians, who put the social sphere and social practice in brackets and
consider works as isolate entities” (Lefebvre 1991: 304).
One of the most popular architecture magazines is Architectural Digest, with a
circulation of 800,000 and affordable cover price of just under $6.00. With frequent cover
stories on the decoration of celebrity houses the journal is more of a lifestyle magazine.
Ironically, the journal, despite its title, has little to do with architecture. Instead it features
articles about celebrity living (Elton John’s home among others), inspiring rooms (which
appear to have a lot to do with furniture placement and color) and spectacular views. If
we compare this to Domus, the premier professional journal, replete with articles on
influential architects, complex design projects, and contemporary competitions, the
divergence is readily apparent. And yet, which journal is more important for mediating a
popular understanding of architecture? The Digest. After all, the very title of the magazine
promises that the material discussed will be digestible.
It is clear that we must cite sociologist Stuart Hall (founder of the movement known as
British Cultural Studies) who notes that “the astonishing global expansion and
sophistication of the cultural industries” has lead to “a proliferation of secondary
environments mediating everything” (Hall 2007: 39). There is no doubt that architecture
belongs to the “astonishing” expanded culture of the present era. Though it has escaped
scholarly discussion, the way in which architecture culture has been taken up and
experienced in everyday culture poses new challenges and opportunities for engaging the
built environment. The stark dichotomy between high and low culture is questionable, and
audiences should no longer be considered empty vessels in need of “the best that has
been thought and written” (or, built). To be effective, culture must “work along the grooves
of existing attitudes and inflect them in new directions.” Given this, we must consider the
role played by various forms of mass media in constructing an understanding of
architecture. Simply put, how does the popular mediation of architecture give meaning to
form?
The public is introduced to canonical architecture as well as everyday manufactured
vernacular forms (a term that architectural historian Elizabeth Collins Cromley and historian
and archaeologist Carter Hudgins introduced years ago when critiquing the work of fellow
architectural historian Dell Upton) (Cromley and Hudgins 1995) through a range of mass
media and in the process is taught to recognize desire and consume the built environment.
As a result, mass media has emerged as an essential architecture material.

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 Introduction 3

Have we really ever considered mass media, in its various forms, as structural as bricks
and mortar? We should. After all, we all know that the wildly popular television drama Mad
Men (written by Matthew Weiner of The Sopranos fame) has done more for understanding
post-war design than anything else (Heller 2012). In a similar vein, let’s not forget that the
television sitcom The Brady Bunch, which ran from 1969 to 1974 on ABC and has
remained in syndication ever since in the influential after-school time slot. The show did
more to educate a generation of viewers about the appeal of a open-floor plan, the brown
and orange kitchen, and the profession (after all, Mike Brady was an architect) than any
other form of architectural education.
Suffice to say, this volume, long overdue, will critically analyze a range of mass media
from advertisements to television and film in order to create a more nuanced and complete
understanding of twentieth-century architecture. In the process its essays will consider
how popular culture both constructs and perpetuates ideas about the built environment.
Many of the essays deal with North American topics—in no small part due to the fact that
popular culture is so central to the American milieu and has been for so long.
There are many questions we need to ask when considering the popular mediation of
architecture. Drawing upon evidence from tabloids, television, consumer purchasing
trends, film, photography, fiction and music, some of these questions will be tackled in this
volume. All will be done in an attempt to establish that there is indeed a formative
relationship between architecture and popular culture. A number of the contributors to this
volume participated in a session entitled Archi•Pop at the annual meeting of the Society of
Architectural Historians in April 2013. It was clear at the session that there was need for a
robust conversation regarding architecture and popular culture. Indeed, I am repeatedly
struck by the wealth of visual and physical material to critique, the number of good essays
and books to read in the allied disciplines of sociology, anthropology, media studies and
visual culture, and the simultaneous dearth of material within the discipline of architectural
history. While other fields tackle questions regarding organizational systems of knowledge,
architectural history and architectural practice have for too long been focused on questions
of elitist aesthetics. Given this, this volume will begin to fill a discursive void.
The volume’s targeted audience consists of both scholars and students—individuals
from the disciplines of architecture and design, visual culture, anthropology, cultural
studies, photography, and media studies. While there are no directly competing titles,
there are numerous individual studies (whether on the Playboy bachelor pad, modern
architecture and the movies, fashion and architecture, culinary culture, etc.) that have
contributed to the discussion of architecture and popular culture. Indeed, we are indebted
to the discussions of John Archer, Annmarie Brennan, Lauren Collins, Beatriz Colomina,
Sandy Isenstadt, Jeannie Kim, Leila Kinney, Ruth La Ferla, Mark Lamster, Karal Ann
Marling, Mary McLeod, Barbara Penner, Chad Randl, Joel Sanders, Jeffrey Schnapp, Lyn
Spigel, Mark Wigley and others who have contributed important pieces to this story.
While each essay will contribute to a greater understanding of specific case studies,
each will also raise significant historiographic and methodological issues about how the
history of archi•pop is done. Whether ephemeral (as in the case of hip-hop), commercial
(as in the case of television), seemingly non-intellectual (as in the case of doll houses) or
seemingly inconsequential (as in the case of shag carpeting), such popular iterations of
4 Archi.Pop

architecture have played a surprisingly formative role in the way in which the built
environment is experienced and understood. This is readily apparent in the case for toys
such as dollhouses, which have been long associated with a class of people (children)
who have had no voice within scholarly architectural history, and yet grow to be users of
architecture. There is no doubt that the dollhouses of one’s youth (such as the one imaged
on the cover of this volume) helped establish domestic expectations (physical, aesthetic,
social) in adulthood. A similar case could be made for hip-hop, which while viewed by
some as anti-cultural and destructive, has constituted an important form of urban critique.
The authors to this volume assume a broad definition of architecture—in keeping with
the nature of the changing discipline. The definition of architecture no longer lies exclusively
with individual buildings. It is now located in landscapes, entire cities, roadways and
parking lots, appliances and postcards, films, toys and much more. This volume explores
these ideas through essays on a range of topics—each of which have been chosen for
their collective contribution to an expanded discourse. Each of these essays assumes a
particular theoretical stance—that is, that popular culture, rather than a known architect,
has played a pivotal role in constructing form, understanding, and desire.
For this reason the volume is not concerned with how well-known designers used
popular culture–say for example Loos and Le Corbusier as Beatriz Colomina has famously
argued (Colomina 1994), or even Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown
when confronted with the Las Vegas strip (Venturi, Izenour, and Scott Brown 1977), but
rather how popular culture, that is, everyday vernacular culture in its various forms, has
maintained active agency in defining and manipulating architecture. In this way, this
volume proposes to do the opposite of what Anne Massey (1996), Sarah Chaplin and Eric
Holding (1998) or Beatriz Colomina have done. It seeks to critique the relationship of
popular culture to architecture—rather than critiquing a relationship between architectural
designers and the popular realm.

Domesticating behavior
The volume begins with domestic bliss. In particular, essays are concerned with how forms
of post-war architecture and their associated behaviors were made familiar, palatable, and
ultimately expected within the realm of popular culture. Holley Wlodarczyk addresses the
cultural legacy of the Colonial Revival house—seen on the familiar and oft-quoted television
show Leave It to Beaver, which ran on CBS and then ABC from 1957 to 1963. As she
notes, the home’s quaint colonialism is quite complex. What does it support, if not the
nuclear family? This is what is so interesting. The viewer recognizes the house, and what it
is expected to contain and in so doing accepts that traditional design takes on the role of
an additional character—whether in prime time soap operas such as Desperate Housewives
or Sam Mendes’ feature film American Beauty (starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning)
where nymphomania, suicidal inclinations, and conformity was inculcated.
Television such as Leave It to Beaver beg the question. What has been the role of
Hollywood in constructing and deconstructing space? For example, how are cinematic
strategies deployed to construct a narrative about the suburbs? Mark Bennett’s blueprints

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 Introduction 5

of classic television homes showed us that stereotypes are certainly at play (Bennett
2000). We are aware that the decade-long, now defunct popular television show Extreme
Makeover Home Edition (which aired on ABC from 2003 to 2012) set the parameters for
a desirable domesticity (themed bedrooms, grandiose kitchens, and well-appointed
yards) but have we sat down to critically assess such popular engagement (Curry 2005;
Jacobson 2008; Wotapka 2010 and Velazquez Vargas 2010)? We must wonder to what
extent other forms of television are responsible for mediating expectations about space.
For example, more than any other room in the house, the American kitchen has
become a mediated space—with mass media largely determining its size, shape, and
content (Brownlie, Hewer and Horne 2005; Cromley 2010). Cooking shows such as
Rachel, lifestyle magazines such as Living, kitchen catalogues, recipes, the burgeoning
cookbook market, the appliance industry, as well as the increased attention to food
culture have all focused attention on the kitchen. Such attention is hyper-visual. Whether
we watch Rachel Ray cooking a sumptuous meal, salivate over a product in a Williams
Sonoma catalogue, or fall for a new glass front Frigidaire refrigerator, the emphasis is on
the visual (Naccarato and LeBesco 2012). We become voyeurs into the kitchens of others.
We have become accustomed to watching scenarios play out in the kitchen while
marveling at the ever-changing range of appliances. Such voyeurism has had a profound
influence on kitchen design. Kitchens are now more open, transparent, and visible. This
intensely visual kitchen culture is most definitely a form of gastro-porn (pornography of
food culture) in that media is used to convince the viewer/consumer to upscale their
kitchen design.
Even recipes themselves reflect a certain visual transparency. Cookbooks of the 1950s
and 1960s are filled with recipes for meals out of pre-fabricated parts making it hard to
distinguish individual culinary components. Today, however, there is a trend towards
making food not only from scratch, but also from good ingredients that have led happy
and healthy pre-kitchen lives. Food is not only identifiable, but the process by which it was
produced is understood to be more transparent.
The upscaling of the American kitchen, with its six-burner stove and granite-topped
island is inherently more cinematic—spacious, open, and photogenic. This photogenic
layout is the one that dominates domestic environments as well as the kitchens featured
in television cooking shows, life style magazines and appliance advertisements. Visual
dominance and a sense of voyeurism pervade both. Photography is used to convince the
viewer/consumer to upscale their kitchen design.
Chad Randl explores one particular renovation trend—that of installing shag carpeting
within domestic space. Shag underscores the more insidious behavior that often took
place in such quaint and seemingly family-friendly environments. As residents began to
remodel their houses in the 1970s, installing the sensual and sinuous shag carpeting and
hedonistic behavior seemed to be conjoined. The shagged environments of over-sexed
celebrities such as Jayne Mansfield and shaggy bodies of individuals such as Burt Reynolds
only helped to solidify the associations between sex and shag in the suburbs. Domestic
normalcy, housed behind the well-appointed architectural façade, seems to crumble.
If Hollywood enjoyed constructing and critiquing familial bliss within the suburban
colonial, they also like constructing a counter narrative. As Donald Albrecht (2001) and
6 Archi.Pop

Joseph Rosa (2000) have shown us, the movies are filled with references to dysfunctional
families (The Glass House, 2001 or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 2012), abusive men
(Sleeping with the Enemy, starring Julia Roberts, 1991 or Enough, starring Jennifer Lopez,
2002), gay couples (A Single Man, 2009), and bachelors (as seen in the Batman franchise)
some of whom appear to sell sex (The Big Lebowski, 1998) who live in unconventional
situations—whether modernist mansions or high-tech caves. It is as if the hard edges of
concrete counters, the transparency of floor-to-ceiling windows, the ambiguous
boundaries of infinity pools and the unimpeded view of wall-less spaces are more
conducive to the domestically suspect. This is only reinforced through the popular music
video featuring Snoop Dogg filmed in Lautner’s Sheats/Goldstein House.
Jon Yoder explores the hedonistically ocular-centric homes designed by John Lautner
and deployed by Hollywood as the villainous lairs of voyeurs, pornographers and playboys.
From the home of Howard White and his acrobatic bodyguards Bambi and Thumper (in
the 1971 James Bond thriller Diamonds are Forever) to the panoptic abode imaged in
Brian de Palma’s 1984 Body Double (the Chemosphere House), Lautner houses seem to
be perfect spaces in which to counter narrate domestic bliss—thereby reinforcing
consumer desire for colonial construction and domestic normalcy. Even Playboy magazine
jumped on board with this notion—featuring bachelor pads furnished with (now iconic)
modern furniture and high-tech gadgets over the course of several issues throughout the
1950s (Osgerby 2005; Preciado 2004; Fraterrigo 2009). These pads were not the Leave
It to Beaver house.

Playing
Architectural experience is furthered through play, whether at the scale of dollhouse as
explored by Mark S. Morris, or the amusement park filled with miniaturized buildings as
discussed by Lawrence Chua. Playing in and amongst small spaces conditions
expectations about full-size environments. More specifically, playing helps to define ideas
about the individual, gender dynamics, and even the nation vis-à-vis space. Adam Gopnik
encouraged readers of the New Yorker to evaluate the colonialist assumptions of the
landscape of the elephant king Babar (Gopnik 2008). The changing design of board
games such as Milton Bradley’s Life (published in 1960 and updated many times since)
underscores larger cultural values regarding the place of women in the home. And one
cannot disagree with Mark Morris’ assertion that there is a difference between the
domestic normalcy constructed by the tubular wooden figures of Fisher Price (based in
East Aurora, New York) and the articulated plastic bodies of Playmobil (based in Zirndorf,
Germany). The houses designed by these companies differed, as too did the domestic
dreams that were affiliated with them.
We know remarkably little about the world of play—today a 22 billion-dollar industry in
the US alone. Corporations responsible for design closely guard trade information.
Material culture—ephemeral and ubiquitous—is rarely preserved. (The Brian Sutton-Smith
Library located in Rochester, New York at the Museum of Play is an exception; they house
a collection of dollhouses as well as the trade publications advertising them.) Fortunately,

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 Introduction 7

scholars have recently begun to explore the design world of children from tinker toys
(Zinguer 2004) to playgrounds (Solomon 2005). Amy Ogata has gone so far as to argue
that designing for the creative child in post-war America was an important tactic for
fighting the Cold War (Ogata 2013). A recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in
NYC raised the bar. Toys emerged as high design as they were displayed in the same
building as the Picassos, Rothkos and Warhols (Kinchin and O’Connor 2012). That said,
a lot remains to be done.
When children grow up, how do their fantasies translate into reality? Are their
expectations of domestic normalcy conditioned by the spaces of play, or not? A toy
store in Ithaca, New York (a progressive community friendly to single sex couples
with children and multi-racial families) has had to repackage some Playmobil family
units so as to properly reflect the cultural context in which they are sold. The Walt
Disney Corporation, which is famously mum of about how they design and operate
their theme parks (Fjellman 1992), could tell us a lot about transitioning between child
and adult. But, they have chosen not to. As Lawrence Chua shows us, the vision of
play is politicized for individuals of various ages at theme parks that shrink the nation
nto a collection of canonical buildings. Indeed, we need to know more about the
politicized world of play as tackled by Ogata, or here by Chua. Recent legal battles have
shown how the seemingly benign activities of the over 100-year-old Boy Scouts of
America are not so benign—seeking to foster leadership that is simultaneously
heterosexual in character.
So what about in places outside of the United States? How do politics and play merge?
We know that the Fascist governments of Germany and Italy targeted children in countless
ways with the hope of designing their adult desires. This should be a lesson to us. So,
while both Morris and Chua address issues of miniaturization, they do so on very different
scales—the former is intimate and domestic, the latter, public and national.

Profligate profiles
Denise Costanzo transports us to the deceptively safe confines of a French Provincial
McMansion in the New Jersey suburbs where the television character Tony Soprano lives.
As she notes, a couple of bubbles burst in 2008—the housing bubble, as well as this
highly acclaimed and much-loved series itself. She shows the dangerous allure of the
American suburban dream, but also the inherent semiotic tensions within aspirational
housing throughout the historic canon—going back to our favorite proto-McMansion—
the Palazzo Medici in Florence.
A discussion of the supersize house is pertinent particularly as the dimensions of the
average American house have doubled between 1950 and 2000. There is no doubt that
media has made consumers comfortable with architectural excess. We watch television
shows such as the Bachelor and are introduced to the lavish vacation destinations and
luxurious domestic abodes with swooping driveways, grand entrances, and surreal
swimming pools. Even the Downton Abbey craze has made viewers more comfortable
with the characters that live upstairs. But this is far from new.
8 Archi.Pop

Post-war photographers such as Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller were crucial to the
consumption of modern architecture (Niedenthal 1993). Indeed, houses such as Richard
Neutra’s Kauffman house in Palm Springs (built for Edgar Kauffman in 1946) became so
famous, largely due to the way in which it was mediated. As many have argued, this is not
due to style, or even Neutra’s design, but the way in which the house was subjected to a
carefully orchestrated publishing event for Life magazine (Niedenthal 1993). Not
surprisingly, Life referred to the house as “glamorous” in 1949 (Life, 146). Shooting for
mass-market magazines, photographers such as Shulman came to define the era as
what art historian Alice T. Friedman has coined as “glamorous” (Friedman 2010). Shulman
did this while bringing modernism to the masses (see the documentary Visual Acoustics,
2008). He photographed eighteen of the twenty-six case study houses (minimal modernist
residential structures commissioned by Arts and Architecture magazine) and in the
process defined the lifestyle of Southern California that would come to embody post-war
modernism. His carefully choreographed silvery black and white photographs, which
positioned people as props (reclining on poolside lounge chairs and so forth) bespoke
comfort, leisure, and indirectly excess.
Not surprisingly, J. Crew, the mail order clothing catalogue (given a boost by the
fact that First Lady Michelle Obama’s regularly uses them as a sartorial resource) used
the Kauffman house for their catalogue shoot in March 2008 (a month before the
house was sold by Christie’s for 12.8 million dollars). This was a time of optimism,
glamour, and wanton waste just prior to the bursting of the housing bubble in the United
States.
Consumer products are often photographed against the backdrop of, or even within,
glamorous buildings: 7 for all mankind jeans against Phillip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House
in New Canaan, Connecticut. Snoop Dogg shot his 2004 music video “Let’s Get Blown”
inside John Lautner’s Sheats/Goldstein House. Car companies have long used modern
architecture as a backdrop for featuring their sleek new vehicles from Saarinen’s War
Memorial Center in Milwaukee to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. But what
does this mean?
Somehow architecture bears connotations of desirability and ultimately consumer
excess which designers of consumer commodities want. And there are certain architects
who are attuned to this. Morris Lapidus (1902–2001) was one. “Too much is never
enough,” he famously declared (Lapidus 1996). His self-defined woggles, use of luxurious
materials, organic shapes, and the famous stairway to nowhere (featured in the Miami
Beach Fontainebleau hotel of 1954) allowed consumers to become actors and products
to become props. It was only a matter of time before Hollywood realized that using a
Lapidus designed site was better than any set—and so Goldfinger (1964), Scarface
(1983), The Bodyguard (1992) as well as an episode of The Sopranos (in 2002) were all
shot at the Fontainebleau. Lapidus successfully packaged places for pleasure and in so
doing legitimized the profligate profiles of wanton waste.
Barbara Penner continues this discussion by analyzing the application of the Pop
aesthetic on architecture. She explores the ways in which architects responded to
consumer desires and in the process demonstrate a certain ambivalence about how
consumerism invariably affects designers.

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 Introduction 9

Cinematic travels
Hollywood has long conditioned the popular perspective on architecture, transporting
viewers to other places and infusing those places with compelling narratives. Merrill
Schleier and Sarah Benson each tackle how this takes place in the movies.
Schleier takes on a canonical favorite—Frank Lloyd Wright. His houses have served as
familiar film sets for years in films including Blade Runner (1982) and the Karate Kid II
(1989). Their design—with open rooms and often dramatic siting—has proved conducive
to filmic techniques. By focusing on one particular house, the striking 1924 cement-block
Ennis House in Los Angeles, Schleier shows how a structure, which pushes the boundaries
of domestic space, emerges as the site of cinematic dystopia. The house’s modern
stylistic character and strategic siting make it a perfect setting for the display of problematic
gender identity, sexual depravity, murder, decadence, and dystopian decay in films
spanning from 1933–1982. Familiar actors, from Vincent Price to Harrison Ford have used
the house in ways that furthered the plots of their respective movies. In so doing they
enabled architecture to assume active agency. And for the masses that saw the movies,
cinematic representations of architecture became an important way of making the avant-
garde familiar even while it remained unfriendly.
During the post-war period, when the middle classes could afford to take to the skies
to visit destinations far and wide, there was a parallel increase in movies that featured these
destinations. Many of these films were B movies—Three Coins in a Fountain (1954), 20
Million Miles to Earth (1957) or Gidget Goes to Rome (1963). Even Roman Holiday (1953),
a better film, starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, falls into this category. And many
were aimed at a younger and often female audience. A genre emerged in which young
naïve women traipsed around the globe—often to places like Italy or France—where they
were seduced by men, good food, fast cars, and architectural wonders. Such films were
quite distinct from the genre of earlier Neo-Realist films being produced by the likes of
Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica or André Bazin in the former war-torn countries.
Indeed, while Gidget pondered a life without Moondoggie (her American boyfriend)
in the box office success Gidget Goes to Rome or the exotic Venutian damaged the
Coliseum in 20 Million Miles to Earth, the characters of Antonio Ricci (of De Sica’s Bicycle
Thieves) and Pina (of Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta) the previous decade struggled with
unemployment and starvation. The geography and itineraries of the Hollywood films was
strikingly distinct from the Italian films. While Gidget and her friends remained ensconced
in the city center, enjoying posh hotels and admiring the monuments, the Italian characters
lived in depressing housing complexes in desolate parts of Rome, isolated from public
transportation, and often without running water. These two worlds could not have been
more different. Why this is the case has a lot to do with the socio-economic realities on
the ground. While Europe was busy rebuilding destroyed infrastructure, Americans were
eager to travel, and for the first time enabled to do so.
Hollywood films underscored the canon of sites (established centuries before during
the Grand Tour) and showed scores of people not only how to visit these sites, but how
to look and respond. As such, cinema helped popularize the architectural canon. As Alice
T. Friedman has noted, post-war travel was glamorous. Airline terminals such as Eero
10 Archi.Pop

Saarinen’s 1962 swooping TWA complex at the then Idlewild airport (subsequently named
JFK) in NYC, helped to underscore the exotic appeal of international destinations. Middle-
class wannabe travelers went so far as to walk the dynamic spaces of the TWA terminal,
without a passport, but with the hope of participating in the feeling of travel (Friedman
2010). Hollywood films provided a similar experience to scores.

Road space
Throughout the volume authors tackle questions regarding the relationship between high
and low culture on different scales and in a variety of media. Iain Borden addresses these
issues within the automobile—perhaps the most influential interface between design,
technology, and people.
Automobile architecture provides the space from which to experience other forms of
design—whether buildings, sites, or cities. While Borden explores the way in which cars
have been designed and represented (whether through film or toys) Esperdy tackles the
actual roadways—in particular anxiety about new auto-oriented architecture (shopping
malls, fast-food restaurants, gas stations, motels, drive-in movie theaters and the like)
sprouting along the burgeoning roadways. Esperdy shows how discussions of interstate
culture took place in popular publications such as Time, Life, Look, the Saturday Evening
Post, and Reader’s Digest. Such magazines were crucial to documenting the frequently
changing built environment during the middle of the twentieth century. Through
advertisements, photo essays, and articles, these journals also chronicled the popular
reaction to the changing landscape—which was at times negative.
Both Borden and Esperdy introduce readers to the corporate consumer culture.
Whether within spaces that move or spaces designed to be approached while moving,
we see the emergence of a branded landscape. Chains of fast-food restaurants and gas
stations begin to transform the roadways just as those roads came to be occupied by
automobiles—some of which were designed to feed into expectations wrought in film.
Lying behind the design of these environments was the consumer culture constructed by
corporations.

Urban critiques
There are countless ways in which popular culture critiques the urban environment. Graffiti
has called attention to urban blight and even propelled some to transform it (most famously
the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani who mounted an anti-graffiti task force in
1995). By celebrating the desolate, vacant and cursed, haunted houses define domestic
normalcy through absence (Vidler 1987). Brandscapes in turn reinforce buying habits that
are themselves integral to the design industry (Klingman 2007). And music has always
provided a ripe critique of cityscapes. Recently, allusions to the now bankrupt city of Detroit
have allowed some critics to successfully locate the missing and mysterious singer/
songwriter Rodriguez as chronicled in the 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man.

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 Introduction 11

Lawrence Chua’s essay continues in this musical vein. It explores how hip-hop has
reframed the modernist blight of American housing projects. The visual and aural culture
of hip-hop (in music videos and lyrics) reframed NYC housing projects as places of vibrant
community. The “death of modernism,” which according to architecture critic Charles
Jencks took place with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project between 1972
and1976, was challenged by hip-hop culture. According to Chua, the musical movement,
born in the inner city housing projects, has successfully re-narrated the history of this
architecture. Race and class are invariably integrated into the history of what many in the
academy have dismissed as urban blight. Thanks to his essay, readers are left to wonder
how they have been not so subtly persuaded to look upon the urban landscape.

Conclusion
As we will see, the topics addressed in this book—from dollhouses to hip-hop, from the
cinematic suburbs to shag carpeting—have had a profound impact on a popular
understanding and interpretation of architectural space. And yet, heretofore, they have
not been subjected to critical analysis. The products of popular culture are also inherently
critical, providing an analytical commentary on the built environment. Through a series of
informed and well-researched case studies, readers are provided with important
methodological examples that simultaneously undertake serious history. As such,
architectural history is finally catching up with one of its main interlocutors. Suffice to say
that in this volume no study is esoteric or irrelevant—each will result in intellectual
repercussions. And each challenges the reader to reconsider the familiar. In so doing,
these essays seek to challenge the discourse of architecture sited in exclusively elite
terms, and in the process hope to underscore the idea that the popular merits serious
discussion.

Note
1 Special thanks are owed to Mike Babcock, Aaron Gensler, Jen Grosso, Pete Levins, Anna
Mascorella, Whitten Overby, and Donny Silberman.
12

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PART ONE

Domesticating Behavior

13
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Chapter 1
The Cultural Meanings of the
Leave It to Beaver House
Holley Wlodarczyk

Few TV houses have shaped the popular imagination of American suburbia more than the
rather unassuming Colonial Revival seen on Leave It to Beaver. While never enjoying
exceptionally high ratings during its original run from 1957 through 1963, the show was
seen by millions for decades after in reruns on both network and cable television,
amplifying its historical footprint and ensuring viewers’ continued familiarity with its main
residence. A DVD set of the entire series now sells for $120 (US), and most individual full
episodes are available for free viewing on YouTube, keeping the Cleaver house in circulation
with old and new potential audiences. Perhaps second only to I Love Lucy (1951–57) as
a cultural touchstone of postwar media, Leave It to Beaver is today viewed through the
comfortable haze of nostalgia for what seem like simpler times long gone by. Part of the
show’s appeal in this context is the perceived pleasantness and stability of the domestic
scene in and around this celebrated American home.
The setting of the Leave It to Beaver house visually registers as an old-fashioned
neighborhood filled with classic pre-World War II suburban architecture, a sharp contrast
to the many monotonous “little boxes made of ticky-tacky” that came to define suburbia
in the years preceding, during and after the series’ initial run. This phrase first gained
notoriety in a 1962 song by Malvina Reynolds, “Little Boxes,” critiquing postwar cookie-
cutter tract developments:

Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,

little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one, and a blue one and a yellow one,
and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.

Recorded by Pete Seeger in 1963, Reynolds’ acerbic folk song was popular just as Leave
It to Beaver left the air. It was most recently employed in opening credits’ sequences for
the first and last seasons of Jenji Kohan’s hit series for Showtime, Weeds (2005–12),

15
16 Archi.Pop

targeting a suburban landscape now filled with look-alike McMansions. This vision of
millennial suburbia served as a sufficiently bland contrast background against which a
colorful cast of characters disrupts the orderly fiction that everyone living in suburbs like
this comes out “all the same.” While over several decades this architecturally determinist
line of critique has nonetheless persisted in framing the relationship between suburban
housing and inhabitants as conformist, and the suburban lifestyle as banal, Leave It to
Beaver represents a visually durable distinction from “ticky-tacky” suburban environments
thus referenced in the wider discourse.
Popular music was not the only media through which such critiques of the character of
modern suburbia could be found. Photographs once used to promote the marvels of
efficient, affordable mass-production of suburban tract homes, like William Garnett’s now
iconic aerial images documenting the construction of Lakewood, California (1950), were
by the early 1960s republished and repurposed in more critical works, like Peter Blake’s
God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (Blake 1964),
to indict such large-scale building practices that increasingly registered as tasteless,
monotonous, ecologically devastating sprawl. In the context of concurrent films that were
more and more frequently bashing newer, poorly designed and constructed ’burbs and
the people of questionable virtue who lived in them, like Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment
in 1957, the well-established, classic façades seen on Leave It to Beaver rather stood for
solid homes and solid families. In contrast to other postwar era media like film, photography,
and music, socially and politically conservative television sitcoms rarely leveled harsh
criticism at either longstanding or newly built suburban locations from which a growing
population of American viewers tuned in. The images of postwar suburban space and
everyday life widely seen on the small screen were not, however, virtual mirrors of the
society that watched weekly episodes of favorite family-friendly shows. Instead, these
media texts transmitted a rather homogenous national family ideal that, for a time,
increasingly excluded references to geographical, social, and cultural difference.
The phrase “Leave It to Beaver” is now commonly employed as an adjective to connote
such presumed small town, middle-class, patriarchal nuclear family values, and is
occasionally brandished in partisan political discourse to illustrate their subsequent loss.
One relatively recent usage illustrating this particular cultural meaning was in an offhand
remark by FOX News prime-time pundit Bill O’Reilly on the 12 November, 2012 broadcast
of The O’Reilly Factor, where he claimed that President Obama’s re-election signaled that
“Traditional America as we knew it is gone. Ward, June, Wally and the Beav. . .out of
here.” This brief utterance and its cultural reference elicited multiple responses from critics
on the political left. On Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Jon Stewart drew laughs a few
nights later by poking fun of O’Reilly’s framing of this opinion in terms of the supposed
“reality” of 1950s’ sitcom families in a segment titled “It Was the Best of Times, It Was the
Best of Times.” Here Stewart pointed out that in his rhetorical use of “traditional America”
in conjunction with this fictional yet resonant TV family, what O’Reilly was really lamenting
was the loss of “white America,” as both the voting majority and the cultural norm. Further
missing from O’Reilly’s pithy comment according to Stewart was any acknowledgment of
the cultural construction of whiteness in the “American experiment” over two centuries
that once openly excluded and derided certain “races” and religions, such as Irish

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Catholics like Bill O’Reilly, and Jews like his guest and fellow lamenter, FOX contributor
Bernie Goldberg. Another humorous response to O’Reilly’s on-air statement was a Tom
the Dancing Bug comic, “Bill O’Reilly’s ‘Leave It to Beaver’ Nightmare,” published
22 November by Ruben Bolling on Daily Kos. Imagining an economic conversation
between the President and the Cleaver family inside their familiar “1960” home, where the
“top tax rate is 91%” and Ward’s modestly compensated “boss lives down the street”
rather than in an exclusive gated executive community, the President is received warmly
by the Cleavers as “bringing back ‘traditional’ America,” pre-New Deal. These discursive
exchanges following the 2012 election demonstrate the continued cultural currency of
Leave It to Beaver, a reference still widely understood beyond the immediate context of
postwar television viewership, yet one that functions as a much more complex, malleable
popular text than usually thought, subject to appropriation by a variety of interests to both
support and critique overly simplistic ways of viewing the past and the present.
While fictional and at times factional, as most frequently used it nonetheless invokes
what is quite possibly the quintessential residential structure representing the American
dream for generations—the “Leave It to Beaver house.” Like many prime-time TV series
of the period, especially sitcoms, Leave It to Beaver depicted that suburban dream as the
province of predominantly white middle-class Americans, whose embodiment of “the
good life” was a comfortable but restrained blend of patriotic duty and domestic tranquility.
Dolores Hayden uses the phrase “sitcom suburbs” as the title for the seventh chapter in
Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000, to classify the type of
suburban building and planning common in postwar years. She introduces Levittown, NY,
Lakewood, CA, and Park Forest, IL as places where “model houses on suburban streets
held families similar in age, race, and income whose lifestyles were reflected in the
nationally popular sitcoms of the 1950s, including Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet,
and Father Knows Best” (Hayden 2003: 128). What is not often if ever remarked upon,
though, is how different the houses and subdivisions seen on these TV shows look from
those Levittown Cape Cods or Lakewood ranch houses, not to mention the lack of mature
trees and lush greenery in these and other brand new, mass-produced tracts. Even the
stately Colonial Revival was occasionally subject to tract-house treatment in the emerging
postwar suburban environment, as captured in a 1948 photograph by Robert Burian
included in Barbara Norfleet’s When We Liked Ike: Looking for Postwar America (Norfleet
2001: 61). Here five slight variations of the most basic Colonial style houses are lined up
in a row in an otherwise empty landscape-in-the-making. Juxtaposed with the image is a
William H. White quote from the October 1951 issue of Fortune outlining “the Pattern”
expressed by one of “The Wives of Management,” by which a progressively upscale
dream is envisioned as starting in a “pretty tacky” starter subdivision, and eventually
upgrading to a custom built home in one of the more desirable suburban locales. The
photograph above the quote reads as if it were an illustration of that initial point of suburban
entry, bare of both architectural character and lush greenery that are common signifiers of
more aspirational, distinguishable—and distinguished—suburban dwellings. Most
postwar households as seen on TV, including the Cleavers’, did not reside in the sparsely
landscaped terrain or the monotonous tracts of houses that have elicited such disdain
from social and architectural critics for most of the last century.
18 Archi.Pop

The architectural palette favored for Leave It to Beaver, as by most film and television
production at the time, can be seen in a brief tour of Colonial Street, the Universal Studios
Hollywood back lot that served as the fictional model community of Mayfield. Named after
the “Colonial Mansion” that once anchored the outdoor set, an assortment of Victorian
houses mostly occupied “Colonial Street.” The original Colonial Revival best remembered
as the Cleaver’s house was later recycled as the home of Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–76),
and then removed during production of the 1989 Tom Hanks’ comedy, The ’Burbs, but a
near-identical replacement was constructed for a new Leave It to Beaver movie in 1996.
Historic photographs of many of the other houses sited on Colonial Street are featured in
a RetroWeb page titled “Leave It to Beaver on Universal City’s ‘Colonial Street’ and
Beyond” dedicated to “211 Pine Street,” the Cleaver family home from the beginning of
the third season through the sixth and final season. This choice of setting further reveals
how the flavor of our postwar nostalgia, as cultivated primarily through visual media, is
oriented toward a type of neighborhood that would have already been well established by
the late 1950s. This somewhat romantic view is shared in television programs more overtly
critical of the spatial character and way of life imagined in contemporary suburban
development compared to prewar small towns, as seen in certain nostalgic episodes of
Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, like “Walking Distance” (1959) and “A Stop at Willoughby”
(1960). Postwar television across genres tended toward representations of suburban
lifestyles, homes and neighborhoods that privileged the traditional over the modern,
visually and ideologically. In this context Leave It to Beaver and the houses that occupied
it were already indicative of a nostalgic mediated rendering at the time of its making.
The significance of this housing type and its history in a California context is not limited
to a backward-looking Hollywood back lot. A local series on the “distinct architectural
styles” of Santa Barbara, California includes one article in particular on how American
Colonial Revivals “laid the framework” of this suburb’s “character.” In a short description
of its historical style and context, local designer Anthony Grumbine begins a column with
his observation that “When the television show Leave It to Beaver was in its heyday, it was
no surprise that the Cleaver family lived in a particular style of house that exemplified
vernacular architecture in the United States for the previous 50 years.” (Grumbine 2012).
This type of house, broadly popular across the country from its centennial through the first
half of the twentieth century, is further compared by Grumbine to the “simple forms of the
first colonial houses” and contrasted favorably against trends toward more complicated
“asymmetrical massing” of Queen Anne-style Victorians. In Building the Dream: A Social
History of Housing in America, Gwendolyn Wright makes only brief and occasional
mention of the Colonial Revival, though she suggests that in earlier homebuilding trends
in the mid-nineteenth century, frontier “American romanticism in architecture had a
distinctly conservative side,” expressed in the symmetry of easy-to-build late Colonial
styles (Wright 1983: 88, 168). By the early decades of the twentieth century she notes
that the Colonial Revival again “found advocates across the nation,” wherein “its simple
foursquare plan and white clapboard façade evoked the moral tone of restraint and sound
judgment,” as well as “an architectural expression of the entire country’s common heritage
of good sense and egalitarian principles.” (ibid 168). It was a popular style of standardized,
precut, mail-order home kit, like “The Vernon,” billed as “The Home of Your Dreams” by

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 Meanings of the Leave It to Beaver House 19

Sterling Homes in 1916, or “The Lexington,” a “Nine Room Colonial” model available
through Sears’ Modern Homes catalogue in 1923. And later, in the tract home-building
boom of the postwar years, Wright includes the Colonial Revival in a very short list of other
popular types, like the Cape Cod, Tudor, and ranch styles that were more likely than
others to earn FHA loan approval (ibid 251). Even in current real estate markets this house
type most associated with Leave It to Beaver remains a popular choice, at least as framed
by select marketing rhetoric. An ad for a vintage “Home of the Week,” described as a
“Leave It to Beaver-style House in Dallas,” begins with the prompt “I see Ward and June
all over this house, don’t you?” (Evans 2011).
The Pine Street house best remembered from the show is actually the second residence
of this television family. Moving between seasons two and three from the somewhat similar
though white-picket-fenced house on Mapleton Drive, the Cleavers appear to be moving
up without leaving their familiar neighborhood. Portions of the cleaner, more streamlined
façade of their new home can be seen beginning in the fourth season’s opening credit
sequence, and increasingly expansive views of the more spacious front yard are
incorporated in the opening credits for seasons five and six (see Figure 1.1). As actors’

Figure 1.1 The front façade of Leave It to Beaver’s Colonial Revival house is clearly seen in this
still from the opening credits of the series’ sixth and final season, originally broadcast on ABC in
1962–63. One of postwar television’s most iconic families, the Cleavers, was often filmed in scenes
set outside the home, on Universal Studio’s Colonial Street, as well as inside the show’s familiar
kitchen, living room, dining room, den, and boys’ bedroom sets.
© 1962, Revue Studio
20 Archi.Pop

names are superimposed on the scene, each family member is respectively shown leaving
through the front door in the morning (Season 4), receiving lemonade from mom while
doing yard work out front (Season 5), and piling into the family car for a picnic (Season 6).
Each scenario features Barbara Billingsley’s June Cleaver as the central figure of the family,
but also as the gatekeeper of the house.
In the 2010 New York Times obituary for Billingsley, the actress who “personified a
Hollywood postwar family ideal of the ever-sweet, ever-helpful suburban stay-at-home
mom,” mention is made of the “immaculate, airy house” she kept (Pollak 2010). Most
often seen within its interior or at its threshold, it could be argued that Billingsley co-
starred with the Cleaver house equally as much as she did with Hugh Beaumont (as
husband, “Ward”), Tony Dow (as eldest son, “Wally”) or Jerry Mathers (as youngest son,
“the Beaver”). Her socially constructed and culturally resonant role was tied to and
interwoven with that American Colonial Revival, as well as the kind of happy home life TV
audiences across decades imagined as part and parcel of it. The obituary contextualizes
Billingsley’s portrayal of June as a “cultural standard” for the TV housewife and mother,
similar to Harriet Nelson and Donna Reed, who headlined other similarly popular shows
of this genre and period. Yet we rarely hear any one speak of the “Ozzy and Harriet
house,” the “Donna Reed house,” or even the “Father Knows Best house.” In “Sitcoms
and Suburbs,” Mary Beth Haralovich calls out the figure of June as she discusses
the cultural “positioning” of the “1950’s homemaker,” pointing out that “her value to the
economy. . .was at once central and marginal in that she was positioned within the home,
constituting the value of her labor outside the means of production,” yet also “central to
the economy in that her function as homemaker was the subject of consumer design and
marketing, the basis of an industry” (Haralovich 1989: 61). “Homemakers” like June
Cleaver were as much symbols used to market an idealized domestic social and spatial
configuration as they were relatable characters in popular entertainment. Yet even while
Mrs. Cleaver “may have been too good to be true,” the series nonetheless “produced fan
mail and nostalgia for decades afterward, largely from the same generation whose later
counterculture derided the see-no-evil suburbia June’s character represented.” (Pollak
2010). Hardly anyone ever critiqued her lovely house, though.
Despite its close association with the show, this house was not “invented” for Leave It
to Beaver. Original construction of the façade was for use as the main set in William Wyler’s
feature film, The Desperate Hours (1955). It was the scene of a home invasion where
fugitive Humphrey Bogart holds the upstanding Fredric March and his family hostage. This
private middle-class home, in a supposedly safe, quiet suburban Indianapolis setting,
functions within the narrative of the film to shock moviegoers out of complacent faith that
their own homes, a comfortable distance from urban crime, were far enough removed and
secured to be inviolable. The original 1955 New York Times review by Bosley Crowther,
“‘Desperate Hours’ for a Nice Family,” touches upon the experience for theater viewers:

The plight of a nice American family held captive in their own suburban home by a
trio of skulking desperados recently escaped from jail may not be entirely original but
it packs the potential hazard of a smoking powder keg. And Mr. Wyler has grasped
the outrage of it in his picture. . .He has caught—for a while—the horrible feeling of

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 Meanings of the Leave It to Beaver House 21

suffocation that these people have when they find themselves strangely isolated by
their captors from the world outside.

The reviewer notes that the writer and director have produced a film that is both “fearful”
and “cogent,” but only “so long as they keep the actors sweating within the prison of the
innocent-looking home.” Daniel Hilliard (March) is the homeowner, husband, and father
who eventually thwarts the criminal’s escape at the end by turning Bogie’s own gun on
him, forcing him out the front door of the house and into a police spotlight—the same
front door that June Cleaver would send her family forth from just a few years later. This
Colonial Revival home, or any other like it, was obviously not where the criminal element
belonged, and his presence disrupts our sense of the cultural meaning of the house.
When Bogart is finally expelled from its shell of domesticity, deprived of its shelter, he
meets his inevitable death at the hands of waiting police. Order is restored in accordance
with Classic Hollywood narrative conventions, and life in this house, in this neighborhood,
can now go on as it is perceived it should. The assumed “happily ever after” imagined in
this house is exactly the kind of uneventful life later enjoyed by the Cleavers.
Even when Hollywood movies do not use this same “Leave It to Beaver house” on the
Colonial Street set, there is a tendency to refer to it when using other Colonial Revival
façades. Nearly four decades after the TV show, a large white Colonial was used as the
home of the Banks family in contemporary remakes of Father of the Bride (1950) and
Father’s Little Dividend (1951). In Father of the Bride (1991) and Father of the Bride, Part
2 (1995), two slightly different houses in actual Southern California neighborhoods were
used to connote the kind of idealized suburban lifestyle associated with the original films
(starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett as parents of Elizabeth Taylor’s postwar bride),
as well as countless TV shows of that era. This composite image of the near-identical
stately houses is featured prominently in both Steve Martin remakes, in which he plays the
eponymous “father of the bride,” George Stanley Banks, who, as in the original, is talked
into remodeling the family home to better accommodate a wedding reception. It is,
however, in the second film that he convinces his wife that it is now time to move
somewhere else since they are near-empty nesters. Already the owner of a sporty
convertible, George’s mid-life crisis takes the form of leaving calm suburbia for the
excitement of more youthful habitation near the beach. Mature trees, lush landscaping,
and an approving rainbow frame the pivotal scene where he assures his wife, Nina (Diane
Keaton), that “We could sell this house in a second. It’s the Leave It to Beaver house that
everybody wants.” George unwittingly sells it to a “foreign” businessman (Eugene Levy),
who, as George later finds out, wants to tear it down and build something new rather than
house his own family in the nostalgic TV dream home. After learning he is about to become
a father again, George returns to plead for the house back, now framed precariously by a
giant yellow crane and the markings of a demolition zone. George tries to undo the rash
real estate deal with an emotional appeal to the all-business Mr. Habeeb (Levy) in terms
of the personal investments he’s already made:

Mr. Habeeb, this is not a piece of land. This is my home and I’m gonna be a father
again and I don’t want to bring my baby home to a condo on the beach! I wanna drive
22 Archi.Pop

down that street and I wanna pull into this driveway. . .You see this pathway? I laid
these bricks with my own two hands. I planted this grass, I built this fence. . .Don’t
bulldoze my memories, man. Sell me back my home!

Sympathy for George’s plight in Father of the Bride, Part 2 is based on an acceptance of
and expectation for the rightness of this house for raising a family. Hollywood films like this
and television sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver have mediated the myths of domesticity
over decades, relying on nostalgia (both in and for the postwar era) in establishing and
propagating a hegemonic suburban nuclear family paradigm understood to belong in this
type of residence. A decade after the Father of the Bride updates, one of the two “real”
houses used as sets was again employed as an ideal though mainstream suburban
residence in Guess Who, a 2005 film starring Bernie Mac as the African-American
husband, father, and homeowner who, in a loose remake of the 1967 classic Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner, is unpleasantly surprised when his daughter brings home her
Caucasian boyfriend. Here the once-white Colonial Revival is literally repainted in a deeper
taupe tone, but it nonetheless functions similarly as a signifier of suburban middle-class
status and respectability, as it did when its white-painted façade was featured in the
1990s’ Father of the Bride films. The subtle change is detailed in a Hooked on Houses
blog posting of stills from each respective movie (Julia 2011). The east coast African-
American suburb in which the latter film is set is filled with homes of similar architectural
style, marking the site as culturally stable and comfortably domestic compared to “the
city” of New York in which the young biracial couple live and work. In one scene overlooking
the sleepy town at night, the daughter (Zoe Saldana) expresses her desire to come back
to a place like this after she and her boyfriend (Ashton Kutcher) are married, confirming a
common, longstanding cultural narrative that positions suburban locations and houses as
ideal places to raise a family. Such ideas, feelings and desires are perpetuated in the real-
life marketing of Colonial Revival homes like this to contemporary consumers, particularly
those already familiar with media references to such architectural icons. Celebrity gossip
site TMZ reported in June of 2011 on the availability and $1.35 million list price of one of
the houses seen in both Father of the Bride remakes and Guess Who. Tapping into
popular awareness of both film and TV narrative connections, the joke is that one of the
“only things not included in the sale” is “years of marital bliss,” and the take-home message
is if you buy this house, happy years and family memories will naturally come.
Other Colonial Revival homes featured in TV series have been deployed to illustrate the
illusive nature of such dreams, or at the very least the complexity of non-traditional life in
homes that otherwise suggest simplicity and conformity. In Will Smith’s breakout acting
role on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–96), an oversized Brentwood mansion resembling
the house in Father of the Bride and Guess Who serves as the posh home of his rich
uncle’s family. Smith’s move there from West Philadelphia was intended as a chance for
reform, a shelter from “bad” influences, and a model of upward and outward mobility. The
“jokes” in this sitcom are, however, mostly at the expense of the upright and occasionally
uptight nuclear family who learn as much from the “troubled youth” as he does from them.
Despite the constant, unchanging façade of the house, representing traditional,
mainstream tastes and values, the prominent African-American TV family that lives within

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 Meanings of the Leave It to Beaver House 23

it undergoes a great deal of change, perceptibly made more “real” to viewers at the close
of the twentieth century who may cherish the simplicity of Leave It to Beaver and desire
its familiar house style, but who no longer find in its scripts a suitable or satisfying social
pattern for emulation “at home” today.
In another more recent television text tackling the notion of suburbia’s reputation as
stalwart though simultaneously stultifying, Swingtown was set on the suburban North
Shore of Chicago during the “swinging seventies,” provocatively exploring and eventually
challenging assumptions about the recursive relationship between a family’s character
and that of their home’s architectural style. Aired prime time on CBS during the summer
of 2008, the short-lived show featured a conventional brick Colonial Revival as the new
home of an upwardly mobile family caught between the social pressures of more
conservative friends still living in a modest postwar tract house in the old neighborhood,
and the tantalizing appeal of new friends across the street who practice their open
marriage in a spectacular modern house boasting a view of Lake Michigan. AP
Entertainment Writer Derrik Lang briefly explains the choices made by the show’s creative
staff concerning the architectural style and interior furnishing of each respective family
home and what they represent, noting the “stodgy” and “humdrum middle-class home”
of the old neighbors, the stylish transparency of the new neighbors’ literal and figurative
“glass house,” and the “middle-of-the-road” characterization of the Millers who experiment
with “the lifestyle” while moving into and redecorating their traditional American dream
home. The family virtue expressed by the home’s architectural style gives way in the end
to socio-cultural change.
The same year that Swingtown called into question the persistence of an aspirational
“Leave It to Beaver” lifestyle beyond quaint visions of postwar life as seen on TV, we
encounter a commercial break most notable for its discursive referencing of the Cleavers
but also its visual disparity between their classic home and the one shown briefly in the
ad. A campaign executive for “The Buttertons,” a 2008 spot for I Can’t Believe It’s Not
Butter, admitted that the title cards and music in the first part of the commercial were “sort
of modeled after ‘Leave It to Beaver’ ” (Elliot 2008). “Sort of.” It depicts an “old-fashioned”
family that loves all things butter, leading into a scene featuring a similar though
contemporary family that now “knows better.”

(soft focus black and white exterior view of a modern postwar suburban home
and car )
Male voice: Meet the Buttertons!
(cut to soft focus black and white interior view of family in kitchen)
Female voice: Back then, a lot of us were like the Buttertons.
Mrs. Butterton: Dinner’s ready
Mr. Butterton: Golly! That sure looks delicious. Ha ha. Let’s eat!
Female voice: We didn’t know a lot about saturated fat and cholesterol.
Jr. Butterton: Mmm. Yummy.
(switch to modern—but similar—family home interior, shot in warm color)
Female voice: Today we know better. That’s why there’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not
Butter. . .
24 Archi.Pop

The campaign, which had a multi-media platform rollout, “lovingly recreates the look of
family life and TV shows of the ’50s.” Despite stated efforts to recreate the feel of Leave It
to Beaver, the title shot shows a much more modern house in the nostalgic black and
white “period” portion of the commercial rather than using any number of Colonial Revival
façades in acknowledgment of its particular 1950s sitcom inspiration. The house seen
here is more reminiscent of the main residence of The Brady Bunch (1969–74) than of
Leave It to Beaver in style and appearance, even though the rest of the details more
closely track the earlier show. It is questionable as to whether or not most viewers even
noticed the difference as it was so briefly used in an ephemeral television advertisement,
or if it even mattered much to the essential commercial pitch, that living like the Cleavers/
Buttertons can be made “better” with the help of a consumer product presented by a
“homemaker” figure modeled closely after June, both in past and present scenarios. Their
“interior life” is what “matches up” ideologically despite external differences.
While we encounter numerous references to “Leave It to Beaver houses” in multiple media
discourses, including feature films, television series, and advertising, we do occasionally still
see the “real” Cleaver home, “sort of.” While the first incarnation languished in a back-back
lot well off the beaten path of studio tours from the late 1980s, a new, nearly identical structure
was restored on the main Colonial Street site for a film version of Leave It to Beaver in 1997.
Afterwards the house façade was used intermittently, including in several high-profile music
videos filmed there in the years after reconstruction of the Cleaver house, which often
figures prominently as the staid residence in a stereotypical streetscape undergoing major
demographic shifts and cultural changes. Unlike the use of the Father of the Bride house in
Guess Who, wherein an African-American family resides in the Colonial Revival house and
its immediate neighborhood in ways congruent with the middle-class domestic script
popularized in TV shows like Leave It to Beaver half a century earlier, in these millennial music
videos the calmness and banality of suburbia is completely disrupted. These domestic
disturbances are, however, more public than the solitary terror experienced within the
detached single family home as seen so long ago, when its first family suffered through the
“desperate hours” of being held hostage.
We easily recognize the Cleaver house reproduction as featured in music videos for
The Offspring’s “Why Don’t You Get a Job?” (1998) and Smash Mouth’s “All Star” (1999),
both by director/producer McG. In the first we briefly see the house, apparently unchanged
from its past media appearances, as the lead singer lands a bright red glider in the middle
of the street, following which a “parade” of sorts coalesces with mixed-race youth joining
him in a walk down Colonial Street and out of the dull suburban neighborhood. The latter
video for “All Star” is the exception in terms of how we see the traditional Leave It to
Beaver façade, now painted bright red with gaudy metallic gold wallpaper-like accents,
and surrounded by a front yard full of kitschy garden gnomes and bird baths. Here the
lead singer is seen rescuing a small dog from a fire burning in a second floor window of
the redesigned Cleaver home, and ends up finishing the song with the rest of the band
playing in the now brightly painted Cleaver garage-turned-neighborhood-stage. While the
colors and décor of the street as a whole are now quite garish, the underlying architectural
forms and details of each home, and especially the Cleaver house, are still clearly
discernible.

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 Meanings of the Leave It to Beaver House 25

The familiar sunny yellow façade returns in a 2001 music video for “Bad Boy for Life”
by P. Diddy, Black Rob and Mark Curry, featuring cameos by a number of other musicians,
as well as sports celebrities like Mike Tyson and Shaquille O’Neal, and a comedic interlude
by Ben Stiller (who also appeared in Smash Mouth’s “All Star” video). In this short form
musical narrative the rappers literally “disturb the peace” of the suburban neighborhood
by moving into Colonial Street, here renamed “Perfectown, U.S.A.” The first neighbor to
encounter the entourage is an older white gentleman coming out of the “Leave It to
Beaver house” to retrieve his newspaper, looking surprised and just a little nervous as the
parade of black limousines and an enormous RV bus deliver the new hip-hop residents to
their home across the street. As the neighborhood undergoes a cultural conversion
throughout the course of the song, with white residents young and old all eventually
assimilated into the outdoor music party, the house is seen again behind one neighbor
peeping in on those enjoying a hot tub from over the top of a wooden fence. Meanwhile,
the Cleaver garage again hosts band performance for the cameras. “Later that night” the
entire neighborhood is turned into an electrified concert venue, featuring a motorcycle
jumping cars parked down the middle of Colonial Street, in front of the “Leave It to Beaver
house.” Suburbia will never be the same following the excitement, suggesting a major
reshaping of the sites, styles and cultural engagement of everyday life. By the end of the
video, however, when the music stops and all we hear is the sound of birds chirping and
dogs barking in the background, a now “settled-in” and quite comfortably suburban
P. Diddy comes out his front door to get the mail. When he sees a grungy (white) band
move into the Cleaver house across the street, he dismissively mutters “There goes the
neighborhood.”
Just a year later we again see the most familiar house on Colonial Street in a video
collaboration by rapper Nelly and R&B singer Kelly Rowland for the Grammy Award-
winning song “Dilemma” (2002). In it she and her mother move into the Cleaver home, this
time in “Nellyville, U.S.A.,” where the neighborhood is now depicted as predominantly
African-American and everyone living there is seen spending the days socializing out in
their front yards, on porches and in the street, more typical of representations of urban
rather than suburban culture (see Figure 1.2). From her second floor bedroom window
Rowland’s character in the story looks longingly at Nelly, sitting outside his house across
the street. Both involved with other people, their shared “dilemma” is negotiated in the
empty nighttime street space between while everyone else sleeps. In the light of day,
though, traditional notions of decorum are maintained, not disturbing the social peace of
the neighborhood for the reckless fulfillment of personal desire. As featured in all four
music videos, the presence of and focus on the “Leave It to Beaver house” can be read
as still reinforcing many signifiers of the suburban, presenting an (almost) unchangeable
structure even while the demographics of its residents change, sometimes radically
compared to the limited vision of it we get in the postwar sitcom. On the surface this
culturally loaded home tends to remain more or less the same physically, despite who
lives there and what goes on in it.
In one of the latest and perhaps best-known media uses of the “Leave It to Beaver
house” since its postwar television debut, we find it on a renamed and more lushly
landscaped set. Colonial Street was “redeveloped” into Wisteria Lane for the ABC hit
26 Archi.Pop

Figure 1.2 In 2002, a replica of the “Leave It to Beaver house” is again seen on Colonial Street,
this time cast as part of a middle-class African-American neighborhood, “Nellyville, U.S.A.,” in the
music video for Nelly’s single, “Dilemma.” Featuring R&B singer Kelly Rowland as new to the estab-
lished, vibrant suburban neighborhood, she and her mother (Patti Labelle) move into the Cleaver’s
old home across the street from rapper-resident Nelly.
© 2002, Universal Records

prime time comedy/soap Desperate Housewives (2004–12). The “Leave It to Beaver

house” is used to open the series, seen here as the seemingly happy home of Mary Alice
Young, the character who serves as a narrator from beyond the grave after she commits
suicide in the first few minutes, all within her very nicely kept home. First Mary Alice
cheerily completes all of the chores expected of a modern suburban housewife and
mother, embodying a cross between the fabled June Cleaver and her stylish, modern
industrial heir, the home-trendsetting media mogul Martha Stewart. Of all of the houses
available on this street set, each with its own cultural history as featured in popular films
and television series, the choice to set Mary Alice’s final act in this Colonial Revival is no
accident. Rather than upholding the image and meaning of such houses as the model
home of American virtue and normalcy (as illustrated so long ago by the Cleavers),
scenarios like this rather suggest that they are merely façades behind which residents
(especially women) battle family problems and personal demons that don’t quite conform
to 1950s’ era social and sitcom scripts. The Cleaver/Young house was also home to a
few more families over the course of the show’s eight-year run, although it remained
always marked by the tragedy that first set this televised mystery in motion. But does this

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 Meanings of the Leave It to Beaver House 27

fundamentally change how we see—and dream about—this type of suburban house?

How do we read the history of this house over its fifty-plus year career in popular media,
from The Desperate Hours to Desperate Housewives and every set piece in between?
And after such a long and varied record of use in film, television, and music videos, why
is it still referred to primarily as the “Leave It to Beaver house?”
In considering the cultural meaning of the “Leave It to Beaver house” as we might
encounter it today and in the future, we first must consider two competing but entangled
discourses that inform our reading of its past: the architectural style and history of Colonial
Revivals in America more generally, and the narrative tones and trajectories that we have
seen played out in this particular house and others like it. Even when seemingly working
against it, each media text nonetheless relies on the distinctive connotations of this
architectural type, the “moral tone of restraint and sound judgment” as Wright described
it. I would further argue that, in spite of the diversity of representations in which we see
this familiar façade, before and after, its narrative function in Leave It to Beaver was the
one most in harmony with the ascribed meaning of this house style as both illustrative and
instrumental of “American values” broadly conceived. The fact that nothing we watched
on this one show ever overtly challenged the uprightness and normalization of the Cleaver
family as they resided in this house worked to maintain and reinforce our association of
these values with it. It may not have originally set the standard, but as seen on TV by
millions since 1959, it provided a ubiquitous and easy entertainment through which that
standard could—and did—proliferate culturally over time.
In this respect it is not only or entirely postwar nostalgia that keeps the TV show and
its famous family home afloat in the popular imagination, but a confluence between its
idealistic narrative and its equally idealistic architecture. This blending of story and
structure is what also makes the phrase “Leave It to Beaver house” so portable, not
strictly tied to this one specific example of a Hollywood home set, but a fluid term which
translates desires for “the good life” into the picture of a certain kind of house standing in
for the American dream. Over the decades and across media this house-as-dream has
been depicted as a place where class aspirations can be realized, racial barriers to
suburban living can be overcome, and the “feminine mystique” can at least be confronted
if not conquered. Even rebellious younger generations, who as children were once the
rationale for moving into houses and neighborhoods like this, are variously shown
reconsidering a move back to a nice Colonial Revival in the ’burbs when they begin
thinking about starting a family. One recent example of this ongoing trend is found in a
Season 8 episode of NBC’s spy-comedy, Chuck (2007–12), “Chuck Versus the Baby,”
where the main couple, CIA agent Sarah Walker and her asset/fiancé Chuck Bartowski,
engage in one such conversation that illustrates the continued appeal of this dream.
Taking into account while also apologizing for the saccharine nostalgia associated with
this particular dream, Sarah finally admits her heart’s desire to Chuck:

Sarah: Well, I always imagined a little white house with a red door and, don’t laugh,
but it had a picket fence, just like, you know, the houses that you see on TV
that people live in.
Chuck: Hmm. Mid-century, very Leave It to Beaver?
28 Archi.Pop

Sarah: Cozy, homey and simple.

Chuck: And perfect.

The dream house as described does not strictly conform to that actually seen on Leave It
to Beaver or ever lived in by the fictional Cleavers, but its basic substance and meaning
are conveyed just the same.
The architectural ideal of traditional styles like the Colonial Revival rematerialized in the
American landscape long before the introduction of television. At a time when more
modern, “Contemporary” homes were increasingly incorporated into new suburban living
environments, postwar television instead focused attention on the aesthetic and
ideological comforts of more “homey” traditional typologies, which, in turn, continue to
influence cultural norms directing what actually gets built and bought in suburbia today. In
the popular imagination as in the built environment, the “Leave It to Beaver house” still
stands for a certain kind of suburban domestic dream and the popular media and images,
cultural meanings and values we turn to over and over again when trying to (re)construct
it for ourselves.

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Chapter 2
“Uglying Out”: Shag Carpet and
the Twists of Popular Taste
Chad Randl

If you grew up in the United States during the 1960s or 1970s there is a distinct chance
you learned to crawl on shag carpet (see Figure 2.1). Baby photos may show you adrift
on a surface of avocado or sea foam shag that blurs out of focus in the background.
Cut pile carpets featuring overlapping tightly twisted yarns between 1½ and 3 inches
long were a seemingly ubiquitous floor covering during this time. High-end designers
and amateur do-it-yourselfers used the material to distinguish functional zones in
open interiors, to personalize space, express identity, and connect to broader cultural
trends. References in popular culture, industry marketing campaigns, and the sensory
experiences of occupants defined shag and shaped its use. Characterizations were often
contradictory. Emerging from handicraft wool and cotton weaving traditions, shag at its
peak of popularity was almost entirely artificial and machine-made. Promoted as
indulgently plush, it could produce painful burns. Advertised as low-maintenance, it was
often anything but.
Shag brought nature inside, blending (with the help of plate glass and sliding doors)
interior and exterior. But it also blocked out the world beyond and secreted occupants
away in a safe and sensual cocoon. Shag was a surface for both nuclear family unity and
liberated sexuality, where children played by day and adults played at night. As some of
these meanings came to dominate public perceptions about shag, the material was no
longer broadly interpretable. When it began to age and wear (or “ugly out” in industry
parlance), consumer interest faded.1 When styles moved on and tastes changed, shag
was a victim of its own popularity, stuck in a past era of sensual excess.

A brief history of shag carpet

Shag’s past lies in two distinct textile traditions—tufted, candlewick embroidery and
European handicraft rugs. The former, first used for patterned bedspreads in the late

29
30 Archi.Pop

Figure 2.1 Babies and families found shag a comfortable surface for relaxation.
© Tim Hainley

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, involved weaving loops of cotton or wool yarn
through sheets of canvas, muslin, or linen. The loops were cut and then boiled to shrink
and fluff the tufts. A fifteen-year-old from Dalton, Georgia, named Catherine Evans
Whitener rediscovered the forgotten process in 1895 when she reproduced a family-
heirloom candlewick bedspread for a wedding present. Evans taught it to others and her
hometown soon became the center of a tufted textile industry that expanded to the
manufacture of bath mats, robes, and toilet tank and lid covers. By the 1930s department
stores across the country were selling Dalton’s products. Within the next decade
broadloom sewing machines with rows of needles and knife blades that cut the looped
yarns were replacing manual tufters. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II,
manufacturers began gluing these tufted textiles to a rigid backing, setting the technological
stage for a postwar carpet boom (Patton 1999).
Shag’s initial popularity among interwar Art Deco and modern designers was
attributable at least in part to the material’s resemblance to European rya and flokati
textiles. Scandinavian rya were originally long pile bedcovers made by knotting wool and
then soaking it to create a tight, durable material that replicated the warmth and comfort
of fur skins (Plath 1966). Rugs were produced in a similar fashion in Greece using the fluffy
hair of flokati goats. Beginning in the late 1920s, Loja and Eliel Saarinen contributed to the
rising American interest in thick pile handmade rugs through their work at the Cranbrook
Academy and Loja Saarinen’s studio. Drawing on Finnish tradition and foreshadowing

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 “Uglying Out” 31

postwar applications, the couple designed a rya covered couch for their 1928–30 house
at Cranbrook.
After World War II textile producers directed their attention to consumer markets.
Technological advances led to the creation of tufting machines specifically designed to
produce broadloom pile carpets up to eighteen feet wide. These improvements and the
entry of numerous firms into the market increased sales volume of tufted carpet from
around $50 million in 1949 to almost $220 million in 1955 (Jones 1959: 23, 34).
Responding to this growth and their own need to diversify, chemical manufacturers
spurred the development of petroleum-based synthetic flooring. Throughout the period,
Monsanto, American Viscose, Du Pont, and others produced a nearly constant stream
of nylon, acrylic, polyester, and olefin fibers that promised greater durability and lower
costs than yarns derived from animals or plants. In 1960 synthetic fibers made up
23 percent of the total surface materials used in carpeting (Kirk 1970: 7). Less than twenty
years later, 95 percent of the carpet yarns made in the United States were synthetic
(Revere 1988: 19).
Combined, these improvements reduced consumer prices per square yard bringing
wall-to-wall carpeting for the first time within the financial reach of middle and lower
income buyers. The manufacturing costs of broadloom carpets were almost halved
between 1950 and 1970. During that same period per household consumption of
broadlooms increased from about two square yards in 1950 to more than eight square
yards (Patton 2001: 97). Included in these figures were a variety of synthetic carpet
types—tip sheared acrylic, nylon tweed, plush. In the early 1970s, manufacturers,
designers and retailers referred to any form of tufted pile carpet with long yarn as shag. At
a peak moment of excess, carpet companies boasted their versions featured yarns up to
six inches long, but even tighter, plush or velvet carpets with dense upright pile were
labeled shag varieties in order to capitalize on consumer name recognition.
Before it became a mass-market phenomenon, postwar designers and architects
used shag often in dialog with the harder, colder surfaces characteristic of Modernism.
Shag neatly accommodated the artistic and architectural interest in contrasting textures.
This surface play was seen in the irregular rhythms of light and shadow on beton brut, and
in the juxtaposition of fieldstone walls and smooth white walls. Shag area rugs on marble
or concrete floors introduced tactile and visual variety as well as a comfortable informality
to what were often stark interiors. Round, oval, or rectilinear area rugs delineated space
in contemporary interiors where the penchant for open plans had merged kitchens, dining
rooms and living rooms. California architect John Lautner used shag in this way, most
notably in his 1960 Chemosphere in Hollywood. Alternately, wall-to-wall shag could be
placed throughout open plans unifying them in a single composition.
The 1960s and 1970s was an architecturally eclectic period that celebrated a range of
expressive forms—space age techno-philia, whole earth ecological experimentation, a
re-emerging interest in historicist forms. Shag was considered an appropriate floor
covering for almost all of them. It appeared in advertisements for “Spanish Baroque”
home furnishings, neo-French Empire bedroom sets, “Early American Colonial” kitchens,
the “British Officer’s campaign chest look,” “country furniture with an authentic French
accent” and “Chippendale-inspired” dining room cabinets. According to the ads, shag
32 Archi.Pop

tied together stripes, plaids and floral patterns on the walls, couches and drapes; it
complemented leather, wicker, chrome and glass. It looked equally appropriate beneath a
La-Z-Boy recliner and an Eames chair.
By the latter-1960s, shelter magazines considered shag an assumed feature of
domestic interior design, so much so that they stopped listing its presence in the write-
ups accompanying photos of featured layouts. At least until the second half of the 1970s
advertisements and articles suggest that shag’s appeal transcended class, race, gender,
and age. Shag was a popular choice for children’s bedrooms and playrooms. Designers
especially encouraged its use in spaces occupied by teenagers where it enabled the
“whole gang [to] sit on the floor around the table for snacks and talk” (Varney 1972: 25).
Some seniors considered long pile carpet an unquestioned base upon which to build a
new interior design. When a seventy-year-old couple contacted a well-known decorator
in 1972 for advice on personalizing their new condo, they wrote “All we have to start with
is a beautiful shag carpet in a dark green” (Varney 1972: 98).
As shag rose in popularity the manufacturers producing it and the dealers and retailers
selling it developed a range of narratives intended to cement consumer interest. Most
touted shag’s combination of texture and color. A 1969 Sears Roebuck ad read:

Shag . . . deep, plush, beautiful and more than luxurious! It’s rapidly becoming ‘the’
style in floor coverings. But texture is only half of its popularity. The magic that makes
shag come alive is color. And you’ll have to come to Sears to find colors like Golds
that burnish with a rich warmth, Reds that blush (not scream), and Blues that look cool
enough to take a dip in. (Sears 1969: 338)

Color was considered essential to shag’s oft-stated ability to tie the various elements of a
room together, the Sears’ ad above offered seventy-nine different shades. A few years
later, Lees Carpets upped the color ante. Hitting every cultural theme from hippie to space
age to tiki, the company offered “Groove Green. Spaced Out Blue. Submarine Yellow.
Pow Brown. Sky Baby. Red Hot. Moonscape. Purple Passion. Golden Buddha. Gin and
Orange. Sundance. Brass Section. Hawaiian Surf. Greensleeves. Wild Oats. Bitter Lemon.
Copperpot. Neon Pink. And Blueberry Pie” (Lees 1971: 59). The material’s texture shaped
its visual reception; as occupants touched it, vacuumed it, or raked it, they altered its
appearance. This was especially true of later carpets that mixed two or more colored
yarns. Recognizing the importance texture had on the material’s visual qualities, House
Beautiful called it “catch-the-light shag carpeting” (Seven Schemes 1972: 48).
Touch perception differed depending on the way the material was encountered and the
body that mediated that encounter. The child’s imagination turned a shag surface into
ocean waves for Barbie to frolic in beneath her dream house, or the sandy dunes of
Tatooine, home planet of the Star Wars hero (and toy action figure) Luke Skywalker. To the
teen it was a surface for lounging and little thought was likely given to its tactile qualities.
Shag was also experienced through the rituals of homemaking. A cushioned place to
stretch out in front of the TV or hi-fi in the evening, could, on cleaning day, become a
belligerent foe determinedly holding onto dirt and detritus. Those with physical impairments
sensed shag differently than the able-bodied. Designers of sensory-rich environments

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intended to assist the development of disabled children made frequent use of shag
(Education and Training 1978: 174). But it could also be a discriminatory, anxiety-inducing
material, limiting access or excluding those who moved with the assistance of wheelchairs,
crutches, or walkers. Shag could likewise be a hazard to stroke patients and others who
had difficulty lifting their legs while walking (Mossman 1976: 168).

Natural shag
Perhaps the most common representation of shag—seen in high modern designs, suburban
mass housing, and in textile and fabric arts—was as a mimesis of nature. This interpretation
drew from a broader postwar turn to West Coast culture as presented in popular magazines,
television programs and films. Glass window walls, sliding glass doors, patios and lanai
effaced the distinction between interior and exterior. Roughly-finished materials like wood
shakes and fieldstone highlighted natural variation that contrasted with the orthogonal order
and abstract purity of some Modernist design. As part of a larger composition, shag’s
colors, yarn length and density could simulate a bed of coral, the shallows of a tropical
cove, a desert landscape, an overgrowing wilderness, a cave, or lawn. Color names—
“western sunset,” “autumn trail”—further reinforced natural associations.
Viewed through the glass window walls of postwar contemporary homes, shag carpet
extended the yard indoors. Shag simulated nature in several late 1940s and 1950s
designs built for Arts & Architecture magazine’s Case Study house program. House 2 by
Sumner Spaulding and John Rex, House 11 and House 15 by Julius Ralph Davidson, and
House 18 by Craig Ellwood, all featured shag area carpets in bedrooms and living rooms.
In each case the rug was adjacent to full height glass doors that opened out at ground
level to lawn and patio (Smith 2002). Albert Frey explicitly united architecture and
landscape at his Frey House II in Palm Springs, California. In the 1963 design, a large
stone outcropping penetrated the window wall between the bedroom and the living-
dining room, pinning the building to the site. The ceiling angled upward to accommodate
the stone intrusion, while below the floor plane shifted in response to the site’s natural
grade. Large stretches of shag carried inside a simulation of the barren desert floor
beyond the house’s glass skin.
Glazed walls filtered down to mass housing in the form of picture windows and sliding
glass doors, they made the outside landscape an interior decoration, a dynamic wall
covering. The result was not only an imprinting of the natural and the organic on the
interior, but also the further appropriation of the surrounding yard and “real” nature as
denaturalized space. Shag meant a spatial continuation of nature on the inside and
domestication of the outside.2 High pile carpeting was like a lawn, and lawns were likened
to carpet (Klein 1977: 227). When American homeowners took up yard care as a social
obligation, hobby and form of consumption during the 1950s, mowing was equated to
vacuuming interior carpets. With the widespread adoption of wall-to-wall shag, promoters
analogized its care with lawn maintenance.
New cleaning equipment and techniques accompanied the appearance of high pile
carpeting. Vacuum attachments like the Kenmore “Shagmate,” and Eureka Williams’
34 Archi.Pop

“Shag Groomer” functioned as rakes, raising the pile out ahead of the beater bar. Bissell
offered “The Shagger” a non-electric carpet sweeper specifically made for long pile. One
expert provided the following guidance: “the final stroke with the vacuum cleaner should
be with the lay of the pile. Then groom with a carpet rake available at most hardware
or home furnishings stores. Gently rake the carpet in the direction that gives the best
appearance, taking care not to pull or tear the carpet fibers” (Bauer 1972: 74). Such
instructions, common in shelter magazines and home care guides, confirmed that in order
to look its best, shag carpet required considerable attention.
In time, shag came to represent a more enveloping version of nature. This jungle shag
had an upper canopy that concealed; it also tended to spread into new territory. Thick pile
introduced the possibility of misplacing dropped pills, earrings and other small objects
within its criss-crossing yarns. Decorating guides advised homeowners to not carpet the
home workshop or sewing room for fear of losing small screws, transistors and needles.
Hand-held metal detectors were advertised as aids for finding objects lost within shag
carpets.
The postwar shift of carpet manufacturers from natural fibers and backings (which
were susceptible to mildew and rot) to synthetic fibers, olefin backings and latex glues
opened new spaces and new applications for shag. The first step was wall-to-wall
carpeting, an interwar development that gained popularity throughout the 1960s as
companies began to offer broadloom carpet in greater widths. Then, toward the end of
the decade, shag moved up the base of built-in furnishings. A 1969 Washington Post
article describing a shaggy interior stated, “A trick that adds considerably to the total
effect of cozy softness is the use of the carpet not only on the floor but on the base of the
built-in banquette, covering up any exposed wood and making the whole room much
easier to maintain” (Wagner 1969: 6). By 1970 experts considered the term “carpet
industry” a misnomer. One commentator suggested that, “As new materials extend
the home interior into the external environment and appear increasingly on walls, ceilings,
and in other areas not considered appropriate just a few years ago, the ‘soft surfaces’
industry becomes a better definition” (Kirk 1970: 1). The following year a report from an
interior decoration exhibit noted that: “The home furnishings industry has apparently
decided that shag rugs can go anywhere” (Nicol 1971: 1–2). Shag bordering tile or other
flat floor surfaces resembled grass overgrowing the edge of a sidewalk or paving stone.
On wall surfaces it seemed to flow around the edges of window frames and bath stops.
Like kudzu it climbed ottomans and end tables, toilet seats, toilet tanks, and bathtub
skirting.
Designers and bold homeowners often introduced decorative elements that
accentuated a shaggy wilderness theme—vine and branch-patterned wallpaper, for
example, or a wall-sized photomural depicting an appropriately natural setting. Paired
with wood-grained paneling, shag could embody a forest floor and the paneling, tree
trunks. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this wilderness-shag gesamkunstwerk was the
den of Elvis Presley’s Memphis mansion, Graceland. The result of a 1974 redecoration
(and renamed the Jungle Room following Presley’s death), it was an indulgent Polynesian-
themed composition of carved furniture, exotic plants, and a fieldstone waterfall. Vivid
green shag-covered floors, stair treads, and parts of the walls and ceiling (Marling 1993:

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76). Presley’s fantasy space also demonstrated another important shag as nature
motif: the cave.
Extending up the walls of a room or onto the ceiling, shag suggested enclosure and
seclusion from the world outside. This was a place to burrow away from the stresses of
daily life or what some considered overly rigid social mores. In his 1958 book The Poetics
of Space, Gaston Bachelard describes the human’s animal desire to construct nest
houses, secure hollows as “protection adapted to our bodies” (Bachelard 1964: 101).
Cave forms drew renewed interest around this time, as architects and intellectuals sought
to sever design from high technology and bring it into alignment with emerging
environmental and social goals. Exhibitions and publications like Bernard Rudofsky’s
Architecture Without Architects drew attention to native building practices from around
the world. Edward Allen’s Stone Shelters (1969), and Lloyd Kahn’s books Shelter (1973)
and Shelter II (1978) also celebrated cave-like construction. Kahn in particular presented
cave dwellings and other vernacular building traditions as models for contemporary
practice, accessible to amateur builders, sympathetic to local climates and reliant upon
local resources.
In the 1950s, architect Bruce Goff was experimenting with cave spaces that used long
pile carpet among its eclectic, texturally-compelling palette of materials. From the exterior,
his Bavinger House near Norman, Oklahoma, resembled a cable-supported spiraling
stone cairn. Inside, it assumed a carved out character with discrete light openings, rough
stone walls and suspended pods covered in deeply-padded shag. Goff meant for these
surfaces to be touched—occupants reclined against angled shag walls and felt the
undulations of rough-cut stair treads—as well as to provide visual pleasure. Stone walls
flaked with anthracite coal and glass cullet combined with diaphanous goose feather and
cellophane skylight treatments provided visual richness and a play of light and shadow.
Other prominent examples of cave and nest architecture include Herb Greene’s 1960
Prairie House, in Norman, Oklahoma and John Barnard’s Ecology House from 1973.
Looking like a wind-worn wood mollusk, Greene’s dwelling had sinuous walls and curved
ceilings clad in cedar shakes and boards. He selected a reddish shag to cover the floors
and stairs because of it texture and similarity to his “wife’s beautiful red hair” (Greene
2013). Barnard’s house was literally a cave, constructed below ground around a central
subterranean atrium on Cape Cod. Similar projects emerged around the same time,
revealing an interest by professionals and ad hoc amateur builders in “earth sheltered”
and “earth sunken” design.
Cave and nest metaphors also found expression in furniture, custom vans, and textile
and fiber art. High-end furnishings design moved toward a gradual enclosure of the sitter,
from Arne Jacobsen’s Egg Chair of 1957 to Eero Aarino’s 1964 Ball Chair and Thor
Larsen’s 1968 Ovalia Egg Chair. Even the mass-produced bean bag chair (first developed
by the Italian design firm Zanotta in 1969) surrounded and embraced its low-slung
occupant. Van customization began in the latter 1960s when Southern California youth
modified old delivery trucks for use as portable crash pads on trips to surf breaks and ski
resorts. Soon it was popular for owners to embellish panel van exteriors with colorful
murals, stripes and trim work, and to upholster interiors walls and ceiling in deep-pile shag
or buttoned velvet. Popular Mechanics listed some common resulting “styles” including
36 Archi.Pop

“Early American, Far Out Oriental, Rustic Ranch, Beaded Brothel, and Migraine Modern”
(Gill 1976: 86). Beds were often integrated into a raised platform in the rear of vans where
windows were small or non-existent.
Throughout the latter 1960s and 1970s artists such as Sheila Hicks, Tadek Beulich and
Urban Jupena explored the sensual, expressive character of textiles and fibers.3 Jupena
(2008) developed a number of distinct long pile, hand-knotted environmental pieces. One
in particular, “Cave Rug” (also titled “Crevice”) featured rug weaving wool with Turkish
knots woven over a foam form (Landreau 1976). The form curved up from the floor to the
wall and then arced over the seating pad to provide “the sensual feeling of a soft, cave
environment.” In explaining the human appreciation for such places the artist stated that
“People are drawn to cave environments. It’s a primeval thing. We come out of the womb
and come into the world and you look for a space that gives protection.” Jupena’s work,
like that of Goff, Greene and Barnard, used shag to help provide that sense of envelopment
and embrace. Their designs reflected an artistic culture increasingly attuned to relationships
between humans and their surroundings, and to the expressive qualities of materials.

Shag and the body

Shag was a surface that encouraged reconsiderations of the body in relation to domestic
space. It facilitated new informal and indulgent activities that occupants enacted bodily
through repose, relaxation, and sensual activity. Shag’s texture also evoked literal
comparisons to the body’s texture and appearance. Postwar Americans lived more casual
lifestyles with family and friends that were literally grounded in new materials and design
ideas. Conversation pits and wall-to-wall shag carpet enabled Americans to occupy in
new ways floor spaces once reserved for shoes alone. Sprawling on the carpet became
an acceptable practice for children and then adults.
The increasingly ubiquitous television played a central role in popularizing floor lounging.
Shelter magazines and decoration books from the 1950s onward encouraged owners to
arrange their “family rooms” to best accommodate a full view of the TV. One author
reminded his readers that “Rooms where [televisions] are used should be planned in such
a manner that a bare minimum of change in chair locations is required for their use”
(Spigel 1992: 108). As the postwar era progressed, wall-to-wall carpeting opened up the
floor as viewing platform and prevented cluttering. Low to the ground furnishings like
round ottoman seats, upholstered mushroom stools, and beanbag chairs, as well as
more stylized designs such as Pierre Paulin’s No.  577 chair (popularly known as the
“Tongue”) from 1967 helped further colonize the floor.
At the same time, television helped make soft floor coverings popular. Broadloom
carpeting was the most heavily advertised consumer product in the home furnishings field
beginning in 1958 (Patton 2001: 94). Between the commercials, television series often
featured domestic sets that placed shag prominently on display. The apartment of career
woman Mary Richards in the 1970 to 1977 hit series, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, had a
raised sitting area covered in thick tan shag; three steps down a shag area rug demarcated
the living room. Characters in another popular situation comedy, The Bob Newhart Show

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(1972–78), inhabited similarly styled set designs (though the younger and more engaged
in the “singles’ scene” the characters were, the more prominent was the shag in their
apartment).
Conversation pits were perhaps the ultimate extension of down-to-floor living. Architect
Eero Saarinen popularized the concept as a way to set off a more intimate seating area
within the modern open plan. The 1950 Case Study House Number 9 that Saarinen and
Charles Eames designed for Arts & Architecture editor John Entenza featured a sunken
sofa wrapping around a fireplace. Saarinen and interior designer Alexander Girard
elaborated upon the idea in the 1958 Miller House in Columbus, Indiana. There, a large
square conversation pit of soft cushions and pillows dominated the main living area,
functioning as a plush, colorful oasis that broke up the room’s otherwise muted tones and
textures. Sunken sofas and conversation pits became increasingly popular in the1960s.
Designers often integrated shag into these compositions, covering steps and benches
with the carpet. One pit owner describing the sensual pleasure such a feature brought
their family said “I love it, especially when we have a fire in the fireplace. It’s such a homey
comfortable place. Everyone relaxes there. People want to sit on the shag carpet.
Someone fell asleep there once, they were so at home. That pleased me to death”
(Creamer 1969).
While conversation pits offered low to the ground opportunities for family togetherness,
they were also sites of seclusion, nooks separated out from larger open spaces, where
night-time dalliances could occur. In fact by the 1960s many began to see low, shag-
covered surfaces as ideal locales for more explicitly sensual forms of bodily interaction.
Tied to new permissive attitudes, shag cushioned the sexualized body and eventually
came to represent it. Throughout the design and visual culture of this period it functioned
as visual shorthand for the erotic, a backdrop for bombshell photo shoots and casual
relations. Textile artist Urban Jupena recognized how a shag surface prompted feelings of
intimacy, stating it “was the kind of thing that made people feel sensual. It made people
want to have sex on it. People would come in the room where there was one of these
environmental rugs and next thing you know, everyone was on the rug, people would tell
you things they’d never tell you otherwise” (Jupena 2008).
Popular conductor Richard Hayman released a recording in 1959 called “Serenade for
Love” with an album cover featuring a woman sprawled on a white shag surface. A man
looms above, pressing close and holding her hand down on the carpet. The composition
suggests that between the sensual performance of Hayman’s orchestra, the shag, and
the virile male, sexual conquest was inevitable. Advertisers also played up allusions to the
types of physical rendezvous that could take place on shag.4 Bigelow, for example,
published a series of zodiacal-themed magazine ads to launch their “Complement” line of
“luscious” and “sinfully sumptuous shag.” David Hurn photographed Swiss actress Ursula
Andress in a violet shirt laying on violet colored shag in 1962, the year she starred as
Honey Rider in the James Bond film Dr. No. Jane Fonda’s Barbarella, the protagonist of
the sexually-charged science fiction film of the same name (1968), travels between planets
in Alpha 7, her cocoon-like spaceship with an interior covered in golden shag.
The ostentatious mansions owned by Elvis Presley, pianist Liberace and actress Jayne
Mansfield used shag and other sensual materials as reminders of their occupants’ sex
38 Archi.Pop

Figure 2.2 Actress Jayne Mansfield’s pink shag bathroom at her Hollywood home (known as the
“Pink Palace”) in 1960.
Courtesy of Getty Images

symbol status (see Figure 2.2). Extending up the walls and across the ceiling, accompanied
by satin sheets or tufted silk sofas, carved oak furnishings, mirrors and fine leathers, shag
and these interiors as a whole were an expression not only of sensual indulgence but
excess and fantasy. On one hand they were assuring stage sets that enabled celebrities
to continue to inhabit their public personas in the privacy of their homes (or to look as if
they do when the houses were publicized in popular magazines). Alternately, like the cave
forms discussed earlier, shag imbued the space with a cocoonesque security and
liberation from the public eye.
While few could afford their own Jungle Room, there were other shorter-term
opportunities to play out plush fantasies. For newlyweds, the postwar honeymoon resort
in places like the Poconos in Pennsylvania and Niagara Falls, New York, offered plush

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luxury combined with imagery of sexual potency. Barbara Penner (2009) described the
guest rooms in Poconos honeymoon resorts as “wastrel spaces,” that connote indulgence
and abundance through their blend of color and texture. In such settings “soft surfaces
abounded—wall-to-wall or wraparound carpeting, velvet curtains, and satin bedspreads—
with every material appearing inches thick.” In a nuanced analysis, however, Penner
interprets these spaces not as vulgar passion pits but helpful settings for inexperienced
young newlyweds to try out their sexual roles through careful stagecraft and gentle
guidance.
Shag’s association with indulgent sensuality was prominent in another setting where
occupants defined their sexual identities and where seclusion from a restrictive exterior
world gave way to the permissiveness of a private inner world. The Sandstone Retreat in
the hills above Malibu, California, was a resort dedicated to naturalism and sexual
experimentation. Former aerospace engineer John Williamson and his wife Barbara
established Sandstone in 1968 along with the “Sandstone Foundation For Community
Systems Research” an organization advocating open sexuality. The foundation’s mission
was to provide “non-structured experiential processes that contribute significantly to the
release and actualization of positive human potential” (Williamson 1969). In Sandstone’s
main two-story ranch house, beige shag-covered rooms provided the setting where up to
eighty resort members, married and single, participated in casual encounters. The Los
Angeles Times described how “at night, the downstairs is softly lighted. Softly swinging
rock music plays. Couples are sitting and talking or sexually engaged, not necessarily with
the partner they came with” (Ferderber 1972). At Sandstone, shag’s overlapping yarns
mirrored the entangled bodies it supported; the material functioned less as a fantasy
texture and more as practical strategy to maximize useable floor space. Esquire magazine
was not impressed with such “experiential processes,” describing Sandstone evenings
more corporeally as “potato-chip and onion-dip breaks, with some clumsy rolling around
on wall-to-wall Acrilan carpeting” (Nobody serves 1972: 131).
From their earliest manifestations, long pile rugs served as decorative simulacra for real
fur rugs made from alpaca, bear, or other animals. It requires only a small mental leap, then,
to consider shag a representation of the animal (even human) body. Marshall McLuhan
(1994) saw parallels between the body and building artifacts in terms of cultural
communication. He claimed that dwellings and clothing (and, one may add, furnishings like
rugs and carpets) are means humans use to communicate with each other and with their
environments just as they use their bodies to communicate. “Clothing and housing, as
extensions of skin and heat-control mechanisms, are media of communication, first of all, in
the sense that they shape and rearrange the patterns of human association and community.”
Throughout the postwar era shag undoubtedly functioned as a mode of communication.
Owners employed the carpet to express ideas, aspirations, and propositions. Shag projected
constructed self-images, it seduced and later (inadvertently) repelled, all as extensions of, or
prostheses for, the body.
The connection is most clear when we consider links between shag and the
communicative qualities of hair in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time in which traditional
sexual relations were undergoing reconsideration. Literature, film, and television seemed
to embrace liberated sexual attitudes and push the boundaries of what was considered
40 Archi.Pop

appropriate content. Elana Levine (2006) has examined how television programming
especially revealed shifts in sexual mores during this decade. Often such attitudes were
expressed through the body and through body hair. A man’s hair length, the extent of his
facial hair, and the presence of underarm and leg hair on women, often marked acceptance
of less restrictive sexual norms.
Conspicuous and profuse displays of hair meant emancipation from traditional body
images and grooming mores that emphasized concealment and a clean-shaven
appearance. Drawings from the 1972 bestseller, The Joy of Sex and its sequels, exemplify
the unabashed celebration of body hair of all sorts by those free from hang ups about
sexuality or personal grooming. Illustrations depicted couples having sex in various
positions on thick textured rugs—anywhere but in bed (Comfort 1972). Shaggy surfaces
were the disembodied extension of the hair that men and women sported proudly as a
tactile representation of virility, openness, and fashion. Like hair, they required frequent
attention to look their best. According to American Home magazine, “Lengthy shag fibers,
which often tend to mat and tangle, need to be groomed like a luxuriant head of hair”
(Bauer 1972). Shag, like tufts projecting from an unbuttoned shirt, attracted the eye and
invited touch. Burt Reynolds’ appearance nude on a bearskin rug in a 1973 Cosmopolitan
photo spread, then, is full of cultural and social meaning. Proud of his hirsuteness, this
symbol of enlightened sexuality, relaxed on a textured surface that mirrored his body and
the meanings it expressed.

Shag’s downfall (and reappearance)

Shag carpet continued to appear in high-end projects into the 1970s. Paul Rudolph, for
example, designed a New York City luxury apartment for Maurits Edersheim in New York
City in 1973 that featured an uninterrupted flow of beige shag from living room to library to
bedrooms to bathroom. Vermillion and blue paint, mirrors, and beige tweed fabric covered
walls and ceilings throughout the space (Colors, curves 1973). By the middle of that decade
shag was well established as a typical feature of the ordinary American home. Author Tom
Wolfe (1981: 69) saw “wall-to-wall carpet you could lose a shoe in” as one of the quintessential
symbols of lower middle-class suburban domesticity. No doubt in response to its broad
popularity, shag’s cultural cachet evaporated within elite design circles. When the material
became synonymous with basement recreation rooms, custom vans and swinging, it’s no
surprise arbiters of taste reacted. A growing aversion for the ornamental, the verdant and the
indulgently decorative contributed to shag’s downfall. Paige Rense, editor of Architectural
Digest, described those interior features she banned from the magazine in 1975, stating:
“My most hated color is bilious green. I won’t run shag rugs, and I crop out all little white
ceramic frogs, porcelain cheetahs, and acoustical ceilings” (Kron 1975).
A terminological recalibration near the end of the decade signaled that shag was
also starting to lose its appeal within the mass market. When shag was at its popular
peak, manufacturers and dealers pinned the term to a range of related carpet types;
by the latter 1970s manufacturers referred to the same surfaces as simply “long pile.”
The New York Times noted a dramatic consumer movement toward its well-mannered

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close-cropped relative, Saxony carpet, as well as oriental and other short pile area rugs
(Reif 1977). But shag maintained a lingering market presence into the following decade.
“Shag and sculptured carpets” were among one regional magazine’s list of home
features—along with kitchen carpeting, conversation pits, fussy filigreed bath fixtures, and
the color avocado green—that were out of style in 1987 (What’s Out 1987).
Carpet experts disagreed about the cause of shag’s downfall. Industry consultant
Reginald Burnett argued that it was the homeowner who pulled the plug on shag, stating
that “Mrs. Consumer changed us from shag to Saxony. Mrs. Consumer is changing us
from Saxonys today to patterned carpet. We the carpet manufacturer, do not, under any
circumstances, control the consumer. It’s entirely the other way around.” Another
consultant, Dusty Rhodes, argued that changes in the way manufacturers marketed and
advertised carpet was responsible. According to Rhodes (1993), the industry moved from
a “tooty fruity and pistachio period” in the 1970s to a “plain vanilla period,” away from
creative, artist-designed carpets in favor of “sameness and plainness.” At the same time,
Rhodes claimed, companies stopped marketing wall-to-wall carpet with a focus on
emotion and romance, in favor of rational arguments for stain resistance and economy. In
other words, they stopped selling the sizzle (the visceral, emotional and sensory allure of
carpet) and started selling the steak (the commodity).
Popular disenchantment with shag was also a response to the material’s failure to live up
to the industry’s earlier promotional hyperbole. Consumer experience with traditional wool or
cotton woven carpet shaped postwar expectations against which synthetic tufted carpets
were measured. Through continual research and development postwar carpet manufacturers
had attempted to develop abrasion-resistant, durable, stain-resistant, synthetic yarns that
also felt pleasing to the touch. But the disadvantages of these materials quickly became
apparent to consumers. Early nylons had a coarse texture and an appearance often
considered too shiny and reflective, a further liability in that it failed to adequately conceal
dirt. They also built up static electricity that discharged when contacting bare skin. Acrylics
shed fuzzy bits of fiber over time and had a low crush resistance. Polyester had a tendency
to crush and was hard to clean. Olefin did not hold up well to traffic and the fibers could even
melt from the friction of a toy car rubbed on its surface (Revere 1988).
When installed inappropriately, cleaned too infrequent, or worn too heavy, shag texture
and appearance could change drastically. Color was not a fixed feature: it faded (especially
when exposed to direct sunlight), it could bleed or rub off, it was stained by pets and
spills, and bleached by cleaning products, perfumes and cosmetics. Reg Burnett’s
business partner and spouse Jean Newton (1993) reported that shag:

was the number one selling style back in the late 60s and early 70s. We used to love
it then. I don’t know what happened, you know, this carpet just musts as it ages and
gets to looking bad. My son was an early teenager back at the time these were most
popular and he had some of this in his room. It started out with the deep purple and it
got lighter and it was kind of a cream color on top.

The 1980s and 1990s overturned shag’s saucy associations. Surviving examples were
treated as unwelcomed hangovers, or flashback reminders of party frivolity that went too
42 Archi.Pop

far. Its wild twisted yarns offered not refuge but repulsion over what stains resided
within. Novelists used shag as a symbol of the shabby and the unwell, its surface
“reminiscent of an animal afflicted with the mange” (Turow 1990). Mocking retrospectives
of the 1970s have appeared in recent years that present shag as part of a larger retreat
from fashion sense that was characteristic of the period. James Lileks’ (2004) Interior
Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible ’70s and Thomas Hine’s (2007) The
Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies
revel in what they consider a bewilderingly tasteless era. Both are underpinned by the
theme that the 1970s was a period of decline. “What were they thinking” critiques of
style extend to moral judgments about the attitudes and behaviors that supposedly
accompanied shag and polyester leisure suits and hairy chests. Today American
culture privileges the shaved body over the hirsute one (Immergut 2010). In language
reminiscent of earlier rhetoric about the purity of unornamented Modernist forms, a
hairless body is a healthy body. In this sense, the “uglying out” of shag carpet in the
decades since its brief boom period is less about the material’s accelerated wear and
poor performance and more a reference to contemporary dislike for the tastes and
lifestyles of the recent past.
Yet even before the derision of shag and the 1970s reached its height, news outlets
began to report the return of long pile carpet, at least to the high style design of boutique
hotels and proto-hipster Brooklyn apartment decoration. The New York Times noted that
“retro fetishism has rescued it from the paneled rec room of kitsch and placed it prominently
in the sunken living room of cool contemporary décor” (Marin 1999). For the mass market,
where the wheels of stylistic rediscovery and appropriation spin a bit more slowly, it took
several years before modern versions of shag found wide acceptance. In part, this was
undoubtedly due to the fact that there was still a lot of original shag surviving in basements,
living rooms and bedrooms throughout the country. Shag’s associations with the
unfashionable who lacked the means or the wherewithal to upgrade since the 1970s
surely slowed its return to middle class interiors.5
Today, Target, Walmart, Ikea and home stores throughout the United States offer new
versions of shag area rugs made with nylon, polyester and other synthetic fibers. While
most of these rugs are typically manufactured in earth tones and other neutral shades,
retailers make sure to include at least a few in pink, lime green, and bright purple. The
sensual associations deployed during shag’s previous incarnation are almost completely
absent from contemporary sales pitches. It is up to journalists to remind consumers (with
a mix of nostalgia and disdain) that these new versions of long pile carpet, like their
antecedents can be “almost obscenely sexy, a vaguely naughty artifact from a more
swinging age” (Marin 1999). But if twenty-first century shag remains limited to well-
behaved area and throw rugs, if it fails to convey any cultural message beyond a retrograde
nostalgia, it won’t be nearly as interesting as the shag that came before.

Notes
1 The expression “ugly out” appears in Rhodes 1993.

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 “Uglying Out” 43

2 English anthropologist Sophie Chevalier found a similar association between interior carpet and
English suburban gardens into the 1990s (Chevalier 1998).
3 Other fiber artists working with shag-like materials included Olga de Amaral, Yugoslavia’s
Jagoda Buic, and Francoise Grossen from Switzerland. These artists worked in wool Persian
wool, dyed horsehair, wet jute wrapped around wire coils, wool, rayon, sisal and other
materials, creating pieces that were textiles, furnishings and sculptures (Life 1972).
4 The AMC television program Mad Men, acknowledged the link between carpet and sex in
Episode 3, Season 5, in which a young advertising copywriter shows a fictionalized ad for
Bigelow carpet with text reading “Right there on the Bigelow. I don’t know what came over us.”
5 The elderly as custodians of past everyday material culture is explored in Rowlands 2007.
44

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Chapter 3
Vision and Crime: The Cineramic
Architecture of John Lautner
Jon Yoder

Los Angeles architect John Lautner (1911–94) loathed the entertainment industry and
often lamented its disappointing lack of quality.1 He called Hollywood films the
“worst things in the world,” and saw them as regrettable retreats from bad buildings
(Sutro 1988: 33).2 “If [architecture] is a static, symmetrical, dead thing,” Lautner
complained, “you have got to go out to the movies or someplace to escape it!” (Feldman
1989: 11). This antagonism seems surprising considering popular culture’s eager embrace
of his architecture. Lautner’s dramatic curvilinear and angular buildings have been
consistently featured in popular magazines including Architectural Digest, House and
Garden, Playboy, Town & Country and Vanity Fair. His houses frequently serve as settings
for television commercials, music videos, fashion shoots, and web and print promotions.3
And perhaps most importantly, Lautner’s houses continue to be used as prominent
locations in feature films. Among many others, they have appeared in Diamonds Are
Forever (1971), Body Double (1984), Less Than Zero (1987), Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), The
Big Lebowski (1998), Charlie’s Angels 1 & 2 (2000, 2003), A Single Man (2009), and Iron
Man 1, 2 & 3 (2008, 2010, 2013).4 In fact, Lautner’s houses appear so frequently in
Hollywood movies that critic Alan Hess dubs him the “most famous unknown architect in
America” (Hess 1999: 18).
Even before his buildings appeared on screen, critics already considered Lautner to be
the quintessential Hollywood architect. Many of his clients worked in the entertainment
industry, and his iconic “Googie-style” restaurants animated the roadside long before
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown began “learning” from Las Vegas.5 As early as
1952, House and Home described Googie architecture as the result of architects like
Lautner bowing down to the interests of the movie industry. “After all, they are working in
Hollywood,” wrote the magazine’s editors, “and Hollywood has let them know what it
expects of them” (“Googie Architecture” 1952: 86). This complicity with popular culture
colored Lautner’s critical reception throughout his long and productive career. Although
popular magazines celebrated his projects during his design prime in the 1950s, 60s and

45
46 Archi.Pop

70s, architecture periodicals largely ignored his work. And when professional critics did
discuss Lautner’s buildings, many characterized them as the worst form of kitsch—guilty
pleasures that catered to the hedonistic desires of the nouveau riche.6 Indeed, his
spectacular buildings seem inextricably linked to the entertainment-industrial complex,
like architectural analogues of blockbuster films. Lautner’s defenders often zealously
contest this lowbrow correlation. The dismissal of his houses as “Hollywood showcase,”
they insist, has obscured his important architectural contributions (Olsberg 2008).7 While
it is true that his association with Hollywood affected Lautner’s reputation, the appearance
of his projects in films is neither accidental nor unimportant. There is actually much to
learn from looking at his architecture through the lenses of cinema.
For one thing, cinematographers insist that Lautner’s structures are calibrated to the
motion picture camera. Stephen Goldblatt was director of photography for Lethal Weapon
2, which used the Garcia House (1962) as a primary location (see Figure 3.1 below). He
explains that Lautner’s buildings invite cinematography because there is typically room all
around them; large open spaces are especially easy for motion picture camera crews and
equipment to control.8 Stephen Burum, director of photography for Body Double, which
used the famous Malin House “Chemosphere” (1960) as a primary location, agrees that
filmmakers always want a lot of space. In fact, he remembers it was particularly difficult to
film buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (Lautner’s mentor at Taliesin, 1933–9).
Burum describes both Fallingwater (1934) and Taliesin West (1937) as a cinematic “mess”
because they aren’t wide-open enough for adequate photography. In this sense, Lautner’s
architecture is usually camera-friendly. After filming sequences at the Arango House
(1973) in Acapulco for Bette Cohen’s documentary, The Spirit in Architecture: John
Lautner (Cohen 1990), director of photography Dan Kneece insisted, “There wasn’t a bad
angle in the whole place.” He also exposed Lautner’s wide-angle aspirations: “Everything

Figure 3.1 John Lautner, Garcia House, Los Angeles, CA (1962), in Lethal Weapon 2, Warner
Brothers (1989).

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 Vision and Crime 47

he did—it was like Panavision!” Edward Lachman was director of photography for Less
Than Zero, which used the Reiner House “Silvertop” (1963) as a primary location. Lachman
likes to use wide aspect ratios because broad frames invite navigation and give viewers
freedom to choose their own focus. Both Burum and Lachman emphasize the importance
of “leaking the composition” so that not everything is contained within the frame of the
shot. Lachman calls this technique “breaking the frame.” Lautner, like Wright, called it
“breaking the box.”9
Lautner’s large spans of glass also lend cinematic qualities to his houses; they
sometimes create spectacular screen images of reflection, transparency, and
fragmentation. Like production designers who use “gimbaling” to divert reflections away
from the camera lens, he used different techniques to eliminate reflections for his viewers.10
Lautner’s extra-wide “apertures” also help to leak the landscape compositions that his
houses frame. In this way, his houses not only function as sets; they also operate like
motion picture cameras to frame panoramic vistas. Lautner’s broad frames sometimes
resemble widescreen film formats such as Cinerama, CinemaScope and VistaVision that
were being developed around the same time.11 So it is not surprising that his “widescreen”
projects tend to appear in extra-wide-angle films.12 At least ten feature films that use
Lautner houses as primary locations were produced using an expansive aspect ratio of
2.35:1 instead of the more common US widescreen format of 1.85:1. According to
Lachman, even this narrower frame is considered to be more difficult to compose than the
smaller 1.66:1 frame used by some European countries, and certainly more difficult than
the 1.33:1 frame that was used for both television and film until the 1950s. Burum agrees,
adding that wide frames present serious compositional problems because they require a
longer focal length lens than narrower frames. Long focal lengths create the impression
that when actors walk away from the camera, they do not become small as quickly as
they would with short focal lengths. This tends to diminish the visual dynamism of
characters interacting with space. So philosopher Gilles Deleuze was correct: the
widescreen frames of postwar cinema remain remarkably unaffected by pedestrian
movement. They stay essentially the same no matter how actors move through them
(Deleuze 1986, 1989).13
If Lautner’s buildings had cinematic—or cineramic—sensibilities, it is at least partly
because he understood architecture in similar immersive terms. His many glazed surfaces
provide intriguing (even liberating) opportunities for cinematography. Poignant instances
include a shot from below a built-in transparent coffee table at the Sheats/Goldstein
House (1963/89) in The Big Lebowski, and shots through pool windows of swimmers at
the Sheats/Goldstein House in Playing God (1997) and Silvertop in Less Than Zero. The
windows into these pools serve as apertures that provide a different perspective of the
main characters—offering underwater views that isolate them from the other characters
in the scene and construct unexpectedly intimate visual relationships with moviegoers.
The peep show effect is obviously at play here, and erotic implications abound. Lautner
reportedly designed the pool windows at the Sheats/Goldstein House so that client Helen
Sheats could keep an eye on her children from her painting studio. Current owner James
Goldstein suggestively admits, however, that he “uses them for something else.” The
presence of these pool portals is not the main reason these houses were chosen as
48 Archi.Pop

settings for these films; but like the broad frames of widescreen cinema and Lautner’s
widescreen architecture, they expand the audience’s freedom by multiplying ocular
opportunities.
Extra-wide frames also present other compositional challenges for filmmakers (and
architects), however. It can be difficult for cinematographers to compensate for the
problems produced by Lautner’s wide-angle spaces, so the broad landscapes framed by
his structures are almost never shown outright. Films privilege views of his buildings
instead of views from his buildings. Cameras frame the houses themselves, and their
gaping apertures in some cases, but the actual vistas are almost always merely implied.
This is partly because the effects of large expanses of glass are always difficult to control.
Issues with glare and unwanted reflections can make the sequestered environment of the
soundstage extremely desirable. Although versions of the Chemosphere have appeared
on screen numerous times—in Body Double and Charlie’s Angels, and on television in
The Outer Limits (1964), The Simpsons (1996), and Current TV (2006)—the actual interior
is never shown. Instead, replicas of the Chemosphere are constructed with walls, windows
and ceilings that can be removed for the camera. The Chemosphere-inspired set designed
by production designer J. Michael Riva for Charlie’s Angels included several significant
changes to Lautner’s original design. Because the Chemosphere’s main space was too
restrictive for filming, the production team built a set that almost doubled the floor area of
the house from 2,200 to 4,000 square feet. They simplified and lightened the ceiling to
create a brighter interior, eliminated the built-in bench seating at the actual house’s
perimeter, and reversed the slope of the glass in order to amplify the impact of the artificial
panoramic view of Los Angeles beyond (Thornburg 2000).14
For these sets, cyclorama translites are often substituted for the actual panoramic
glass that would admit too much light during the day and reflect too many lights at night.
This is one reason the glass in the Chemosphere-inspired house in Charlie’s Angels was
corrected for the camera by tilting it outward at the top. It also accommodated an
extended steadicam shot when the villains eventually reveal themselves in the film. During
this scene, the camera approaches and then revolves around one of the “angels” to
register her reaction to betrayal from all angles. It also reinforces the rotational logic of the
central living space. Director McG is proud of this continuous shot because it worked
“with the cylindrical nature of the house.” Not surprisingly, panning and rotating
camerawork proliferate in other films located in Lautner’s in-the-round architecture. The
James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, uses a panning shot to follow an acrobatic villain
as she flips around the perimeter of the Elrod House (1968) in Palm Springs. Even the
animated series, The Simpsons, creates the impression of a panning shot to expose the
swanky interiors of washed-up 1970s movie star Troy McClure’s Chemosphere-inspired
bachelor pad. In Body Double, production designer Ida Random substituted a rotating,
circular bed and built-in television for the fireplace and cozy built-in benches that occupy
the center of the actual house. Beginning with a shot through the glass from outside the
set, the camera slowly pans inside and eventually stops at the rotating bed. There, the
television screen’s harsh electronic light conspires with neon lights and a reflective metal
wall to announce the folly of “artificial” vision. Drinking (and watching) himself into oblivion,
the main character spirals into self-destructive depression on the rotating bed.15 Revolving

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 Vision and Crime 49

on this Sisyphean turntable of immersive visuality, he watches late night cable teasers for
porn movies on the built-in television. These houses all invite unconventional revolving
camerawork to describe the spiraling qualities of their unconventional cineramic spaces.16
Film’s love affair with Lautner’s architecture has not been a case of blind adoration,
however; Hollywood has also amplified his notorious reputation. In his discussion of
Modern architecture in the cinema, critic and curator Joseph Rosa characterizes Lautner’s
Chemosphere as “Panoptic,” and points out that his designs are usually portrayed as
“traps—highly seductive sites of crime and deception” (Rosa 2000: 164). Filmmaker
Thom Andersen, whose 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself denounces
Hollywood’s persistent vilification of Modern architecture, even describes Lautner as “the
architect Hollywood most loves to hate.”17 Indeed, his houses are almost always cast as
lairs of villains. But films consistently house villains in the buildings of other Modern
architects as well—Wright’s Ennis House (1924, see Chapter 8), Richard Neutra’s Lovell
Health House (1929) and Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House (Case Study #22, 1960) are some
persistent favorites. Hollywood traditionally uses Modern Rationalist buildings, with their
“cold” materials of steel, glass and concrete, to imbue the characters that inhabit them
with a lack of emotion or sensitivity. In this way, Modern architecture is often broadly
associated with the criminal mind on screen. Lautner’s buildings are no exception. They
help to place the characters that occupy them closer to, or over, the edge of respectability.
It makes sense that dangerous characters might occupy a dangerous house. But the
onscreen evildoers that inhabit Lautner’s houses are special. For one thing, they tend to
commit overtly visual transgressions: voyeurism, pornography and racism among them.
Why are his houses singled out as sites of visual villainy onscreen? One answer is that
Lautner’s architecture is decidedly “ocular-centric.” In other words, the desire for specific
dramatic views from his buildings often drove their design. But the types of views these
buildings frame are often implicitly deemed inappropriate or even oppressive. This makes
sense given architect Adolf Loos’s century-old admonition to avoid the outgoing view: “A
cultivated man does not look out of the window,” he insisted. “His window is a ground
glass; it is there only to let the light in, not to let the gaze pass through” (Colomina 1992:
74).18 Because of their obvious ocular-centrism, Lautner projects are often construed as
oppressive reifications of the gaze. Literary critic Thomas Keenan even discusses the
Garcia House on Mulholland Drive as threatening the sanctity of the human(ist) subject.
He describes the project in explicitly anthropomorphic terms: “The house stands out on
the hill as a hooded aperture, not so much a platform or a container for viewing as the very
technology of the gaze. It looks like an eye” (Keenan 1993: 121–5). In Lethal Weapon 2,
a detective investigates a group of racist South Africans that occupy this house. In a
scene Rosa calls “one of the most symbolically loaded images of the modern home in
Hollywood history” (Rosa 2000: 167), the hero hooks his pickup truck to one of the
house’s structural columns and pulls the giant white “eye house” down the hillside in
flames.19 Whereas Lautner saw architecture’s ocular operations as liberating, Hollywood
portrayed them as oppressive.
Lautner often eliminated the middle ground from his widescreen frames by collapsing
distant landscapes with his buildings’ immediate environments. In this way, he composed
seemingly unspoiled Edenic environments in which occupants of his houses see no
50 Archi.Pop

neighbors, and just as importantly, can be seen by no neighbors.20 Lautner essentially

created his own ocular-centric domestic islands by carefully calibrating sightlines to
eliminate visual barriers for occupants and erect visual barriers for neighbors. Whether
they create barriers with poured concrete or planted vegetation, Lautner’s houses imply
the possibility of being naked in the garden—a condition architectural historian Kenneth
Frampton describes as the “latent erotic content” of Lautner’s work. McG, director of the
Charlie’s Angels films, calls Lautner’s houses “fundamentally erotic.” And the editors of
House and Home tellingly described Googie architecture as “Modern Architecture
Uninhibited” (“Googie Architecture” 1952: 86). This ostensible loss of architectural
inhibitions is sometimes peripherally portrayed as liberating, but it is more frequently cast
as criminal. And although Hollywood often disparages Lautner’s ocular-centric architecture
as visually excessive, it is kinder to the different—but also ocular-centric—steel and glass
Rationalist houses of mid-century Modernism. Andersen even calls Koenig the one
“Modernist architect Hollywood lets off lightly.”21 This is because in an architectural culture
dominated by Cartesian space, Lautner’s enveloping views literally failed to fit the grid.
Vision that is naturalized—or seemingly democratized—by the Cartesian grid seems
safely contained. But vision “unleashed” by Lautner’s wide frames assumes connotations
of danger and excess. His buildings become analogues to the anti-ocular narratives of the
films in which they appear, and the screen characters that inhabit them are essentially
judged guilty of seeing too much.22
Extreme visual stimulation, of course, has typically been more acceptable in the
opportunistic entertainment industry than in the relatively puritanical architecture
profession. But even in cinema, visual pleasure has often been construed as excess. As
film theorist Linda Singer explained, “In a culture that devalues or demonizes sensuous
affect and its recognition, it is no wonder that movie going seems to carry the connotation
of a guilty pleasure, a self indulgence productive of nothing more than isolated imaginary
gratification for a spectator displaced from accountability” (Singer 1990: 63). It is this
supposedly self-indulgent aspect of the cinema that causes philosopher Fredric Jameson
to suggest that the filmic view is “essentially pornographic” (Jameson 1992). Indeed, by
the pinnacle of Lautner’s career in the 1970s, an anti-ocular bias had begun to dominate
critical theory. Vision itself was variously labeled: a “cancerous growth” by Michel de
Certeau (1984: xxi), the progenitor of commoditized “spectacle” by Guy Debord (1967),
the engine of “panoptic” surveillance by Michel Foucault (1975), the catalyst of alienated
“abstract space” by Henri Lefebvre (1974: 286), and the seed of military violence by Paul
Virilio (1989, 1991). Vision thus became the ideological villain. Ocular-centric projects like
those of Lautner were subsequently cast as complicit with voyeuristic, pornographic,
spectacular and panoptic modes of ocular oppression. After all, to provide a commanding
view is to construct a power relationship—one that literally positions some citizens above
others. When views are exclusive, as they are in most of Lautner’s private residences, it
makes sense that they are sometimes naïvely interpreted as dominating or oppressive.
The megalomaniacal villains of the James Bond films provide an extreme example of
ocular excess. Their isolated lairs and high-tech tools often marry landscape and
technology in ways that amplify visual envelopment and automated interactivity. In fact,
critic and curator Donald Albrecht insightfully observes a kinship between the

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 Vision and Crime 51

“overwhelmingly angled” sets of production designer Ken Adam and the architecture of
Lautner. This is not surprising since Wright heavily influenced both designers. Adam has
even been called the “Frank Lloyd Wright of décor noir” (Albrecht 2000: 118). He is well
known for creating the war room in director Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War black comedy,
Dr. Strangelove (1964). He is also famous for designing the paradoxically prehistoric and
futuristic villains’ lairs in seven Bond films.23 Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the sets of
the Bond series and Lautner’s buildings both reverberated with what pop journalist Tom
Wolfe called the “Bourgeois Expressionism” of the second machine age (Wolfe 1981). The
curvaceous qualities of widescreen cinema also came to characterize this genre of
architecture, both onscreen and off. The Bond film, Goldfinger (1964), used architect
Morris Lapidus’s Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
(1969), used a revolving observatory in the Swiss Alps as the panoptic lair of Bond’s evil
nemesis.24
Two years later, Adam used Lautner’s Elrod House as a primary location for the Bond
film, Diamonds Are Forever (see Figure 3.2 below). He remembered a “fantastic-looking
house made of reinforced concrete. It was very futuristic and I thought, ‘I couldn’t have
designed it better myself’ ” (Frayling 2005: 175).25 This is partly because Lautner and
Adam shared a fascination with circular forms—Lautner for the panoramic views they
frame, and Adam for the isolated and commanding worldview they symbolize. By inverting
the Arthurian roundtable (or war room “poker table” of Dr. Strangelove) into a circular seat
of panoptic control, the lair of a Bond villain evokes images of a single mastermind
radiating power in all directions. It is easy to imagine Bond’s maniacal nemesis occupying
the (command) center of a circular space and attempting global domination via remote
control. Diamonds Are Forever deploys circular motifs even more than most Bond films.
Much of the film is set in Southern California and Las Vegas, two places where the space

Figure 3.2 John Lautner, Elrod House, Palm Springs, CA (1968), in Diamonds are Forever, Eon
Productions (1971).
52 Archi.Pop

age of the 1960s often took circular form. Circles appear at multiple scales in the film,
from the LAX Theme Building and Elrod House, to a round bathtub and a circular
transparent bed filled with fish in Bond’s Las Vegas hotel room. It is here where the 1960s
popular culture vision of the future—transparent, round and floating—is most fully realized.
Although they presumably have fewer ambitions for world domination, the inhabitants
of Lautner’s actual houses also frequently interact with their environments via remote
control. Their outgoing vision is sometimes enhanced with push-button (or even voice-
actuated) technology, which stretches and amplifies views of the distant landscape. In
fact, some of these spaces can be controlled remotely from a single central location.26 At
the touch of a button, glass walls and skylights retract, bubbling hot-tubs emerge, walls
pivot to reveal striking vistas, lighting dims, intercom and stereo systems activate, water
fills basins from hidden sources, and television sets emerge. But although several Lautner
houses contain these push-button “conveniences,” their actual operations rarely appear
in the films that use these houses as locations. Because it is one of Lautner’s most
automated projects, one might expect the Sheats/Goldstein House to be a standing
reserve of special effects for filmmakers. But production designers almost never make use
of its animated features. Instead, they substitute alternatives that share the same
automated spirit, but are more synchronized with the motion picture camera. The rotating
bed in Body Double, the command console in The Outer Limits, and the numerous control
rooms in Diamonds Are Forever are only a few key examples.
When budgets and clients allowed, Lautner embedded automated controls in
ergonomically convenient locations, which are often at the bedside. Lights, retractable
panels, intercoms and security systems can sometimes be controlled remotely from a
relaxed position. In fact, his cineramic subject often assumes a supine posture. So it is not
surprising that beds figure prominently in several films featuring Lautner buildings. When
a porn star attempts to seduce the protagonist in Body Double, she leads him from the
wet bar to the circular bed, climbs on top of him, and pushes the button to start the round
bed rotating. “They had one of these in Star Whores,” she quips. Beds also serve as
important settings in Playing God. A built-in bed in the master suite of the Sheats/
Goldstein House establishes an intimacy between criminal characters where conventional
architectural intimacy is otherwise lacking. And a built-in triangular bed in the same suite
positions a gangster as the audience for his estranged girlfriend’s striptease. The
unobstructed, sparkling cityscape below—a scene Lautner framed sharply with an
angular floor, ceiling and couch—is usually enough to dazzle architectural viewers. But the
stakes are different in cinema; it seems to take images of a woman undressing to
sufficiently impress Hollywood movie audiences. Could there be a more suitable locus for
film to (re)inscribe the concept of the “male gaze” than the panoramic prow of this master
[sic] suite? In 1997, twenty-five years after art historian John Berger famously argued,
“men act and women appear,” Hollywood was still reinforcing this conservative cultural
myth.27
In fact, masturbation, voyeurism and pornography are unusually common themes in
films that use Lautner’s houses as locations. In Body Double, a villainous husband enlists
a porn actress to pose as his wife and perform a masturbation routine in front of a neo-
Corbusian horizontal window.28 He then “casts” the unsuspecting protagonist as a voyeur

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 Vision and Crime 53

in the Chemosphere up the hill. With this witness to eliminate himself from suspicion the
husband dons a disguise, enters his wife’s bedroom, and murders her before the
desperate witness can make it down the hill from the Chemosphere to save her. Vision is
fast, easy and deceptive, the film’s narrative suggests, especially when compared to the
time-consuming pedestrian obstacles the frantic protagonist encounters on his failed run
to rescue the female object of his desire. Not only the victim’s erotic routine, but also her
grisly murder, was performed “on screen” for the voyeur. Random’s design for this
Chemosphere set departed substantially from Lautner’s original design. The earth-colored
and woody interior of the original house seemed too domestic for a lone male character
plotting to kill his wife. So Random replaced Lautner’s wood and brick finishes with
expanses of black, luminescent and shiny surfaces. The transformation of the film’s
hardworking hero into a pornographic actor—achieved with a costume of tight leather
clothing, slicked-back hair and gold necklaces—reflects Random’s makeover of the
actual Chemosphere into its bachelor pad set for Body Double (McGarry 1985).29 It now
appears as a swanky misogynistic space for remote viewing—a sleek, black, shiny, phallic
precipice from which crimes against women are perpetrated and observed.
Misogynistic storylines are unusually common in films that use Lautner houses as
locations. Indeed, violence against women proliferates in these films. Men objectify,
deceive, and physically fight the main characters in both Charlie’s Angels films, for
example. Although the angels usually prevail in these brutal martial arts encounters, they
are still expected to sit and take orders from Charlie, a man they never meet who issues
condescending instructions over speakerphone. In Lethal Weapon 2, a female assistant
to the film’s evil mastermind, is portrayed as the only ethical member of the racist South
Africans that occupy the Garcia House. After becoming romantically involved with the
hero, her countrymen murder her in a disturbing underwater scene that plays to the
camera as misogynistic spectacle. And in Diamonds Are Forever, Bond battles two female
bodyguards (Bambi and Thumper) in the main space of the Elrod House. While fighting
Bond, they seem to be performing erotically for him as much as trying to subdue him. He
eventually prevails in a ludicrous scene in which he holds their heads underwater like
powerless children until they relent. Misogyny also abounds in Body Double, horrifically in
the murder scene in which a disguised husband drills his wife to death. Although the
protagonist does not actually commit murder, his presence in the ocular (audience) space
of the Chemosphere allows the crime to happen. The fact that he is an unwitting
accomplice to this crime reinforces Hollywood’s persistent anti-ocular assertion that
viewing from a distance is inherently destructive and ultimately leads to impotence.
Random’s Chemosphere set became a collage of the masculine bachelor décor of
Southern California. It reflected De Palma’s impression of the saunas, sunken swimming
pools, and open plans of actual houses in the Hollywood hills. “I was amazed,” he says.
“They’re all basically built like the Playboy mansion” (Dworkin 1985: 85–7). In fact, Playboy
magazine featured articles on Lautner’s Wolfe Swimming Pool in 1964 and the Elrod
House in 1971; De Palma initially enlisted porn star Annette Haven to play the role of the
porn star in Body Double; and artist Richard Phillips made a short film with porn actress
Sasha Grey on location at the Chemosphere in 2011. The Sheats/Goldstein House,
however, is still Lautner’s project with the closest links to pornography (see Figure 3.3).
54 Archi.Pop

Figure 3.3 John Lautner, Sheats/Goldstein House, Los Angeles, CA (1963/1989), in Charlie’s
Angels: Full Throttle, Columbia Pictures Corporation (2003).

The porn video Unleashed (1996) was shot partly on location there. And two years later,
in the Coen brothers’ film, The Big Lebowski, the house appeared as the Malibu beach
house of pornographer, Jackie Treehorn. The following exchange in the main living area
between the porn king and the film’s slacker protagonist suggests that sex is on the verge
of electronic automation:

Jackie Treehorn: Of course you have to take the good with the bad. New technology
permits us to do very exciting things in interactive erotic software.
Wave of the future, Dude—one-hundred percent electronic.
The Dude: Well, I still jerk-off manually.
Jackie Treehorn: [laughs sarcastically] Of course you do.

There is something poignant about locating this comedic dialogue in the electronically
automated, ocular-centric main living area of the Sheats/Goldstein House, as if the space
itself generated the script. But is the architecture itself actually pornographic because
cinema implies it? And is Jameson’s indictment of film as an inherently pornographic
medium justified? Hollywood and critical theory indeed seem surprisingly united in their
anti-ocular assessments. But before we credit them with essential insights about Lautner’s
architecture, it is crucial to ask what their dubious assumptions reveal about the anti-
ocular orientations of popular culture. Lautner’s spaces are not inherently pornographic,
racist or misogynistic, even though their villainous onscreen occupants frequently derive
pleasure from remote viewing. Similarly, Foucault’s model of surveillance and control—
although tempting to apply to seemingly panoptic structures like the Chemosphere and
Elrod House—should not delimit these projects. Their inhabitants, unlike the guards in

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Jeremy Bentham’s infamous prison, do not literally appropriate or control what they view.
Instead, they seek, and sometimes achieve, a sublime expansion of individual pleasure
and freedom rather than an oppressive expansion of power over others.
Film’s status as popular entertainment allows Hollywood to specialize in identifying and
extending cultural myths. Modern and postmodern architecture’s avant-garde aspirations,
on the other hand, with their attendant doctrines of purity and resistance, sometimes
obscure the field’s own guiding myths. Throughout the twentieth century, architecture
critics tended to accept certain received dualisms—including static/mobile, optical/tactile,
surface/substance and form/function—as natural frameworks for design production. In
fact, there is nothing natural or objective about these frameworks; they are just as
culturally constructed as any other ideology. Sometimes it takes the seemingly uncritical
medium of the movies, through the attentive work of filmmakers like Lachman, Adam, De
Palma and Random, to expose the mythical status of these longstanding cultural dualisms.
At stake in this discussion is nothing less than disciplinary agency and self-awareness.
By casting down our eyes and denigrating ocular-centric architecture, not only do we
often fail in our quest to expose oppressive modes of exploitation and control; we also
erroneously assume that an ethically pure or critically resistant architecture automatically
arises from the unsullied side of cultural myth.
The physicality of space and camera, as well as the ideological ferment of an era,
inevitably influence the ways buildings are deployed in the production of films. Lautner’s
cineramic architecture, on the other hand, demonstrates one way widescreen cinema can
be deployed in the design of buildings. In these two highly visual disciplines, physical and
ideological apparata conspire to construct the variously sensorial, automated, guilty,
powerful, erotic, liberating and deceptive pleasures of both cinema and architecture. In
the end, Lautner’s extraordinary buildings found little favor with the architectural
establishment for the same reason Hollywood repeatedly portrays them as sites of scopic
crime. They commit disciplinary blasphemy by reveling in the pleasures and freedoms of
immersive widescreen viewing: an act deemed excessive and unworthy of serious critical
attention within the relatively puritanical—and surprisingly anti-ocular—cultural terrain
surrounding architecture and cinema.

Notes
1 This essay draws on research conducted for the author’s UCLA Ph.D. dissertation, which
included personal interviews with architects, clients and filmmakers including Thom Andersen,
Jacklyn and Philip Burchill, Stephen Burum, Russell Carpenter, Bette Cohen, Frank Escher,
Kenneth Frampton, Stephen Goldblatt, James Goldstein, Guy Hamilton, Elizabeth Honnold-
Harris, Dan Kneece, Edward Lachman, Steve Lowe, McG (Joseph McGinty Nichol), and Guy
Zebert. Their assertions in this essay are taken from these interviews unless noted otherwise.
See Jon Yoder, Widescreen Architecture: The Immersive Visuality of John Lautner (Los
Angeles: Regents of the University of California, 2011); and “A View to Kill For,” in Modern
Painters, Vol. 20, No. 6 (July/August 2008), pp. 60–5.
2 Although he hated most Hollywood films, Lautner frequently praised his favorite filmmaker, French
director René Clair. See, for example, Entr’acte, Dir. René Clair (Les Ballets Suedois, 1924).
56 Archi.Pop

3 Silvertop (1963) has appeared in music videos by Tom Jones and the Stereophonics (“Mama
Told Me Not to Come” 1999), and Monica (“Inside” 1999). The house also served as a setting
for an episode of the television series, Viper (1994), and a magazine feature for the television
series, Sex, Lies & Secrets (2005). The Sheats/Goldstein House (1963/89) has appeared in
music videos by Tracie Spencer (“It’s All About You” 1999), and Snoop Dogg (“Let’s Get
Blown” 2005).
4 Although Tony Stark’s sprawling, automated house in the Iron Man films is not an actual
building, production designer J. Michael Riva based the set design on Lautner’s Beyer House
(1983) and Levy House (1990), which are both located in Malibu. Riva also used Lautner
houses for Charlie’s Angels 1 & 2 and Lethal Weapon 2.
5 In the 1940s, Lautner worked as an associate with Douglas Honnold who designed movie
sets for MGM. In Honnold’s office, Lautner designed a chain of Coffee Dan’s coffee shops
(1946–48). In independent practice, he designed a chain of Henry’s Restaurants (1947–57)
and the first Googie’s coffee shop (1949), all in the Los Angeles area. Some of Lautner’s other
early design commissions included the Desert Hot Springs Motel for film producer and director
Lucien Hubbard (1947), the United Productions of America Studios for film studio president
Steve Bosustow (1949), and a house renovation for actress Anne Baxter (Frank Lloyd Wright’s
granddaughter) and her husband actor John Hodiak (1951).
6 Writing on the eve of Lautner’s eightieth birthday, critic Aaron Betsky called his oeuvre the
“bravura gesture of a wasteful genius.” See Betsky, “John Lautner at 80: A Life in Design,” in
Architectural Record, Vol. 179, No. 12 (December 1990), p. 15.
7 Author interview with Frank Escher. See also the Hammer Museum exhibition website: http://
hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/139
8 Stephen Goldblatt notes that the scene in which Mel Gibson pulls down the “stilt house” with
a pickup truck took two weeks to set-up lighting and cameras, and it took much longer than
that to build the full-scale house set. For the film, the set cost about $500,000 to build and
another $500,000 to demolish with explosives. To blow-up the house, the production team
used the same detonators that NASA uses to separate the space shuttle from its propulsion
tanks. Seventeen cameras were used to capture the explosions that toppled the house.
9 The former owner of the Desert Hot Springs Motel, Steve Lowe, suggested that Lautner’s
continual quest to “break the box” was somehow the scandalous architectural equivalent of
“deflowering the virgin.”
10 Gimbaling is a technique used in set design to deflect reflections. It involves creating a serrated
plan with facets of glass in order to break up continuous reflections. Lautner used a similar
technique in both the Pearlman Mountain Cabin (1957) in Idyllwild, CA, and the original Elrod
House (1968) in Palm Springs.
11 In order to compete with television, the movie industry developed a number of widescreen film
formats starting with Cinerama in 1952. Subsequent formats included CinemaScope (1953),
Todd-AO (1953) and VistaVision (1954). See John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
12 Lautner’s step-daughter, Elizabeth Honnold-Harris, accompanied Lautner to the Los Angeles
premiere of the first Cinerama film, This is Cinerama!, in 1952; and associate Guy Zebert
accompanied him to the CinemaScope film, Bad Day at Black Rock, in 1955.
13 According to Deleuze, wide frames helped to transform the “movement-image” that
characterized early cinema into the “time-image” of postwar cinema. He described the
movement-image of early (mainly silent) cinema as being defined by the movement of
characters within the frame. The desire to visually convey narrative often resulted in wildly
theatrical gesticulations by actors. This was often the paradigm preferred by René Clair and
other directors that viewed the introduction of sound in the cinema as an unwelcome invasion.

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 Vision and Crime 57

Later directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and John Ford, however, created what Deleuze
called time-images by suppressing movement within the frame and thus foregrounding the
temporal aspects of visual engagement.
14 The Chemosphere-inspired set designed by J. Michael Riva for Charlie’s Angels reportedly
cost $180,000 to construct, which is $40,000 more than the actual house built in 1960 (not
adjusted for inflation).
15 Playboy magazine founder, Hugh Hefner, consciously compared his notorious 7½ foot
diameter Playboy Bed to a phonograph: “It goes 331/3, 45 and 78!” he declared to Tom Wolfe.
See Wolfe, “King of the Status Dropouts,” in The Pump House Gang (New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1968), pp. 49–54.
16 In the terms of art historian Jonathan Crary (and philosopher Michel Foucault), Lautner’s
spaces “discipline” observers by inviting us to pan as them instead of staring at them. See
Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990).
17 Even Andersen describes Lautner’s interiors as “sometimes vulgar or excessively
ostentatious.” See Los Angeles Plays Itself, 2003. He also notes that a shift might have
occurred sometime between the 2000 release of Charlie’s Angels and the 2003 release of
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. A villain occupies a Lautner house in the first movie, but a hero
occupies a Lautner house in the second. This shift is at least partly involved with the historical
cycle—what seemed scary ten years ago might now seem safely nostalgic.
18 This is Beatriz Colomina’s English translation of the following French passage in Le Corbusier’s
1925 book, Urbanisme: “Loos m’affirmait un jour: ‘Un homme cultivé ne regarde pas par la
fenêtre; sa fenetre est en verre dépoli; elle n’est là que pour donner de la lumiêre, non pour
laisser passer le regard.’ ” In the later English translation this passage reads, “A friend once said
to me, ‘No intelligent man ever looks out of his window; his window is made of ground glass; its
only function is to let in light, not to look out of.’ ” See Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and
Its Planning, Frederick Etchells, trans. (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1987), pp. 184, 186.
19 The Garcia House was not actually destroyed for this film. Instead, a full-scale mock-up of the
house was constructed and demolished on camera. Goldblatt remembers that the production
(construction and filmed demolition) costs for this scene were more than ten times the
construction costs of the original house.
20 Lautner consciously tried to design seduction into his buildings. In a 1989 interview, he
described the lighting scheme at Silvertop in terms of seduction: “And this other one here is a
gas light. There were gas lights in the garden also. So you could have the whole place with
gas lights, flames, instead of just electric lights. That’s when you get a pretty girl here you
know [laughs]. Champagne and gas lights.” Lautner, interview with Bette Cohen for The Spirit
in Architecture: John Lautner, Sound Roll #1 – Part 2: 26 min. 21 sec. (28 July, 1989),
Silvertop, Bette Cohen archive (transcription by author, 1 August, 2007).
21 Los Angeles Plays Itself, 2003.
22 Architect and film set designer Robert Mallet-Stevens published a pioneering essay on the
topic of illuminating character through non-expository means in the late silent film era. Film
environments, he argued, should inform the audience about the individuals that inhabit them
before the characters ever appear on screen.
23 Adam studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture for two years at the urging of
Vincent Korda, the famed art director of the early science fiction film, Things to Come (1936).
At the time, architectural training was the best way to become a designer for both stage and
motion pictures.
24 Although Adam did not serve as production designer for this latter film, the aesthetic he
established for the series certainly contributed to the choice of this location. The revolving
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observatory is actually the world’s first revolving restaurant, Piz Gloria, which is accessible via
the Schilthornbahn cable car in Mürren, Switzerland.
25 According to director Guy Hamilton, “The fun of location hunting for a Bond movie was always
to search the world for the most unusual-unique-luxurious or bad taste locations the Art
Director and I could find. Our chief villain was always an international archimillionaire thus
justifying the search. Location hunting in Las Vegas and Palm Springs naturally took us up the
ridge overlooking the city with its then half a dozen luxury houses. Lautner’s immediately stood
out. The owner was most co-operative (they usually are for Bond). I amended the script to fit
the lay out and we introduced some set decoration and props to suit the action. What I
remember mostly of the house was the texture and Lautner’s daring.” Adam remembered:
“And I arrived at this place, and it was absolutely right for the film. It was a reinforced concrete
structure, very Modern. And fabulous. And I said you know this is as though I designed it . . .”
See Diamonds Are Forever (Special Features). Dir. Guy Hamilton. Danjaq & Eon Productions,
1971. DVD. MGM Home Entertainment, 2000.
26 According to Frank Lloyd Wright, “If it [automation] keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but
the push-button finger.” Lautner, although he idolized Wright as a mentor and frequently
referred to him as a “real genius,” strongly disagreed with him on this topic. While Wright
understood automation as substituting for bodily activity, Lautner saw it as expanding the
body’s realm of action. See The New York Times (27 November, 1955).
27 In 1972, Berger argued that “men act and women appear” in the tradition of Western painting,
and in 1975, filmmaker and scholar Laura Mulvey developed a related psychoanalytic model of
the male gaze for cinema studies. Susan Dworkin essentially restated Berger and Mulvey’s
arguments in her book on the making of Body Double: “In the culture of the camera, what the
man looks at is important above all. What the woman feels about being looked at means
much less. And she lives in danger of having her feelings ignored, her substance ignored, until
she is obliterated, meaningless, powerless, fictionalized and as dead as Gloria Revelle.” See
Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972; Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1975; and
Dworkin, Double De Palma, 1984.
28 By distorting the assumed orthogonal orientation of architectural fenestration, Lautner
essentially took Le Corbusier’s ribbon windows and curved them into the third dimension. This
maneuver effectively transforms the mobile (cinematic) subject of the pedestrian promenade
into the lounging (cineramic) subject of widescreen architecture.
29 John Philips and Linda Douglas, the Chemosphere’s third owners, agreed to allow Brian De
Palma to film scenes for Body Double at the house with one major stipulation (and $30,000).
Philips “agreed only on condition that the movie makers not only treat the house well, but that
the house not be the scene of any ‘graphic sex or violence . . . or anything very negative,
anything that would do damage to the character of the house.’ The movie makers complied,
he said.”

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PART TWO

Playing

59
60

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Chapter 4
Dimensions of the
Mass-Produced Dollhouse:
Fisher-Price Versus Playmobil
Mark S. Morris

The hook at the side was stuck fast. Pat pried it open with his penknife, and the
whole house-front swung back, and there you were, gazing at one and the same
moment into the drawing room and dining room, the kitchen and two bedrooms.
That is the way for a house to open! Why don’t all houses open like that?
The Doll’s House, Katherine Mansfield (MANSFIELD 1923: 2)

Traditionally home-made or bespoke products of individual craftsmen, the dollhouse

became widely popular during the Victorian era (1837–1901) borrowed from German
examples established a century earlier. Like dolls, dollhouses were intended for females,
but not necessarily young girls. Their contents were often collected everyday objects
brought into the service of and refashioned for a miniaturized world. The house might be
crafted by a parent or relative (usually male) or purchased, while the interior’s finishing and
furnishing were typically handled by women. Daughters old enough to handle the
collection that the dollhouse represented would be permitted to “play” with it, but the
dollhouse itself was originally a predominantly adult pastime.
When the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944) completed Queen Mary’s dollhouse
for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924, his work was incorrectly thought to
represent a woman’s obsession with perfect domesticity and petit grandeur. Rather, it
was Lutyens’ fascination with the miniature that propelled the project (Stewart 1993).
Lutyens had the dollhouse constructed in his own living room, even pushing his family out
of its space. He never tired of drawing details for the dollhouse even when he was meant
to be attending to enormous projects in New Delhi. Lutyens offered several innovations
with his diminutive project. Queen Mary’s dollhouse is accessible on all sides—four

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façades can be drawn upwards via a system of pulleys. Lutyens made a basement garage
level complete with working toy motorcars powered by alcohol. The books in the library
were all microbiblia, legible with a magnifying glass. The family portraits in the dollhouse
parlor were delicately framed real postage stamps.
Detail-drenched architectural styles, like the Victorian, provide the requisite nostalgia
and density of details appreciated in miniatures. Post-World War I dollhouses in other
architectural styles, including Art Deco and early Modern examples, exist but only as
deviations from the Victorian/gingerbread type, these also being hand-made. Mass
production of dollhouses in the UK and US did not begin in earnest until after World War
II. These new dollhouses provided empty rooms to be filled by the consumer. In this
way they remained true to their function as vessels to display collections of miniatures.
There was therefore still a roughness to the interiors where different scales and levels of
detail often clashed. The dolls that inhabited these mass-produced toy houses started
also to become mass-produced and included alongside some of the manufactured
houses. Standardization of the scales of these dolls and their houses did not necessarily
bring standardization of the other collectibles. Dollhouse “sets” complete with dolls (a
family) and furniture to scale only became widely available in the late 1950s.

Fisher-Price
Established in 1930 in the town of East Aurora not far from Buffalo, New York, the Fisher-
Price Toy Company was founded by Herman Fisher, Irving Price, Helen Schelle and Price’s
wife, the noted book illustrator Margaret Evans Price. Their early toys were made in high-
grade Ponderosa pine and lined with color lithograph prints or decals glued to the wood.
These bright and detailed images were the secret to the firm’s success. By the 1960s,
Fisher-Price began to produce a new line of toys under the name Play Family. A runaway
hit, the Play Family House was essentially a dollhouse set but with key differences. Firstly,
the house was manufactured as a complete architectural model rather than a traditional
dollhouse where the rear elevation was left open. More like Lutyens’ dollhouse for Queen
Mary, it presented all its elevations and even included an attached garage. The Fisher-
Price house opened down its middle (along the line of its pitched roof’s peak) with the turn
of a latch-handle and, once opened, presented four rooms. A portable staircase in yellow
plastic could be placed “outside” the nominal area of the house to link the lower level and
upper floor which was partially “under eaves” and set with dormer windows.
The house came with a family of simplified figures, also of Ponderosa pine, painted in
different colors and capped with printed heads (see Figure  4.1). No operable or even
illustrated limbs were included. The turned profiles of the “mother” and “daughter” figures
included a flare suggesting dresses while the “father,” “son” and “dog” had simple
cylindrical bodies in the manner of clothespin or peg dolls; even more simplified than
Alexander Girard’s 1963 totemic designs for wooden dolls produced by Vitra. It would be
hard to even refer the Fisher-Price family as dolls and this was part of their cross-gender
appeal. The Fisher-Price Play Family House (never referred to as a dollhouse) was
conceived—like most Fisher-Price products up to that time—as being largely gender

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 Dimensions of the Mass-Produced Dollhouse 63

Figure 4.1 The Fisher-Price Play Family House.

Photo by Kathryn Morris, Morris toy collection.

neutral. The original packaging of the Play Family House featured a young girl and boy
interacting with the set, albeit the boy is shown holding the plastic car intended for the
garage with working door. The plastic pieces of furniture included with the house were
minimal and, relative to the faithful miniature copies of the “real thing” valued by dollhouse
collectors, almost perverse. All the furniture was squat to match up with the truncated
proportions of the figures. The seats of the dining and easy chairs were scooped out as
round buckets to hold the base of the figures. The furniture was not decaled or detailed
beyond molding, but was designed in such a way as to compliment and visually connect
to the decals of the rooms’ walls and floors.
The lithographs by Margaret Evans Price that cover the interior and exterior of the
house are carefully composed. They identify and extend the character of the house and
its rooms. The architectural and interior design elements she features are more or less
straight representations of popular domestic spaces of the 1960s. Blue carpet and a large
fireplace signify the living room, while the kitchen gets a floor resembling faux brick
linoleum along with knotty pine cabinetry and double ovens set in a stone wall. Wood
paneling lines the parents’ bedroom, a dresser and walk-in closet are included on flanking
walls. The kids’ room is bright yellow and receives a large braided rug. Windows are
highlighted with shutters and frilly curtains tied with red bows. But for all of their charm,
there is dissonance between the two-dimensional furniture and features represented in
the lithographic decals versus the three-dimensional plastic furniture included with the
play set. The “world” represented by the lithographic decals is more detailed and evocative
64 Archi.Pop

than the simplified figures or plastic furniture. The images suggest another or alternative
house, one which has been flattened to make way for a clumsier other. When one plays
with the Play Family House, one is really playing with two houses: a tangible house and
an image-based (or imaginary) house. Some frustration is had in wishing for the more
sophisticated illustrated house to manifest as its own toy. The decals turn the house into
a breed of pop-up book that Price would have appreciated.
In subsequent designs, like the Play Family A-Frame House produced between 1974
and 1976, the incongruence of the toy and its illustrations is largely worked out. The
A-Frame kitchen is notably realized as a three-dimensional built-in complete with
saucepans and spice jars forever fused to the backsplash; the whole kitchen is one piece
of molded golden-colored plastic. Likewise, the hearth is partially modeled where two
separate decals indicate the firebox and the stone chimneypiece. Between the flat
illusionism of the Play House of the late 1960s and the realistic modeling of interiors
featured in the A-Frame of the mid-1970s, a rare Fisher-Price toy exclusively sold by
Sears in 1971, Play Family Play Rooms, marks the halfway point between reliance on
two- versus three-dimensional design. More like an architectural model, Play Rooms was
a tray of six spaces, each room defined by two or three walls at most. No roof, but real
door openings between the rooms. Access was from above than from the side or section
of the house. The “walls” of these “rooms” were illustrated by decals but only as cheerful
backdrops—shelves, wallpaper, tile for the bathroom—for the furniture included which
was more numerous and varied than the set that came with the Play Family House. No
space or false doors or built-ins were implied by the Play Rooms’ decals. No alternative
universe was hinted at.
From 1974 to 1977, with a reprise “Classic Reissue” in 1988, Fisher-Price produced its
Play Family Castle. The castle was realized as a model with turrets and crenellation, roofs
and deep doorframes. The castle also featured a number of built-in moving parts: a
trapdoor to a concealed lower dungeon, a pivoting staircase concealing a hidden alcove,
a false wall that could be drawn aside to reveal a grotto. The roofscape with its tiered
battlements was especially detailed, every paving stone was rendered in shallow relief, a
steep stair linked one turret to the next. The castle was also heavily illustrated with flat
decals designed by Margaret Evans Price. With these images she offered a definitive
parallel world to the one played out with the toy set. She drew scenes in flat exterior
windows that were incongruous to the interior, eyes peering out of a door forever bolted
shut, dogs scampering about and a crocodile hidden beneath the working drawbridge.
She even designed a Fisher-Price coat-of-arms. The interplay between the “real” modeled
elements and the illusionistic illustrated ones struck a chord; it was one of the company’s
all-time bestsellers. The castle typified the Fisher-Price approach; namely, the ingenious
melding together of toy and picture book. The Fisher-Price Play Family houses and castle
were never pure dollhouses, but tangible stories.
Most of the early or classic Fisher-Price toys viewed without their illustrated decals are
modest, even primitive, in form. It is the illustrations that give them their charm, interest
and play value. Such objects might be considered tools for scenographic or illusionistic
play; activity halfway between physical toy manipulation and viewing a picture book. The
reductive forms of the toys function as so many surfaces for graphic display. Children with

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 Dimensions of the Mass-Produced Dollhouse 65

limited or early motor skills can therefore partake in a visually rich yet physically less
demanding play. And because of the illustrations, the toys often hold the interest of older
children; thus the toys—owing to their physical robustness and visual sophistication—
become staples of childhood and “heirloom” or “hand-me-down” toys shared by
generations of children whereas more complicated toys of many parts narrowly intended
for or attractive to specific age groups, are less likely to endure in the playroom.
The scale of the Fisher-Price Little People toys was unusual. The Little People
“architecture” was less than half the scale of traditional or commercially available
dollhouses. Fisher-Price effectively offered an older kid toy type, the dollhouse, to very
young children. This alone must have prompted some of its popularity. Its scale would
frustrate anyone hoping to blend their dollhouse collectibles with the Fisher-Price sets, but
that communality was never the point. Indeed, the Fisher-Price Little People line enjoyed
a certain autonomy from other toys of its dollhouse genre. Likewise, it was scaled up from
play village sets (block sets intended to make villages or toy train buildings). The Fisher-
Price was ergonomically calibrated for smaller hands.

Playmobil
Playmobil toys became available in the United States in 1975 when the Fisher-Price brand
was well established. Developed by Hans Beck (1929–2009) for the German Brandstätter
company from 1971–1973, the first mass-produced Playmobil toys focused exclusively
on toy figures; initially, Native Americans, construction workers and medieval knights
(Playmobil 2013). So the doll preceded its dollhouse. The figures were intended to be
ergonomic as well, able to fit comfortably in children’s hands. From the start the figures
were designed to offer a limited range of manipulation and movement; rotating head and
arms, fused but pivoting pairs of legs. Rotatable wrists would not be invented until 1982,
but characteristic open hands were there from the toy’s inception. They were plastic,
Brandstätter specialized in plastic toy manufacture, and, except for the legs, hollow. Like
the Little People of Fisher-Price, the facial design was abstract, minimal and universal.
While Playmobil would become known for their gender neutrality, the first toy lines were
more directed at young boys, that untapped “doll” market Fisher-Price had already
connected to in the US.
It took a few years for Playmobil to find a wide audience. Shops were hesitant to make
orders at first as the figures did not fit into established toy categories. They were bigger
than toy soldiers (Beck thought of his designs as a gentler, less static reinvention of the
toy soldier) and smaller than conventional dolls. But Beck and Brandstätter persevered.
The Oil Crisis of 1973–4 helped Beck’s project along in that his figures could sell at a
higher price point than other larger and solid plastic products made by Brandstätter
(Collectobil 2014). The figures began to catch on and the Playmobil division made a profit
for the company. Brandstätter began to license the manufacture and sale of the Playmobil
line in other countries, eventually becoming a global phenomenon.
Beck’s intention was to make figures for open-ended play. “My figures were quite
simple, but they allowed children room for their imagination” (Walker 1997). He wanted
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children to project upon the figures. “They invented little scenarios for them. They never
grew tired of playing with them” (Walker 1997). As the popularity of the toys took off, the
company sought designs for accessories (handheld weaponry, horses that figures could
click astride) and environments (teepees, forts and so on) that could be marketed as sets
with the figures. Despite the expansion of this aspect of the toy over the next three
decades, Beck argued, “. . . the central point has always been the figure, not the
surroundings” (Walker 1997).
The Playmobil figures have been remarkably consistent in design, scale and attitude
(forever set with a slight Mona Lisa smile). But the central point—that focus—over the last
ten years, at least, has surely swung to the surroundings to the point where the figures
play a supporting role to their increasingly complex architectural surroundings. These
environments include a range of houses, castles, farms, a palace, a zoo, airport, hospital,
fire station, police station, veterinary clinic, bank and train set. Earlier sets, like the
American Wild West-inspired fort, were sold in pieces to be put together as a simple tab-
in-slot system. More recently, a completely new method of construction, “System-X,” has
been introduced using plastic connector pieces—small cylinders with Phillips head or
cross-hair inscribed ends—that require a patented tool to build all new sets. System-X
can be viewed as an attempt to make portions of the sets interchangeable and therefore,
like the figures, open-ended. In practice, the rigidity of the connections made possible by
the connector pieces makes taking sets apart to rebuild again a task best suited to adults.
From its inception, Playmobil considered Danish toy company LEGO their biggest
competition. The new system would appear to roughly emulate LEGO’s emphasis on
mutability and reconfiguration of basic parts, except that Playmobil’s constituent building
parts are whole wall sections and spans of flooring rather than a block set in any normative
sense.
Unlike LEGO, the architecture on offer from Playmobil is highly detailed in form and
relatively specific in terms of presenting identifiable architectural styles and eras. Its castle
sets are less from fairytales, as with the Fisher-Price castle, and more accurate models of
medieval fortresses. Their detail does not come from highly colored decals (the castles,
for instance, are molded in dull gray-brown colored plastic), but from incised and molded
rustication and crisply defined profiles. With Playmobil color shifts only happen with the
addition of another physical plastic component. Where there is a window there is a void,
never an illusion of such. The portcullis really works, the windows are framed and
mullioned. Houses range from medieval to Belle Époque to Modern and each receives
appropriate and, compared to Fisher-Price, copious furniture and finishings including
curtains and wallpaper. Playmobil’s palace is labeled “Fairy Tale,” and draws on
architectural themes from The Arabian Nights. Its “City” series toys focus on more or less
contemporary urban scenarios and design.
The single set that would see the most detail, the largest number of accessories and
add-ons was Playmobil’s “Dollhouse” (but referred to as Bürgerhaus or townhouse in
Germany) released in 1989 and re-released and modified several times thereafter. A grand
house for a well-heeled family with staff, the exterior presents Biedermeier façades with a
columned front porch, flanking conservatory and mansard roof (see Figure  4.2 below).
Like its brand predecessors, the toy mimics architectural models. It completely gives into

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 Dimensions of the Mass-Produced Dollhouse 67

Figure 4.2 The grand-looking Playmobil Dollhouse.

Photo by Kathryn Morris, Morris toy collection.

being a nineteenth-century dollhouse rather than an open-ended or transcendent

meta-house. Its interior sets, sold room by room, adhere to the period and glory in its
domestic fussiness. The plastic furniture is elaborately designed. There are claw-footed
bathtubs, potted ferns, elegant mantle pieces and a grandfather clock. There are dining
room, library, nursery and music room sets.
One of the more striking aspects of the Playmobil Dollhouse is its use of color-printed
decals functioning as different wallpapers per room. Nothing else is represented with
these decals, no trompe l’oeil effects as with Fisher-Price, but it set the Dollhouse apart
from the other toys of the brand, as did the introduction of real cloth and silhouetted
pieces of felt that could be hung as window dressing on the inside each window. In many
ways the Dollhouse, like most dollhouses, existed to be dressed, filled with appropriate
paraphernalia and treated as a collection. Whereas a standard dollhouse traditionally took
years to dress with a disparate series of sought-out objects, the Playmobil version offered,
at a price, an immediate and cohesive collection. The play value of this particular toy may
have been superseded by this older form of surrogate house-making, but as new sets for
the house were introduced, some seasonal, new and idiosyncratic figures were introduced
that tried to keep up with their surroundings. The parlor set came with a bearded
gentleman in a red scarf, slippers and fez. The dining room had a maid in uniform and the
music room—intended for the conservatory space—included a fanciful long-haired man
in a purple-lapelled tuxedo and black mustache.
Playmobil’s latest offering is a specially licensed Apple Store Playset complete with
chunky display tables, Genius Bar and a small auditorium/classroom where new products
68 Archi.Pop

can be announced. Miniature plastic iPads, iMacs and laptops use decals for their
screens. System-X is fully deployed and highly visible across the toy, the small square
holes that receive the connector pieces become part of the high-tech image the toy
exhibits. A floating “glass” railed stair (translucent uncolored plastic) connects two floors.
Stairs are an interesting way to gauge such a toy’s architectural fidelity. After all, a dollhouse
(when not in Lutyens’ hands) is usually half a house one room deep with an emphasis on
served versus service spaces; no spaces in Playmobil’s Dollhouse, despite its larger-than-
average ambitions include accommodation for its many members of staff. The Dollhouse
does give over quite a bit of floor space to staircases that rise through two floors and on
to the attic/nursery. It includes newel posts and delicate balusters. It might not be likely
that children move the figures realistically up and down the stairs when changing floors in
play, but the architectural feature is presented straight-faced and hints at themes of
upstairs/downstairs conjured by the time period represented by the toy.
The Fisher-Price Playhouse stair, as noted previously, was a free-floating object that
could link first and second floors wherever placed along the open edges of the second
floor. In subsequent toys like the Hospital Playset, Fisher-Price would successfully
integrate working, hand-cranked, elevators with sliding doors. All of this emphasis on a
building’s section and vertical circulation is a natural outcome of the spatial shallowness
of the standard dollhouse and the play interest in movement and differentiation of spaces
and occupancy. In very recent years, Playmobil surprised loyal fans of the product line
with limited edition stripped down portable houses that configure almost exactly like
Fisher-Price’s old Playhouse, except the house dispenses with real windows and doors
altogether in favor of printed color decals inside and out which, just as Evans Price
introduced, include not only wallpaper but “blind” French doors and windows and,
distinctly like Evans Price’s designs thirty years before, feature entire pieces of illusionistic
flat furniture. The only significant divergence from the Fisher-Price precedent is that no
stair whatsoever is included.

All choked up
To bring the Fisher-Price toy line up to the present, one must acknowledge a dark year in
that company’s history. It was 1986 when Edward M. Swartz (1934–2010) published his
Toys That Kill book with the byline, “Make Sure Your Child Is Safe, Avoid Thousands of
Life-Threatening Toys.” Swartz was part of a broader consumer advocacy movement in
the 1980s. The founder of World Against Toys That Harm, or WATCH, Swartz was a
prominent Boston attorney and an expert in liability law. Despite that fact that Toys That
Kill did indeed include thousands of commercially available toys, the author took special
aim at Fisher-Price. Not only were several of its products (and not just the Little People
line) included in the book, but Fisher-Price’s wood peg-style Little People were the only
toy featured on the book’s cover. The choking hazard presented by the Fisher-Price
figures was highlighted in the book with a diagram for a modified Heimlich maneuver
developed specifically for ejecting the unscrewed Fisher-Price figure’s head out of a child’s
throat. There was clearly some sensationalism in featuring the primly smiling Fisher-Price

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 Dimensions of the Mass-Produced Dollhouse 69

Little People under that title, but the book’s marketing angle worked. The book was a
public relations nightmare for the toy company. By that point in time, Herman Fisher had
retired, Irving and Margaret Evans Price and Helen Schelle had died, and the toy company
was owned by Quaker Oats. A comprehensive redesign aimed at addressing toy safety
issues radically changed the physical form of the toys as well as their appearance.
The figures were made doubly wide in diameter—too wide for a child to even put in
their mouth—and with them all the accessories and buildings became even squatter.
Gone was any kind of architectural realism as seen with the A-Frame House, gone was
any ambiguity about the “appropriate” ages the toy line was intended for. In their new safe
form, the toys took on a naïve, cartoon town appearance that put them more in the
toddler aisle. But this revised figure type would be short-lived as the company, eventually
becoming a subsidiary of Mattel (Sims 1993), let go of the component piece figures in
favor of soft plastic and rubbery monolithic dolls that maintained exaggerated squatness
but recalled nothing of the original Fisher-Price figure. The materiality of new Fisher-Price
toys is entirely plastic, the pine that had linked the mass-produced toys to older wooden
toy traditions and crafts had been progressively phased out. Decals play a minor role, if
any, in the contemporary brand. In 1997 Mattel decided to market the bulk of its preschool
toys under the Fisher-Price name that, despite the Toys That Kill drama, still conjures
enough positive nostalgia for parents that knew the original toys or versions of them in
their own childhoods, that the moniker alone remains highly valuable.
Playmobil has not been without its own bad press. It had its brush with American toy
safety advocates even earlier in 1982 when one of the two US companies licensed to
make the toy, Schaper (the other company being Mattel) went in partnership with
McDonald’s restaurants to feature figures as toy surprises in early Happy Meals for
children. Ten million sheriff and Native American figures had been distributed with the
meals before the campaign was abruptly ended when it came to light that the figures did
not meet the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s standards in regard to choking
hazards. McDonald’s recommended its patrons return the figures in exchange for ice
cream or a partial refund of the Happy Meal. No one had reported a choking incident. The
figures were not subjected to anything like the redesign of Fisher-Price’s and visibly
remained almost the same, a legacy in part owed to Beck’s original focus on the design
of figures as opposed to their surroundings.
It is worth briefly noting the multisensory aspect of some toys and their special place in
childhood development. Most toys appeal visually, most are touched and handled in
some way. Increasingly, many toys have mechanical or electronic sound effects. What of
smell and taste? The Fisher-Price Little People and their accessories could be and were
sniffed and tasted in the course of play by many children. The unique texture, warmth and
smell of Ponderosa pine made those early figures ripe for both oral and nasal interactions.
Baby siblings might be drawn to them when teething. People of a certain age, who grew
up with these toys, must, in the recesses of their mind, recollect the extra-visual sensations
these toys produced. And not just the figures themselves, but, in particular, the exposed
sponge foam lining of the Fisher-Price play set beds was so enticing to chew that collectors
of the vintage toys now find these pieces stripped of their foam more often than being
intact. Old sets featured, for example, on eBay are sometimes noted as having the beds
70 Archi.Pop

with their original foam. The chief choking hazard represented by Playmobil figures is not
the figure as a whole, but when children mouth the heads of the figures and pop the
domed plastic piece standing in for the figure’s hair off and suck those round pieces into
the back of their throats. Many kinesthetic toys intended for the young might sponsor
such unintended or collateral activity.

Narratives
Susan Stewart describes the role of the dollhouse as a staging place for adult themes
expressed by children and, conversely, its role as a time capsule for adults. “The dollhouse
has two dominant motifs: wealth and nostalgia. It represents a myriad of perfect objects
that are, as signifiers, often affordable, whereas their signified is not” (Stewart 1993: 61).
In The Cultures of Collecting, John Elsner likens the architectural models of Sir John
Soane (1753–1837) to things like dollhouses, “While a real building can never be fully
surveyed or controlled—for it always contains its viewer—the model is the building
reduced to a toy. It is architecture the owner can survey” (Elsner 1994:175). And, by
extension, control and gain mastery over an object, the raison d’être of most toys. “But
his [Soane’s] interest in models as serious playthings is something it would be hard to get
any practitioner to admit to” (Harbison 1993: 86). The idea of the dollhouse as a “serious
plaything” and one where architecture dominates the design of the toy is useful to
understanding their narrative function. “To toy with something is to manipulate it, to try it
out within sets of contexts none of which is determinate” (Stewart 1993: 56).
Some toys are associated with scalar narratives. A great deal of juvenile literature and
film is centered on miniaturization for the obvious reason that children have a special
scalar relationship with their environment. From the Brothers Grimm to Disney, narratives
for children abound in detailed descriptions of the small. Dwarves, fairies and gnomes are
commonplace characters and they all claim miniature environments. Toys that come to
life or personified animals find shelter in doll’s houses or adapt everyday items like
matchboxes into pieces of furniture in some hidden lair. The delight these stories take in
minutiae represents a large part of their appeal. Tales rooted in the description of small-
scale physical environments are prime candidates for film adaptation. There is an economy
in making, say, a stop-animation film based on a scale narrative as the sets are readily
built as scale models. These in turn suggest toys to be marketed with the film. There is no
scalar difference between the narrative, film set and merchandise.
Alice in Wonderland plays with scale constantly, as does The Wizard of Oz. The journey
from Munchkinland to Oz is about journeying back to full-scale. Growing up is again literally
translated in Peter Pan when the Lost Boys build Wendy a small house to keep her with
them (all the boys live in tree houses). The most famous scale story, Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels has had many film treatments focused on the second chapter of the story.
Gulliver is intensely involved in the miniature architecture of Lilliput, a whole city of dollhouses:

I stepped over the great western gate, and passed very gently, and sideling through
the two principal streets, only in my short waistcoat, for fear of damaging the roofs and

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 Dimensions of the Mass-Produced Dollhouse 71

eaves of the houses with the skirts of my coat. I walked with the utmost circumspection,
to avoid treading on any stragglers, who might remain in the streets, although the
orders were very strict, that all people should keep in their houses, at their own peril.
The garret windows and tops of houses were so crowded with spectators, that I
thought in all my travels I had not seen a more populous place. The city is an exact
square, each side of the wall being five hundred foot long. The two great streets which
run across and divide it into four quarters, are five foot wide. The lanes and alleys,
which I could not enter, but only viewed them as I passed, are from twelve to eighteen
inches. The town is capable of holding 500,000 souls. (Swift 1994: 40–2)

When a fire breaks out in the palace, Gulliver saves the day by urinating on the blaze in
sight of the Lilliputian queen. For this the hero is banished. Psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi
describes “Lilliputian hallucinations” in elaborating on a point in Sigmund Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams:

The sudden appearance of giants or magnified objects is always the residue of a

childhood recollection dating from a time when, because we ourselves were so small,
all other objects seemed gigantic. An unusual reduction in the size of objects and
persons, on the other hand, is to be attributed to the compensatory, wish-fulfilling
fantasies of the child who wants to reduce the terrifying objects in his environment to
the smallest possible size. (Ferenczi 1955: 48)

Gulliver’s Travels illustrates a desire not to shrink and inhabit a model environment, but
to use diminution to become a relative giant. This finds a parallel in the toy’s function to
defray anxiety and lend a sense of control. All scale narratives, from literature to film
and computer games, speak to issues of dominance; overcoming fears, mastering
situations.
A “paracosm” is a neologism from the 1970s, used to describe a detailed and
consistently structured imaginary world with its own geography, weather, customs and
even language. By definition, a paracosm originates in childhood fantasy and can persist
into adulthood as a personal creative laboratory. It can be fantastic or based largely on
reality. Critics have linked the notion of paracosm to certain literary works and authors.
The Brontë siblings’ shared worlds of Angria and Gondal are prime examples. These
imaginary worlds functioned as a seedbed for Branwell, Emily, Charlotte and Anne’s later
writing and were triggered and initially nursed by a gift of toy lead soldiers.
Toys and the creative play they sponsor often invite extemporaneous storytelling or a
crafting of narratives that guide interactions with the object of the toy and others playing
along. The Brontës played together with their toy soldiers and spun sophisticated back
stories or histories linked to individual soldiers as they crafted shared narratives in real
time suggested by the unfolding play or game enacted with the figures. The Brontës were
not unusual in this regard, most children weave some story as they play with toys. What
makes the Brontës unusual, perhaps, is their group dynamic and shared interest extending
the root stories sponsored by the soldiers into grand narrative arcs that developed and
expanded over several years long after the toys were put away.
72 Archi.Pop

Psychologists tend to regard paracosmic tendencies as coping mechanisms used by

children who have experienced a profound loss in an effort to gain control through a
surrogate reality; the Brontës lost their mother. However, a paracosm might be more
broadly interpreted as a special form of creative practice. Michelle Root-Bernstein asserts
in the International Handbook for Giftedness that paracosms “supplement objective
measures of intellectual giftedness. . .as well as subjective measures of superior technical
talent” (Root-Bernstein 2009: 605), citing a Michigan State University study which found
a disproportionately high number (relative to the general population) of MacArthur Fellows
who admit to maintaining paracosms.

Gender
Both Fisher-Price and Playmobil mass-produced what had previously been a girl’s toy
(and previously to that, a woman’s toy) in the late 1960s and 1970s when gender
stereotypes were being broadly challenged. In that, they were serving a new market,
appealing to girls and boys and their liberally minded parents. The dollhouses or house
play sets were also serving a comparatively younger market; giving five- and six-year-olds
access to a type of toy previously reserved for older girls. Granted the toys were simplified,
but they aped known precedents: dolls, toy soldiers and dollhouses.
Fisher-Price often featured photography of children, boys and girls, but not toddlers
until very recently, playing with the toy on that toy’s own packaging. Playmobil also uses
color photography in the graphics printed on its boxed sets, but the images are only ever
of the toy itself. Exteriors of toy buildings are generally featured on the front of a Fisher-
Price or Playmobil box, while interior vignettes are frequently the focus of the box’s other
sides. Neither toy company overstates the toy’s name; Playmobil sometimes uses a
product code number in place of generic names. One could say that Fisher-Price
marketing philosophy was grounded in showcasing the interaction of child and toy and,
by that juxtaposition in a given photograph, reveal the real size of the toy. On the other
hand, Playmobil keeps all the focus on the object of the toy, makes any user group’s age
range or gender simply guesswork. Importantly, the actual size of the toy is hard to grasp.
There is some artistic license taken with the backgrounds photographed with the toys,
abstracted landscapes or cityscapes that push the toy’s capacity to emulate the real.
Architecture plays no small part in this illusionism.
From the start Fisher-Price’s Little People sets included men and women, boys and
girls. The family intended for the Playhouse featured Mom and Dad, Sister and Brother . . .
and dog. The depictions of other figures in the decals generally balanced male and female
characters. In its first phase, Playmobil was much more focused on male characters—
cowboys, all male Native Americans, knights—and would seem intended for boys more
than girls. As the Playmobil toy lines have evolved, more female figures have been
introduced up to the point now where certain lines are specifically geared for girls: the
Princess Family Castle, Magic Castle and Fairyland. With these specific toys, mostly
found in the code 5000-range of products, the packaging shifts to a pink and pastel
palette alongside its trademark sky blue color wrapping most of the boxes.

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 Dimensions of the Mass-Produced Dollhouse 73

Architectural conclusions
Comparing the toy buildings of Fisher-Price and Playmobil, one can imagine a graph with
two lines crossing over time. Fisher-Price introduced its buildings early on and its figures
were always intended to play their parts within those environments. The Fisher-Price Little
People play sets saw some increasing architectural sophistication or realism take over
the flattened, but still architecturally ambitious, worlds presented by the decals. But the
average age of Fisher-Price’s demographic would be younger than that of Playmobil’s and
inside that difference of one, two or three years, many aspects of the two companies’
product line, including their appropriation of various architectural precedents and styles,
were locked in. Certainly a case could be made that children fond of Fisher-Price are likely,
as they mature, to move on to Playmobil as a natural extension of that trajectory of play.
The difference in target demographic per brand, that difference in age, is also a difference
of size, so Fisher-Price buildings are slightly smaller in scale than Playmobil’s. A Playmobil
figure may visit a Fisher-Price house, but their heads will graze the ceiling and the low
bucket furniture will be unusable. A Fisher-Price figure in a Playmobil environment looks
out of place in size and level of detail or articulation. The architecture graph’s line falls
gently for Fisher-Price as the company expands, founders retire and less open-ended
sets—the Fisher-Price McDonald’s restaurant or Sesame Street set, for example—are
marketed. The line plunges after 1986 when, in the interests of safety and staying in
business, the toy buildings lose their earlier architectural emphasis becoming more
obviously toy-like, lighter weight and made almost entirely of molded plastic with occasional
graphic highlights invested in small rather than copious decals.
Playmobil’s architecture line only pulls up from the bottom line of the chart after several
years into the development and manufacture of its figures. But then the line ascends fairly
quickly with architectural diversity and depth growing apace. Playmobil’s trajectory in
terms of using architectural designs to add play interest and value to its toys probably
crosses and eclipses Fisher-Price’s line by 1986, but thereafter the explosion of
sophisticated architecturally-inspired sets offered by Playmobil makes it, by now, one of
the great architectural toy lines. Playmobil’s longtime real competition, LEGO, bests it in
this regard as it not only emulates architectural forms, but also makes architects of its
players. LEGO functions as architecture, its serious game and narrative focus is assembly,
building. Playmobil offers limited opportunities for assembly, but its goals as a toy are
broader and still linked to an emphasis on the figure and the surrogate persona a child
might project upon it.
Architecture brings a sense of reality, a sense of connectedness to the real world, to
both Fisher-Price and Playmobil toys. Both companies deploy architecture strategically to
prompt serious open play and the projection of the player and their narratives into realistic
but safe, thanks to scale, scenarios. This realism courtesy of architecture is not to forestall
creativity or staunch fantasy, but in fact to provide just enough scaffolding for complex
play to arise. Architecture also denotes historical time periods; to what extent a child
intuitively grasps the historical themes assumed with different styles may not be as
important as the diversity of form and scenarios the styles offer. The parent or adult
purchasing the toy set is also caught up in the historical and associated narratives
74 Archi.Pop

architectural precedents trigger. The Fisher-Price concept of reframing the antecedent

dollhouse type associated with older girls as a play set for younger children of both sexes
was truly innovative. Playmobil evolved its product line and marketing stance in this
direction belatedly, but now plays a similar role in the toy market. Both brands have put
fairly accurate and complex architectural examples into the hands of generations of
children. Even when the toys are not in play but stored on bedroom shelves, they persist
in inviting imaginative or paracosmic musing.

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Chapter 5
Honey, I Shrunk the Nation-
State: The Scales of Global
History in the Thai Nationalist
Theme Park
Lawrence Chua

Situated in a zone of industrial factories and slum housing outside of Bangkok, Muang
Boran theme park invites visitors to leave behind the grimy environment of present-day
globalization and step back in historical time. Walking through its gates, one enters a
landscape of reproductions, preserved historic buildings, archaeological artifacts, and
recreations of mythical landscapes in varying scales: miniature, life-size, and monumental.
Tucked away at the peripheries of the world capitalist economy, it is easy to forget that
Muang Boran was at the vanguard of a global phenomenon in the late-twentieth century
that shaped the way in which corporations imagined their dominion over space and time
by reproducing the conceptual spaces of the nation and its patrimony in lived, Euclidean
space. These parks joined the fantastic qualities of Disneyland with the scholarly
imprimatur of preserved heritage sites. By reducing the conceptual spaces of the nation
into miniature streets, houses, and monuments that could be experienced in compressed
space and time, national theme parks like Italia in miniatura (Rimini, 1970), Taman Mini
Indonesia Indah (Jakarta, 1975), Splendid China (Shenzhen, 1989 and Orlando, 1993–
2003), France Miniature (Élancourt, 1991), and Miniatürk (Istanbul, 2003) created a
classifiable grid in which visitors learned to see themselves as if in a funhouse mirror. Their
reflection returned to them a picture of themselves not as members of a global class,
whose conditions of alienation transcended geo-political borders, but as citizens
embedded within a bounded, determinate, and countable community: the nation
(Anderson 1991: 184). However, while these later sites reproduced the sites of the nation
in miniature as a spectacle for primarily visual consumption, Muang Boran’s varying scales
did something more complex. They revitalized an increasingly passé nationalism by

75
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appealing to Cold War consumerist tastes while reaching back to the cultural systems
that preceded the nation—the religious community and the dynastic realm.
Although it was built in 1963, Muang Boran drew on the conjoined genealogies of
several techniques of modern popular culture in its production: the development of
pleasure gardens from sites of royal leisure to arenas for public education in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries; the ethnographic display of human beings as part of colonial
expositions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the use of popular culture
techniques by fascist regimes in both Europe and Asia to sacralize the state. Seeing
themselves as distant relatives of Europe’s struggling monarchies, the ruling class of Siam
(as Thailand was known before 1939) could draw on European colonial tropes of exhibition,
display, and leisure as part of its own attempt to colonize the people and areas surrounding
the court. As an affiliate of the Axis powers during World War II, the Thai state could
draw on the politics of popular spectacle developed in fascist Europe and partner with
private enterprise after the war to sell the idea of the nation to its citizens. This history
makes an intervention in studies of modern pop culture beyond the borders of the
fictive West by pointing to its uneven development as a global phenomenon that draws
on colonialism and fascism, two episodes that are elided by most histories of popular
culture.
At first glance, the phenomenon of Muang Boran appears to have democratized
architectural history by framing it in populist terms. However, by manipulating the scale of
historic architecture through modern techniques of spectacle and consumption, the
creators of Muang Boran have produced a nostalgic landscape that simultaneously
memorializes the nation while erasing the historical conditions that produced it. The
varying spatial and temporal scales of Muang Boran offer up the “imagined community”
of the nation as a continuous narrative that stretches back into the primordial, mythological
past and can be experienced through the full corporeal sensorium (Anderson 1991;
Balibar 1991: 86). Instead of the global history of labor, materials, ideas, and technologies
that have produced the built environment, Muang Boran draws on the spiritual appeals of
European art history to offer up a fairy tale of a nostalgic garden facing the extinguishing
threat of foreign materialism. The historical relationships between macrocosm and
microcosm, or between the human body and the universe, are mediated by the dimensions
of the nation-state and create a view of present-day globalization and its inequalities as a
condition of nature.

History and cosmology

The primary archive of architectural history is the building (Arnold 2002: 8). At Muang
Boran, architecture is also a device for narrating the events of the past through space.
Because space is permeated with social relations—it is not only supported by social
relations, it also produces and is produced by social relations—architecture’s symbolic
meanings are appropriated through social experience and encounter (Lefebvre 2009:
186). The landscapes of Muang Boran narrate a story of national belonging by integrating
both miniatures and monuments as well as several forms of recounting the past. Some of

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 Honey, I Shrunk the Nation-State 77

these, like political economic history and art history, are universally recognizable. Others
are particular to the region.
Historical forms like the tamnan placed local religious sites within the larger world of
Buddhism. Other forms, like the phongsawadan narrated the history of the dynastic state
and emphasized the place of the Thai within a world of kingdoms. The most influential of
these, “China” and “India,” were once the ideological axes of Siam, but in the mid-
nineteenth century both had been defeated by European powers (Thongchai 2000: 533).
Positivist narrative traditions or prawatisat (literally, “past-science”) sought to place Siam
and later Thailand as a nation-state among other nation-states. All of these narrative
approaches sought to locate the temporal history of the region within a larger trans-regional
or global spatial register. The dissemination of Buddhism, the founding of the Cakri dynasty,
and the encroachment of European colonial power all left their indelible marks on Thai
historical writing. Each event has marked a change in spatial and temporal arrangements,
but because the emerging Thai nation-state was integrated into the world capitalist
economy as a sovereign entity rather than a colony, these worldviews were continuous
rather than distinct. The resulting historiography was “modern in character but based upon
traditional perceptions of the past and traditional materials” (Thongchai 1995: 99). Muang
Boran reproduces the cosmology of the tamnan, the heroic dynastic actors of the
phongsawadan, and the material evidence of the prawatisat in the landscape of the park.
In their most literal and fantastic built forms, these integrated historical approaches
appear as sculpture gardens that punctuate the park grounds between recreations of
historic sites and preserved buildings. These gardens borrow from the tendency in post-
World War II Thai monastic complexes to build sculpture gardens depicting the promises
of Nirvana and the hellish fate of those who transgressed Buddhist principles (Anderson
2012). As at these monastic complexes, the plaster and sandstone sculptures at Muang
Boran animate scenes from pre-modern and early-modern religious and cosmological
texts. The center of the Brahmanical universe, Mount Meru, is reproduced as a pavilion
on an islet encircled by a giant painted concrete and plaster fish, with mythical animals
spouting water into the pond that surrounds it. In the Suan Ramkian, sculptures perched
amidst a cascading waterfall recount the story of the Thai version of the Indic epic, the
Ramayana. All of these gardens juxtapose fantastic imagery against a landscape that has
been cultivated to appear as “natural” as possible, so that trees, water, and rocks mediate
the more garish representations of the cosmological order. Muang Boran invokes
hierarchical understandings of the social order that are represented in the cosmologies of
classical literature like the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Traiphum Phra Ruang. In
this social order, the monarchy is of divine origin and sits at the top of the world of men
(Wyatt and Woodside 1982: 25; Day and Reynolds 2000: 9). This hierarchy was presented
as part of the natural order through the historic development of the pleasure garden.

The pleasure garden and nature

The commemorative biography that accompanied its founder, Lek Wirayaphant’s
cremation ceremony described the sensual experience of the park:
78 Archi.Pop

Together with the creamy white Victoria lotus, the edges of whose round, large leaves
raise at the edges like a bamboo winnowing basket, these flowers stand guard when
the wind dances across the surface of the pond, enticing the cool fragrance out of
the lotuses, to penetrate and mix with the cheerful air currents in the truly good, clear
weather. These natural aesthetics are the positive constituent part that was transmitted
by the architecture of the Thais only in the past. The place where these meticulously
crafted copies were built anew in this country, all 109 pieces in Muang Boran, are
worthy of study, and further more, worthy of seeing. (Wiriyaphant 2001: 17)

The writer’s florid prose, linking the experiences of architecture and nature, calls attention
to an important characteristic of Muang Boran: the juxtaposition of the monumental, the
miniature, and “nature.” The park features gigantic sculptures of mythological and religious
figures and miniature reproductions of Khmer ruins. These stand in marked contrast with
the life-size reproductions of monuments, palaces, houses, and markets, the verdant
greenery and manicured waterways, and the ethnographic displays of human beings on
the park grounds. Unlike the cheerful fragrance of the lotus flowers in the pond described
by the writer, the varying scales of architecture and landscape at Muang Boran are not a
natural occurrence. The sensorial experience of the park ameliorates what might be an
otherwise jarring encounter with both the miniature and the monumental. Susan Stewart
has noted that in literature, these shifts in scale are the product of an eye performing
certain cultural operations, manipulating, and attending in particular ways to the physical
world (Stewart 1984: 55). In architecture, the scale model has been used as a mechanism
for defining a cultural universe as well as a tool for construction. Architectural models have
served as a means for extending the architect’s intellectual might in an attempt to
understand a complex and confusing whole (Smith 2004: xvi). Within Muang Boran, the
dimensions between man and universe are mediated in a similar fashion via the park’s
scale recreations. Through the variation of scale in the landscape and architectural
recreations at Muang Boran, miniaturized reproductions of ruins like the Khmer complexes
of Phra Prang Sam Yod, Prasat Hin Phanom Rung, and Prasat Hin Phimai, and larger-
than-life sculptures of deities, demons, and literary characters, create a social hierarchy
that appears natural through their sensorial appropriation as part of what appears to be a
natural landscape.
A park, like a garden, is a complex symbolic space where natural materials are
manipulated to produce an unreal space (Clavé 2007: 6). It is essentially a place where the
senses are acculturated and reordered. The early concept of the park was applied to
spaces for royalty, which were created for the enjoyment of their leisure time but were also
reflections of new ideas about the social and natural order. The structure of Versailles or
Chantilly, for instance, was not simply a garden for the pastimes of the French absolutist
court, but reflected Descartes’ Meditations, Pascal’s Pensées, and the political power of
Louis XIV (Mitrašinović 1998: 3; Lablaude 1995: 12). This was not limited to Europe.
European-style pavilions and gardens of the Yuanmingyuan, commissioned by the Q’ing
Emperor Qianlong outside of Beijing in the eighteenth century represented the convergence
of ideas about European perspective with Chinese scientific thought as well as the place
of the Q’ing empire in a new global era (Zhu 2009: 27–32; Weil 2013: 100).

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 Honey, I Shrunk the Nation-State 79

As European monarchies began to decline in power in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries, royal parks were opened to the public, often through violent means (Lablaude
1995: 164). The Tuilleries, for instance, was designated as the new Jardin National of the
nascent French Republic after King Louis XVI’s execution. The Yuanmingyuan, meanwhile,
was destroyed by British and French expeditionary forces during the Opium Wars in the
1840s. European “pleasure gardens” began to spring up on the outskirts of towns, such
as the Vauxhall Gardens. These gardens employed various topographical illusions for the
pleasure of discovery and were the stage for public spectacles like masques and fêtes
champêtres, games which involved social role playing and transformations that paralleled
the garden’s architectural qualities (Bruno 2002: 196–197). The Jardin du Roi, founded by
King Louis XIII in 1626, became a principal site for the making of French natural historical
knowledge after the French Revolution (Spary 2000). These parks came to symbolize
the democratization of the aristocracy’s ludic- and knowledge-based pursuits as well
as the new colonial and industrial economies that the new democratic societies were
based upon (Clavé 2007: 7). The flora and fauna of new regions that were integrated into
the world capitalist economy were transplanted into pleasure gardens that sought to
simulate the landscapes of other regions as both a form of entertainment and education.
Their zoological character allowed for the educational display, acclimatization, and study
of wild animals, but they were also responses to the rampant urbanization of the industrial
age.
In Siam, which did not experience the industrial revolution, the emergence of an
autonomous bourgeoisie, or a democratic revolution, the royal garden never became a
public pleasure garden in the European sense of the term. However, it did serve as a site
for political experimentation in the early twentieth-century. King Rama VI (r. 1910 to 1925)
used the gardens of Dusit Palace to create a miniature democratic city in 1:20 scale,
replete with its own parliament, laws, and three newspapers (Chaem 1970: 41). The
king’s experiments, however, were limited to the miniature city. Siam remained an absolute
monarchy until 1932. Yet, they demonstrate that as a highly mediated version of nature
the park’s curative, educational, and political value was perceived, if not globally than at
least in Europe and Siam, by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Human zoos, typology, race,

and art history
The “dark side” of these ideals manifested itself in the popular entertainment of displaying
human beings and the “human zoos” that first appeared in nineteenth-century European
metropoles. Their appearance and rapid spread was linked with two mutually supporting
tendencies in European history: nationalism and colonialism. On the one hand, they were
part of a growing intellectual interest and institutional restructuring in the study of human
variety and difference (Qureshi 2011: 186). Such exhibitions frequently resulted in the
creation of racial hierarchies and served as the justification for colonization. Throughout
the 1880s, metropolitan audiences flocked to see groups of people who were often drawn
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from colonized populations and imported to perform songs, dances, and other ceremonies
as demonstrations of their unique nature (Qureshi 2011: 2). Indeed, one of the nineteenth
century’s most infamous human exhibits, the conjoined twins Chang and Eng, were
contracted by Robert Hunter, a British merchant in Siam, to be exhibited as a curiosity on
a world tour. Hunter was capitalizing on the expansion in scale of a popular form of
entertainment that had been pioneered by entrepreneurial speculators, missionary groups,
and itinerant showmen. By the time Chang and Eng’s contract with Hunter expired, the
display of human beings became associated with philanthropically-inspired public
education. For the burgeoning discipline of ethnology in metropolitan centers like London,
performers could provide the evidence to learn about typological human variation while
exposing these ideas to an audience beyond the academy.
On the other hand, if this popular culture technique could be exploited to disseminate
ideas about human difference, it could also be used to persuade audiences of the
collective identities that were associated with the construction of nation-states. The
human zoos that played on the trope of the exotic Other appeared in European, American,
and Japanese metropoles alongside faux Breton, Alpine, Irish, Scottish, and Corsican
villages, combining an interest in ethnographic conservation with a promotion of “the
land” and “regional heritage” (Blanchard et al. 2008: 8–9, 31, 256). National and imperial
tendencies were not mutually exclusive. The 1903 Fifth National Industrial Exposition in
Osaka, for instance, sought to construct the “modern” identity of its visitors by directing
their attention to the “uncivilized” peoples who inhabited the Japanese empire’s new
territories (Blanchard et al. 2008: 257). In the United States, the staging of its own colonies,
both internal (Native Americans) and external (such as the displays of Filipinos at the 1904
St. Louis World’s Fair), alongside other “exotic” peoples, was a way of defining the
essential form of the identity of the nation and its peoples while confirming a racial model
based on eugenics and social Darwinism (Benedict 1991: 5).
Art history and race science were intertwined disciplines at the turn of the twentieth
century. Biological factors were considered the reason for physical as well as cultural
differences among people (Zerffi 1876: 25; Bayard 1900). French archaeologists, art
historians, and ethnographers operating in France’s Southeast Asian colonies that
bordered Siam, classified their neighbors, the Khmers, as a distinct race. The view was
corroborated by their Siamese counterparts in the royally-patronized Antiquarian Society,
who were eager to prove Siam’s unique and ancient lineage in the face of territorial
encroachment (Peleggi 2013: 15–16). These views were prompted by the 1859–61
“discovery” of Angkor Wat by a French archaeological expedition in a remote Siamese
province. The taxonomy of people, as well as things and places, that the expedition
created, ushered in an era of archaeological fetishism, the appropriation of the ruins into
French national heritage, and a moral justification for French imperialism (Barnett 1990;
Edwards 2007: 21). In Siam, meanwhile, the many monuments built by pre-modern
Khmer polities that remained within Siamese borders became peripheral examples of
Siam’s architectural lineage. The achievements of the Thai race could be seen in the
imagined political and artistic lineage from three regional polities: Sukhothai (1250 CE to
1378 CE), Ayutthaya (1357 CE to 1767 CE), and Bangkok or Rattanakosin (1782 CE to
present) (Damrong et al. 1973: 50). By 1904, the interrelated discourses of race and art

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 Honey, I Shrunk the Nation-State 81

history supported the re-drafting of the territorial limits of the national geo-body as Siam
was obliged to cede the site of Angkor Wat to France’s Cambodian protectorate.
The ideology of race and the legacy of human exhibition can be seen in the live exhibits
in Muang Boran. Life-size replica villages and markets dot the park landscape, often
inhabited or run by park workers. The rustic timber-framed pavilions and houses of the
Anthropological Museum (the exact translation of the museum’s Thai name, Phiphittipan
chao na, however, would be the Peasant Museum) house not only displays of fish traps,
bullock carts, ceremonial artifacts, and the historic tools of rice cultivation, but park
workers as well. While some park workers repose on hammocks strung from the pilotis of
vernacular farmhouses, others tend organic vegetables in a nearby experimental plot. In
the Floating Market, a recreation of an idyllic water hamlet, park workers dress as rural
villagers, selling noodles from boats that ply the market’s waterways. Amidst the various
timber shops, the Floating Market also features recreations of a mosque, an early Christian
Church, a Chinese shrine, spirit shrines, and a Buddhist wat. Salvaged from their local
contexts, the market’s buildings now tell a story in which the poverty, poor hygiene, racial
discrimination, and epidemics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given way to
a nostalgic encounter with a past in which exchanges in public space are framed by a
pastoral marketplace that is free of any traces of exploitation. Animated by human labor,
they are material proof to visitors that the long history of the nation, with its hierarchical
indexes of belonging, reaches back to the pre-modern past and continues into the present.

Fascist spectacle and popular culture

The Siamese Archaeological Service identified, classified, mapped, measured, and
surveyed many of the monuments that are recreated within Muang Boran. Founded in the
1920s and headed by the Siamese historian Prince Damrong and the French epigraphist
George Coedès, the Service sought to inventory and conserve ancient monuments and
antiquities in the country (Peleggi 2013: 19). Its mission was stimulated by the fear of
territorial loss to the colonial powers at its borders. Muang Boran’s mission of conservation
is driven by the fear of a different kind of loss. In a popular magazine article on the park, a
writer compares Western materialism’s assault on national beauty to the sacking of the
polity of Ayutthaya in the eighteenth century.

Everyday, we lose something beautiful of the art and culture of Thainess to the
materialist tendencies of the West. . .After we lost Ayutthaya the second time (in
1767 CE), the mental state of the Thai people in that period was likely scattered helter-
skelter because of the dangers of war and the danger of living. When the prosperity
of Ayutthaya was razed, the accumulation of more than 400 years of art was also lost.
There was nothing that could continue to be appreciated or admired except for the
ruins and the smog smoldering in the hearts of every Thai person during that period.
After we re-achieved independence and peace returned to the Thai race again, King
Rama I surmised the various losses that had been suffered and ordered the rapid
reconstruction of society by rebuilding the morale and spirit of the Thai people. He built
82 Archi.Pop

things that one could have faith in, built warmth in the feelings of society, whether they
were monastic complexes or literary works, these were the source of art. Beauty in the
mind gives inspiration to people’s imaginations. The beauty of Thainess rises again.
(Ploy Kaemphet 1993)

This aesthetic appeal to the spiritual permeates the landscape of Muang Boran and draws
on fascism’s historic reliance on spiritual conceptions of reality. In the 1930s, the Thai state
looked to Italian fascism’s pretense to a spiritualized world as a platform for the repression
of “mundane” material demands. Mussolini’s ideas were popular among both royalist and
constitutionalist political factions (Batson 1984: 152–3). He was lionized in various
biographies and his writings were translated into Thai (Mussolini 1937; Wičhitwāthakān
1929: 69–70). Mussolini’s fascism exalted the spirit as a way of denying the material needs
of the masses while simultaneously making use of a developing consumer culture and new
means of technological reproduction to denounce the natural body as both a site of
sensory experience and a locus of utopian vision. The Thai state, like the Italian fascist
regime, played upon consumer desires by promoting its leadership in a manner similar to
the way that companies marketed commodities and invoked spiritual values that would
transcend the “uncivilized” status of the masses (Falasca-Zamponi 1997: 125).
In addition to exchanges of materials, technology, and manpower between Thailand
and the fascist nations, ideas about mobilizing the masses for political objectives circulated
among the governments of Thailand, Japan, Italy, and Germany during this period (Vicha
2004: 92–3). These regimes shared not only aggressive building programs and the
remaking of the urban landscape, but the use of popular culture, in the forms of festivals,
tourism, the invention of new rituals, and the establishment of pageant celebrations to
sacralize the state. Italy’s Governmental Press Bureau, established shortly after the
fascists came to power, was re-named the Ministry of Popular Culture in 1937 and
oversaw not only press and propaganda, but film, theater, and tourism (Cole 1938: 426).
In Siam, the constitutionalist government that rose to power after 1932 formed the
National Institute of Culture in 1942 and bureaucratized cultural management through
decrees and initiatives such as the dispatch of mobile units to the provinces in order to
make the rural population conform to rules of orderly and civilized behavior (Peleggi 2007:
53). The World War II-era Thai state sought to centralize its political authority through the
development of a culture of nationalist entertainment and the introduction of modern
custom and language to remote rural areas by popularizing elite forms of tourism that had
been promoted in Siam by the State Railways department as early as 1924 (Pattravadi
2007).
By the beginning of the Cold War, the Thai state could build on this nascent infrastructure
and begin to develop mass tourism and travel in the country. The founding of the Tourism
Organization of Thailand in 1959 was paralleled by the development of new roads and
improved transportation networks made possible in part by United States military funding
in Thailand. At the same time, the state began to liberalize its racist and autarkic economic
policies after the Korean War ushered in a boom in the early 1950s. Individuals and groups
within the Chinese business community, like Muang Boran founder Lek Wiriyaphant,
co-operated with the Thai military regime to create new business conglomerates (Pasuk

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 Honey, I Shrunk the Nation-State 83

and Baker 1995: 139). During this period, Lek acquired the rights to the Thonburi Group,
a government-initiated corporation that would become one of the largest import-export
corporations in the country as the agent for Mercedes Benz, Renault, and Chrysler
(Wiriyaphant 2001: 18).
The development of Thailand’s post-World War II automobile industry and the
development of road building projects produced a new, mass cultural sensibility that drew
public attention to the parameters of the nation-state. Royalists staged a revival of the
monarchy and developed a public relations campaign that created an image of the
country’s new king, Rama IX (r.  1946 to present), as a modern and populist monarch.
Films and photographs of the king depicted him in the countryside, surveying new public
works and holding audience with rural farmers. At the same time, growing numbers of
farmers took advantage of new roads and improved transportation networks to temporarily
migrate to the city and become wage laborers. This source of cheap labor initially flowed
into urban service occupations like construction during the months between growing
seasons (Pasuk and Baker 1995: 43). The circulation of labor, coupled with the
development of a nationalist popular culture prompted a new relationship between the
state, the land, and its citizens. As more inhabitants of far-flung regions came to learn
about the nation and its history through improved access to state-supported education
and popular culture, they came to experience the idea of the nation-state as a reality
through state-funded transportation projects and other built works. Older land-based
allegiances to village and region were transformed into a nationalist culture that posited
the king at its center, returning to older cosmologies. The development of tourism was an
important part of this campaign, which allowed large numbers of people to experience
shared associations of a collective past, present, and future through an encounter with a
landscape that was at once symbolic and real.
Muang Boran was conceived of and built during a period in which land became
landscape. This new landscape, in turn, was shared through a public experience that
symbolized a common home and identity (Clark 2004: 9). Yet, the park was not a project
of the state and had a more ambivalent relationship to the state’s attempts at centralizing
its authority. During the 1970s, an eponymous journal produced by Muang Boran
advocated forms of local history and community culture that critiqued the national Fine
Arts Department’s development policies for destroying archaeological evidence to develop
heritage sites into tourist attractions. These policies deprived local communities of
significant parts of their culture and beliefs in the name of heritage preservation (Srisakara
1987: 26–34). Lek Wiriyaphant’s image of Thailand’s past was informed by his experience
of its contemporary realities in the Cold War-era. His beliefs were often at odds with
specialists in Thai art and architecture. Acknowledging that built structures in the past
were often “on bad terms with nature,” and that such structures were selectively edited
over time through repair and renovation, he insisted that when a preserved structure, its
life-size replica, or a miniature model was placed in Muang Boran that it be “appropriate
to the time and place in which they were going to be encountered so they can be
understood by people in the present” (Wiriyaphant 2001: 58).
The “living” contemporary quality of architectural restoration and reproduction at
Muang Boran builds on the global history of leisure parks and exhibitions, the merger of
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state and corporate power that has been a hallmark of fascism, and the spiritualization of
capitalism and consumption (Falasca-Zamponi 1997: 134). Editing the structures of the
past to appear “appropriate” and “understood by people in the present” is a way of
assuring visitors that on the one hand, the world is made up of replicable plurals that can
be experienced in the present day and, on the other hand, that there was a Thai culture
long before there was a Thailand (Anderson 1991: 185). These ambitions are suggested
by a poem written by Lek:

The image of Muang Boran

Is the history of Siam,
Filled with the impressions of history
Ancient monuments and ancient materials
To not gather around for a look
And remember the fate of the country—
The story of humanity, which is not certain—
Is to sadly miss something
In the period which ash passed us by.
There is one nationality,
That has transmitted a high culture, an ideal society piled with happiness.
When it lacks continuity,
This loss and sadness
Isn’t a personal loss or gain,
But is a kingdom lacking shape, human body, and form. (Muang Boran 1979: 117)

In this poem, Lek links the memory of the past to the form of the kingdom as a sort of
logo. The logo is the geo-body of the contemporary Thai nation-state: its four regions,
capital, and seventy-six provinces. As we have seen, however, the memory of the country’s
past at Muang Boran is an experience mediated through the vicissitudes of the present-
day market and its hierarchies of civilization. It could draw on the time-transcending
and conflict-resolving functions of ancient monuments to redraw the borders of the
nation-state and the physical limits of the citizen trapped within it.

Boundaries and border disputes

While the image of Muang Boran is based on the image of the national map (see
Figure 5.1), boundaries and scales within the park do not function in the same way that
they do in a modern map. The distinctions between regions in the park are sometimes
porous, with buildings from the north settled within recreations of southern villages and
literary or religious sites nestled between historic places. The park’s boundaries mark it as
a space of representation, within which the nation can be rendered as a total concept and
a timeless entity, regardless of what it abuts (Anagnost 1997: 162). At Muang Boran,
Thailand’s neighboring countries have disappeared, although their presence is recalled
through a play on scale and juxtaposition that makes the nation seem not only timeless

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 Honey, I Shrunk the Nation-State 85

Figure 5.1 Map of Thailand and map of Muang Boran. Approximate location of Preah Vihear is
marked by a six-pointed star on both maps. Note that while the geographic map places the site on
Cambodian territory, the park map places it within the borders of Thailand. Source: Muang Boran (l.)
and Central Intelligence Agency (r.).

but unique, as if it has emerged in a vacuum. The Burmese who sacked Ayutthaya are
presented as an absent threat, in the form of the ruins of the ancient polity and a surreal
monument to the villagers who resisted them at Bangrajan. Cambodia also seems to
have disappeared, except in the ruins left by the Khmer polities of the ninth through
twelfth centuries, reproduced in miniature throughout the park.
The most controversial of these miniature Khmer ruins is the model of Prasat Preah
Vihear, known as Khao Phra Viharn in Thailand (see Figure 5.2). A sanctuary dedicated to
the Indic god Shiva, Preah Vihear straddles the Dangrak mountain range that marked the
contested border between Siam, and later Thailand, and French Indochina, and later
Cambodia, throughout the twentieth century. The actual ruins are composed of a series
of sanctuaries that are linked by staircases and walkways that ascend a steep cliff. The
earliest parts of the sanctuary date back to the ninth century, but most of it was built
during the reigns of the Angkorian kings Suryavarman I (1002 CE to 1050 CE) and
Suryavarman II (1113 CE to 1150 CE). The temple was part of the territory ceded to
France in 1907, then re-occupied by Thai troops during World War II, and finally returned
to French Indochina in 1946. The site was occupied intermittently by Thai armed forces
since then and inscribed as a UNESCO world heritage site in 2008, prompting renewed
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Figure 5.2 Summit of the miniature model of Preah Vihear/Phra Viharn at Muang Boran. Photo by
author.

tensions between Thailand and Cambodia that have erupted in shelling and skirmishes on
both sides of the border.
Khmer temples and sanctuaries of the Angkorian period like Preah Vihear were not
only monumental symbols of power, they were potent examples of cosmological space
and time, reproduced in real time and space for human experience. They not only
animated narratives about the creation of the universe through images, but depicted
them, as at Angkor Wat, in scenes that could be appropriated through the senses as the
earth rotated around the sun (Mannikka 1996: 161–72). Epics like the Mahabharata and
the Ramayana, from which they were drawn, were powerful rationales for the rule of kings,
the hierarchical view of the universe, and the structuring of human society into four varnas
(alternatively, classes, castes, or complexions) (Brockington 1995: 97–8). Before they
were relegated to the peripheries of nationalist art history, Khmer temples were coveted
by the Thai ruling classes. In 1860, King Rama IV (r. 1851 to 1868) ordered a Khmer stone
temple disassembled and reconstructed closer to Bangkok. When he learned that the
stone temples were too enormous to be taken apart and transported back to the capital,
he dispatched an armed expeditionary force to relocate a smaller temple, the Prasat Ta
Prohm instead. The attempt failed when 300 local villagers emerged from the forest and

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 Honey, I Shrunk the Nation-State 87

killed the royal individuals in charge of the expedition. The commoners, meanwhile, fled
into the forest. It is not clear why the villagers were so incensed, but their response
indicates that attachments to local, land-based identities were probably stronger than ties
to distant courts during the period. The incident convinced King Rama IV to abandon his
grandiose plans and construct instead a small model of Angkor Wat within the grounds of
the Chapel of the Emerald Buddha in the Grand Palace complex, where it remains today
(Edwards 2007: 24; Charnvit 2003).
In 1968, on the fifteenth anniversary of Cambodia’s independence, head of state
Norodom Sihanouk had a scale replica of the Bayon temple of Angkor built in the National
Stadium at Phnom Penh as the center piece of a mass parade celebrating the country’s
push towards industrialization (Kambuja 1968: 118–20). In the roughly one hundred years
between the building of these two scale replicas of Khmer monuments, modern
knowledge-based disciplines like art history as well as building- and image-making
technologies made substantial interventions in statecraft. Yet, these technologies have
not caused a rupture between the pre-modern cosmologies expressed through the
architecture of Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm, and Preah Vihear and a new conception of national
belonging. Rather, they have created a bridge between these older systems of power and
a modern public by representing a time- and space-transcendent nation through its built
forms. Benedict Anderson has noted the ways that technologies like the census and the
map allowed the colonial state and the independent nations that followed them to create
both a detailed grid in which everything could be classified as well as a series of replicable
plurals (Anderson 1991: 184). This series assured citizens of their place within the nation
and that their ancestors could be traced back to the immemorial past as well as into the
limitless future (Anderson 1991: 10–12; Barnett 1990: 125). The nation, with its limitless
life span, was something worthy of sacrifice.
The flag that flies over the model of Preah Vihear is the white elephant on a red-field
that is based on the early-twentieth-century Siamese royal standard. Clambering up the
miniature ruins, visitors pause to photograph themselves, just as they do at the actual site
on the Dangrak mountains. The ascent at Muang Boran is gentler and less majestic than
the real site. Although the miniature site has been painstakingly crafted to resemble the
original, any comparison between the Dangrak mountain range and the hill at Muang
Boran ends upon arrival at the summit of the miniature Preah Vihear. From one side,
visitors see a pond at the foot of the hill they have just climbed. In the middle is a
monumental recreation of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk (see Figure 5.3). An image
from the Indic epic the Mahabharata, the churning produces the elixir of immortality and
requires the cooperation of two opposing factions of deities, depicted here holding
opposite ends of a five-headed naga or mythical dragon serpent wrapped around a pole
emanating from the back of a tortoise. If the visitor turns in the opposite direction, and
looks over the cliff, in the general direction of the real Preah Vihear, an entirely different
vista opens up. The industrial factories of Samut Prakan can be seen in the near distance,
belching smoke into the torpid tropical air.
This tableau dramatizes the ways that Muang Boran reconciles the historic
contradictions of the nation in the global capitalist economy. While the interests of workers
and corporations have historically been at odds, nationalism has sought to align them,
88 Archi.Pop

Figure 5.3 The Churning of the Ocean of Milk monument at Muang Boran. Photo by author.

allowing nations like Thailand to participate in the neo-liberal global marketplace as a

stable source of cheap labor and leisure consumption. As the confluence of several
techniques of modernity, the national theme park reconciles the primordial view of
production (churning the ocean to manufacture an elixir of immortality) and its contemporary
iteration (the sweatshops, assembly lines, and canning factories of the global free trade
zone), making them appear natural and continuous. It renders older conceptions of space
and time as tangible, aesthetic experiences by reproducing the monuments of the past as
quotidian regalia that can be appropriated through human sense perception as part of the
everyday (Benjamin 1968: 240; Clark 2004: 4; Anderson 1991: 183). “Half-Indic cosmic
mountain and half-Disneyland” (Day and Reynolds 2000: 14), Muang Boran offers a
version of history that is at once scaled-down and scaled-up, miniature and monumental.
While collectivities like nations are too expansive to be experienced immediately, Muang
Boran has succeeded where the real nation has not. It has produced the symbolic
experience of a homeland and a common identity by adjusting the language of art history,
archaeology, phongsawadan, tamnan, and prawatisat into a popular cultural language
that can be experienced in a single day by a collectivity distracted by its own distorted
reflection.

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PART THREE

Profligate Profiles

89
90

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Chapter 6
The Palazzo Soprano
Denise Costanzo

The opening credits to the HBO series The Sopranos begin with an eerie, flickering image
of the tiled ceiling of the Lincoln Tunnel. We are in the passenger seat of a sport utility
vehicle as it heads out of New York City to cross a New Jersey of industrial turnpike
landmarks and gritty commercial districts. Along the way, we catch fragmented glimpses
of our driver—thick fingers grasping a cigar or a toll ticket, smoke-veiled eyes in the rear-
view mirror, a shadowy profile—while the lyrics of the theme song suggest he is armed
and “born under a bad sign.” The view outside the car then shows a series of residential
areas: dense working-class frame housing, elegant historic-revival urban manses, and
more modest mid-century suburban homes. During the song’s final crescendo, our drive
culminates in a lush neighborhood worthy of the Garden State’s motto and an ascent up
a curving driveway. We arrive at a sprawling blond brick, mansard-roofed home in a
manicured garden (see Figure 6.1). Only then does our driver, Tony Soprano, come into
full view, slamming the car door.
This house—the Soprano house, the apotheosis of our ninety-second promenade
automotive—is as crucial to Tony’s character as the late James Gandolfini’s indelible face.
It belongs to a familiar cultural trope: the free-standing single family home, an established
symbol of domestic normalcy in North American visual culture. If asked to describe the
series based on this introduction alone, we might guess its main character has exchanged
New Jersey’s meaner streets for prosperous suburban respectability. But our driver’s grim
expression, the menacing song, and that pistol-shaped “R” in the title all declare that this
house is a façade. Tony is a gangster. The show belongs to a genre that has excavated
myths about power and success in the United States since James Cagney films in the
1930s.
The Sopranos’ opening credits establish how important the setting is to this particular
mob story. Dozens of New Jersey topoi, obsessively charted online by the show’s legions
of dedicated fans, embed the drama in a network of real-world locations. David Chase,
the show’s creator—whose family name was originally DeCesare—has called New Jersey
“a character” (Sepinwall 2012: 37). Tony’s house is an actual residence located at 14
Aspen Drive in North Caldwell, New Jersey, owned and inhabited by a private family. Used

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92 Archi.Pop

Figure 6.1 “The Soprano House” (14 Aspen Drive, North Caldwell, New Jersey, US). Photo by
author.

as a set for the show’s pilot episode, its interiors and backyard were later reproduced on
a sound stage, but all of the series’ driveway scenes were filmed on site.
Architectural settings for organized crime stories have typically reflected their cultural
realities. “Soldiers” dwell in working-class ethnic enclaves or inconspicuous suburban
camouflage. The capi dei tutti capi either keep a similarly low profile or rule from luxurious,
isolated and defensible estates. But Tony is a capo who inhabits a very different sort of
house: a recognizably but “normally” upscale exurban home. It is physically and
economically distant from the declining neighborhood where he grew up, yet easily
reached from that world by car—even now, as scores of online fan photos taken in the
Soprano driveway demonstrate. In the show, Tony’s next-door neighbor is a physician,
the sort of person we might expect to find in such a home. Dr. Cusamano understands
enough about Tony’s line of work to treat him gingerly across the driveway. But their
encounters raise an important question: when a family’s wealth comes from the
underworld, why would they flaunt it on a cul-de-sac?
Tony’s house presents a conundrum. It is also an analogue to one of the series’ most
distinctive additions to the gangster genre: the main character’s therapy sessions with a
psychologist. Both reveal his contradictory desire to claim all the fruits of American
success built on a blood-splattered foundation. Like the theme song’s insistent beat, the
opening credits punctuate each episode with the show’s most fundamental paradox. The

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Sopranos, whose eighty-six episodes were hailed by New Yorker editor David Remnick as
“the richest achievement in the history of television,” a drama whose intricacy and depth
are comparable to Dickens, can be summarized in one phrase: a mobster in a McMansion
(Remnick 2007).
At least that is what Remnick calls Tony’s house; the term “McMansion” is never used
in the series itself, or by any of its creators. Tony once mocks his wife Carmela for
complaining about her circumstances while living in a (full-fledged) “mansion.” Writings
that discuss the Soprano house can use either label; neither one predominates the
extensive critical literature about the show (Lavery et al. 2011: 122, 307, 311). A mansion,
of course, is an aristocratic manor or a similarly stately home. The label is a tribute to a
home’s aura of elite dignity that usually conveys respect. “McMansion” does the opposite.
The prefix “Mc” adds an association with fast food hamburgers that instantly inverts
the root noun’s original meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “McMansion” as
“a modern house built on a large and imposing scale, but regarded as ostentatious and
lacking in architectural integrity.” It aspires to elegant grandeur, but fails. In the end, a
home meant to impress becomes an expensive embarrassment. Calling the Soprano
house a McMansion in front of Tony or Carmela would not be a healthy move.
The show’s creators selected the North Caldwell house from 150 New Jersey
candidates for its class associations of a “very deliberate, nuanced and signifying sort”
(Frank 2002: 104). But the use of two such different labels—one a compliment, the other
a pejorative—reveals that what the house signifies is not at all clear. This may be because
the definition of a McMansion depends more on opinion than fact; distinguishing
refinement from ostentation is an operation of taste, which is subjective and culturally
specific. My luxury can easily appear vulgar to someone else. Most architects and design
critics would probably agree on the architectural quality of the Soprano house, whose
traditional style violates widely-held modernist preferences. But certainly not all:
internationally prominent architect Robert Venturi, always ready to rebel against the
discipline’s norms, called the Soprano house “rich with vitality” (Trebay 2002). Other sharp
observers such as media and literary critics, not to mention the show’s wide popular
audience, might not agree with them, either. Within a society that accommodates many
competing taste cultures, we should not be surprised to find this term is used inconsistently.
Thus, “McMansion” could be understood as an elastic insult that applies to an entirely
different set of big houses, depending on the speaker’s ideas about domestic architectural
decorum. If this is the case, then when we call a house a McMansion this simply means
that we find its attempts at elegance inauthentic. The term vividly expresses our negative
reaction to a large home. Unlike “skyscraper” or “cathedral,” however, it is not very useful
for architectural analysis, because it describes a personal, variable judgment instead of a
building’s objective qualities.
But is there truly no such thing as a McMansion? The term was invented in 1990 to
describe a recently-invented form of housing that, like the word, conjoined large, expensive
houses with mass production in a new way. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
the earliest documented instance is a newspaper article of 15 July, 1990 in the San Diego
Union-Tribune, which states that the “move-up homes trumpeted by builders are
‘McMansions’—a very pale version of the American dream” (Oxford English Dictionary
94 Archi.Pop

2013). Formerly, most elite North American homes were custom built to a client’s
specifications. Their individualized production contrasted with the vast majority of new
housing, which consisted of “tract” homes built en masse on undeveloped land outside
existing cities. Tract houses are associated with uniform design, which economized
construction and helped make them more widely affordable (Wright 1983). Developers
soon learned to camouflage the monotony resulting from such “cookie-cutter” production
through short menus of plans and minor exterior variations. Nonetheless, tract homes
remain mass-produced architectural products from corporations.
Such houses became the norm for middle-class American suburban life in the decades
after World War II. But in the 1980s developers began to offer homes that bridged the
divide between “regular” and “elite.” They made owners feel they had moved up to
something special while sparing them the time and expense involved in building a custom
home. Like “McMansion,” historian Dolores Hayden’s term “tract mansion” captures this
collision of architectural categories (Hayden 2004). Also known as “move-up” homes,
they featured market-tested luxury features: elaborate multi-gabled rooflines, double-
height foyers with sweeping stairs and sparkling chandeliers, seigniorial master suites
with Jacuzzi tubs, and gleaming granite countertops. These ready-made packages
anticipated buyers’ aspirations but still benefited from economies of scale—at a higher
price point.
While the Sopranos’ spacious kitchen features more modest laminate counters instead
of granite, it still exudes luxury through its generous layout, high ceilings and glossy marble
floors. If the show’s creators did think of it as a McMansion, they made a very timely
choice. The series’ run from 1999–2007 coincided with a peak in this housing type, just
before the US real estate bubble began to deflate in 2008. In 2000, as The Sopranos’
second season was underway, architecture critic Suzannah Lessard pondered a
McMansion she visited as a dinner guest. She was bemused by her hosts’ delight in a
home that she found “ugly in almost every respect—misshapen in its proportions,
misbegotten in its materials.” She even christened its three-story, shaft-like study “the
center of the American void” (Lessard 2000: 15). But despite her distaste, Lessard
concluded that the McMansion offers a fitting resolution to an architectural and ideological
problem: what sort of upper-class houses are appropriate in a democracy.
Lessard compares the house she saw to two other grand American homes: George
Washington’s plantation house in Virginia, Mount Vernon (1757–99) and the Villard Houses
in New York City by McKim, Mead, and White (1885). Their venerable elegance is entirely
authentic, but it also reflects fixed systems of social inequality: slavery in the first case,
Gilded Age capitalist exploitation in the second. However much we may respect them as
design achievements, Lessard believes these homes’ aristocratic nature makes them
incompatible with American values. In contrast, despite its design gaucheries, a
McMansion expresses elite status in a suitably commodified and democratic way. If, as
American mythology maintains, prosperity is open to all, its rewards should also be
accessible and abundant, even mass-produced. As Lessard writes, “We will simply have
many Medicis” (Lessard 2000: 15).
This is only one of the essay’s multiple references to the Italian Renaissance. In one
passage, Lessard observes that the Villard Houses’ grandeur demonstrates “what it

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might have been like to be a Florentine aristocrat in the age of the Medici,” a family she
mentions five times in five pages (Lessard 2000: 12). This is unusual for a discussion of
North American houses. Modern suburban homes do have genealogical links to early
modern Italy, but they come by way of eighteenth-century Britain. John Archer has
recently demonstrated how the British aristocrats who built neo-Palladian villas outside
London inspired the Empire’s mercantile classes. Newly prosperous professionals in
Britain and its former colonies (such as the US) followed their example and built their own
“bourgeois compact villas” as accessible weekend retreats near the large cities where
they worked (Archer 2005). But when Lessard dismisses a neighborhood of McMansions
by declaring “these palazzos were frankly ordinary,” this introduces an odd comparison of
suburban American homes to an urban domestic type (Lessard 2000: 15). Like mansions,
palazzos are impressive homes inhabited by wealthy families, including the Medici she
invokes so often. But they are strictly city homes, and lack the garden settings that define
both villas and suburban houses like Tony’s.
Lessard is clearly being ironic rather than architecturally precise; she simply (and
successfully) uses the association to contrast the effect of an array of McMansions with
Italy’s urban streetscapes. Yet this connection may offer more than a single rhetorical
punch. The most paradigmatic Renaissance palazzo in Florence, the Palazzo Medici
(begun 1444), was built by an aggressive, enterprising businessman whose neighbors
found his activities and ambitions highly suspicious—basically, a guy like Tony Soprano.
Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) also led a very powerful family, one that had amassed
one of Europe’s largest private fortunes in only two generations through shrewd personal
connections, cunning manipulation of local politics, and morally tainted financial practices
(lending money at interest, condemned as the sin of usury by the Church). By the mid-
fifteenth century the Medici were wealthy and powerful, but not fully respectable. Much of
the Florentine establishment considered them threatening outsiders (Kent 1978).
Comparing Tony Soprano to Cosimo de’ Medici can seem rather far-fetched. Yet in
2003, two independent but—amazingly—identically-titled projects called The Medici:
Godfathers of the Renaissance (one a book, the other a television documentary) explicitly
associated Cosimo and his family with Italian-American gangsters (Hardy, 2004; Strathern
2003). The previous year, a painting entitled “The Duke and Duchess of North Caldwell”
by artist and actor Federico Castelluccio depicted the Sopranos in the guise of another
powerful Renaissance couple, Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, Duke and
Duchess of Urbino (see Figure 6.2). Castelluccio was inspired to reinterpret Piero della
Francesca’s famous double portrait of 1465–72 as Carmela and Tony while he was part
of The Sopranos cast.1
These popular works all share an intriguing tendency to connect characters from
contemporary organized crime stories with Renaissance historical figures. But they can
hardly overcome a cultural chasm that divides Tony’s luxurious but architecturally
unremarkable home from such historic icons as Federico’s Palazzo Ducale in Urbino by
Luciano Laurana (1470–5) or especially Cosimo’s Florentine house, which has become an
anchor of the Western canon. The Palazzo Medici has been attributed to two of Florence’s
most famous quattrocento architects, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and Michelozzo
di Bartolomeo (1391–1472?) (Preyer 1990: 65–73). It is the archetypal palazzo. Even
96 Archi.Pop

Figure 6.2 “The Duke and Duchess of North Caldwell” (2002). Original oil painting by Federico
Castelluccio—now in private collection in Toronto, Canada.

more than Mount Vernon or the Villard Houses, the Palazzo Medici embodies the
architectural integrity that McMansions presumably lack.
Yet some critics during the Renaissance did, in effect, describe the Medici’s new house
as inappropriately ostentatious. One, Giovanni Cavalcanti (1381–1451), famously
lamented that “many have complained of [Cosimo’s] magnificent buildings. . .he has
started a palace, by comparison with which the Colosseum of Rome would seem
worthless. And others say: Who would not build magnificently with the money of other
people?” (Cavalcanti 1838–9: 73 n. 85 as translated by Lindow 2007: 61). When Pope
Pius II described Cosimo’s palace as “fit for a king,” this was not necessarily a compliment;
living like royalty was perilous in republican Florence (Lindow 2007: 61). A century after
the Palazzo Medici’s completion, Giorgio Vasari claimed that Cosimo had rejected
Brunelleschi’s initial proposal for a free-standing, much grander palazzo facing the church
of San Lorenzo because it would have been immodest. Accurate or not, Vasari’s story
shows that even when Florence was securely under Medici rule, it remained prudent to
present their enormous family palace as an expression of humility rather than hubris
(Vasari 1991: 140–1; Hyman 1977:117–18; Elam 1990: 45–7).

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This was far from the truth. Cosimo’s house boldly defied local norms from the moment
his builders broke ground. For one thing, it was built as an entirely new structure from the
ground up. Most Florentine patricians lived in “recycled” palaces, so this was a rare and
conspicuous expense. The Palazzo Medici’s cost was estimated by contemporary
sources to be 60,000 or 100,000 florins—shocking sums, since the Medici commercial
empire averaged an annual profit of 20,000 florins (Hatfield 1970: 235, n. 24; Raveggi
1990: 13). While historians consider the construction estimates unreliable, they do convey
a popular perception that the house literally cost a fortune to build.2 The amounts also
contrast starkly with the homes of other powerful Florentine families, whose assessed
values ranged from 1,500 to 2,000 florins (Goldthwaite 1987: 993). To even consider a
palazzo’s price was itself a revolution. Traditionally, the location of a patrician home had
meant far more than its size, design or exchange value. A palazzo was most valuable as
part of an ensemble of adjacent, communicative urban symbols and images: a defensive
tower, ceremonial loggia, and omnipresent family crest (stemma). Together these
demonstrated a family’s continuous occupation of a neighborhood, where entwined
social, economic, and political relationships provided them with an enduring power base
(Eckstein 2006).
The Medici had mostly lived in a central neighborhood near the Mercato Vecchio,
today site of the Piazza della Repubblica (Kent 2000: 241; Tarassi 1990: 2–9). Cosimo’s
father Giovanni acquired property north of the city’s ancient core, immediately outside the
ring of its twelfth-century walls, in territory that was only added to the city when its
enormous new defenses were completed in 1333 (Fei et  al. 1995: 31, 41). Giovanni’s
ambitious son decided to abandon the city’s crowded and competitive older districts and
invest heavily in this peripheral, less prestigious location. Cosimo cleverly exploited a new
“suburban” neighborhood’s strategic advantages. Michael Lingohr has shown the special
significance of the corner where he chose to build his house, at the intersection of the via
Larga (now the via Cavour) and the via de’ Gori (which follows the line of the demolished
twelfth-century walls). Both streets pointed to two Medici-sponsored ecclesiastical
projects. The monastery of San Marco, restored by Michelozzo with Medici funding, was
only two blocks north up the via Larga. San Lorenzo, the oldest church in Florence, stood
one block west off the via de’ Gori. It had recently (perhaps conveniently?) burned down
and been rebuilt by Brunelleschi through Medici generosity (Lingohr 2006).
Much like today, Cosimo was able to build a much larger house on the city’s edge than
was feasible in its dense historic core. His colossal new home occupied a site that
originally held a dozen smaller properties—nine houses, an inn and various other
“chasette” (Saalman and Mattox 1985: 335; Hyman 1977: 265ff). With approximately
40,000 covered square feet (3,700 square meters) on its three main floors, the Palazzo
Medici was bigger and more magnificent than any other home in Florence at that time
(Bartoli 1990: 76–81). To contemporary observers, it probably resembled the city’s most
imposing public buildings more than a private residence. This association was underscored
by design elements borrowed directly from such structures as the Palazzo della Signoria,
Florence’s city hall. These include the heavy, rusticated stone blocks on its ground floor,
arched bifora windows on the two levels above, and street-level benches along its
perimeter (Elet 2002).
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Cosimo’s house was smaller than the palazzo seen today, which the Riccardi family
expanded five bays north after they purchased the home in the seventeenth century. But
its original, more vertical proportions better emphasized its still-impressive height. At
eighty feet tall from bench to cornice, the house stood nearly twenty feet higher than local
precedents like the Palazzo Busini-Bardi, and only fifteen feet below the city’s limit for a
private tower. Such towering scale commanded public attention and made the Palazzo
Medici an instant landmark. It also stood only one block north of the Piazza del Duomo,
which joined the Baptistery of San Giovanni to the Cathedral entrance. Seen obliquely
from this most prestigious vantage point, its bulk echoed the free-standing Palazzo della
Signoria’s appearance from the southern end of the via dei Calzaiuoli. This street, created
during the fifteenth century by widening and joining older streets, is aligned with the via
Larga (meaning “wide street,” the city’s broadest), so they form a single urban corridor.
The final result: both palazzi, one public, one private, stood as comparable visual anchors
at opposite ends of a north-south axis bisecting Florence, centered on the cathedral
square.
Cosimo’s brand-new house in a developing neighborhood indelibly inscribed his
family’s power onto the city. The Palazzo Medici’s design further underscored the message
of permanence through multiple references to ancient Rome. Its geometrically ordered
plan followed the proportions prescribed by ancient authors. The exterior openings and
interior courtyard (cortile) used round-headed, not pointed, arches. The cortile also
featured archaeologically informed columnar orders and decorative reliefs depicting
ancient gems and coins from the Medici collection. The palazzo’s deft interweaving of late
medieval and antique references is a testament to the skill of its famous architects. But
blending imagery from multiple histories is also a hallmark of the McMansion; critic Ada
Louise Huxtable associates them with “a mind-boggling mix” of references (Huxtable
1997: 67). This is also seen in the Soprano home, whose French Provincial style is
supplemented with Palladian windows and Tuscan columns.
Yet the most fundamental connection between the Palazzo Medici, the McMansion,
and Tony’s home is the idea that a grand house—the right house—can fashion a new
identity and a great destiny. The Palazzo Medici’s architecture was designed to equate
the Medici name with Florentine power forever; it was Cosimo’s dream house. The
McMansion’s more accessible version of a dream house offers both a confirmation of
success and a way to increase it—an investment account with a Jacuzzi. Like Cosimo’s
palazzo or many a McMansion, the Soprano house reflects a paterfamilias’ faith that a
better home can establish a superior, more secure place in the world for his descendants.
Tony chose to live on a suburban cul-de-sac because he believed it would protect his
family’s safety and their future.
But protect them from what, exactly? Tony worries about the FBI far more than finances
(and keeps most of his liquid assets in cash), so home equity accumulation was hardly a
priority. While physical violence is part of business, strict rules of engagement protect
families better than any alarm system. The Soprano house does safeguard Tony and
Carmela’s children, however; not from bullets, but from the danger of becoming like their
parents. It provides an appearance of respectable prosperity that is consistent with the
successful businessman Tony claims to be, without being so grand it invites trouble.

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A nice house in the right zip code meant his kids could go to good suburban schools,
socialize with future Ivy League MBAs and their families, and open doors to a future
outside organized crime. It is on par with the $50,000 donation to Columbia University
that secured his daughter Meadow’s admission, or the strings Tony pulls to give his
perilously aimless son A.J. a toehold in the film business.
While he hopes his children will follow another path, Tony is unashamed of how he
makes a living. He repeatedly describes himself as no different from any other successful
American entrepreneur, and makes no attempts to “go legitimate.” Much like his
euphemistic answer to questions about his job (“waste management”), or ready excuses
to Carmela for his rendezvous with various mistresses, his house is just one more façade
in a life defined by systematic deception. We see Tony bothered by many things, but
inconsistency between image and reality is not among them. He may live by a (malleable)
code of honor, but Tony lacks integrity, the virtue of wholeness that allows us to understand
from without what lies within.
What better home for such a character than a McMansion, whose cardinal sin is the
absence of architectural integrity? Unlike the mobile boundary between tasteful and
ostentatious design, we can measure this criterion more objectively. For example, most
development houses frontload their dignity on carefully balanced and ornamented street-
facing façades to maximize “curb appeal,” then economize on their less visible surfaces.
But their faux shutters and tacked-on masonry veneer are as transparent as stage make-
up. If these theatrical elements do not actually deceive anyone, they can hardly cross an
ethical boundary.
McMansions simply amplify this widespread strategy, so it would be unfair to condemn
them for doing what seems acceptable in more modest homes. Their most serious crime
against integrity is a different one: an ironic marriage between grand architectural imagery
and mediocre quality. This assumed combination drove a 2008 episode of the television
show King of the Hill (“Square-Footed Monster”). In it, an oversized McMansion
overshadowing the protagonists’ yard in a modest Texas neighborhood becomes a
deadly threat during a windstorm because of its flimsiness. In the end, the main characters
must demolish it for public safety.
In contrast to this gleeful critique, Lessard believes the McMansion’s superficiality is
really a virtue. As “more commodity than architecture, a kind of consumerist packaging,”
she finds their insubstantiality appropriate for America’s prosperous but mobile two
percent (Lessard 2000: 15). Most of their owners do not intend to pass their homes on to
future generations. They need houses that can express their success today, hold or
increase their market value, and sell quickly when the next job or a luxurious retirement
beckons across the country. More permanent forms of architectural prestige are not worth
the investment. They also threaten to cement today’s elites into a fixed power structure,
just as the solidity of Cosimo’s house helped turn his nouveau riche family into despotic
aristocrats.
Yet a more careful look at the Palazzo Medici shows even this icon is not as it appears.
When the house’s south side is viewed from the piazza San Lorenzo, looking east along
the via dei’ Gori, we can see how the rusticated stone turns the corner, then stops abruptly
after about two feet. This reveals that these famous pietraforte blocks are not load-bearing
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masonry, but a skin-deep wrapping. Despite its apparent weight, the Palazzo Medici’s
façade is only a membrane—a very heavy, very expensive wallpaper. Cosimo used
expensive resources like dimensioned stone as strategically as any modern developer.
Over forty years later, when the Strozzi built a free-standing palazzo in Florence, they only
used dressed stone on three sides, leaving humble stucco on the fourth. Just like North
American suburbanites, Renaissance Florentines were comfortable masking standard
construction with a decorative surface image aimed at a public audience.
If architectural integrity means that what is seen on the outside should reflect what lies
beneath, then neither a McMansion nor the Palazzo Medici qualifies. Perhaps we should
not use this concept to assess the tensions between a building fabric’s visual image and
physical substance—an issue theorists have wrestled with since Carlo Lodoli (1690–
1761)—but rather the relationship between a container and its contents. This would
connect architectural integrity to Vitruvius’ ancient idea of décor, meaning decorum or
propriety, which holds that a building’s form should be appropriate to its social and
symbolic status (Vitruvius 1999: 25). The Palazzo Medici meets this criterion easily; it has
provided a suitably august setting for wealthy families and civic functions (today it hosts a
museum and local government). But if we agree with Lessard that McMansions are just
as suitable for their occupants, this interpretation does not help us distinguish them from
“real” mansions, like Cosimo’s house.
And the Soprano home: does it exhibit architectural integrity? If we apply the surface
versus structure approach, it does at least as well as the Palazzo Medici. The all-brick
North Caldwell house appears as solid as any North American home constructed using
standard methods. It was built by a professional home builder for his own family, so he
undoubtedly specified quality construction, not profit-driven shortcuts. If we apply the
Vitruvian interpretation instead, this requires us to make social and architectural judgments
about who should live where. A potentially uncomfortable task, perhaps; yet The Sopranos
already demands this. From the opening credits, the show asks us whether we think
someone like Tony should live in such a house. The answer may seem obvious: no one
who lives on murder and brutality deserves either the comforts or the appearance of
bourgeois respectability. Tony belongs in a jail cell, like the one where his competitor
Johnny Sack ends his days.
But if the answer were that simple, we would not keep watching. In one early episode,
Tony’s neighbor Dr. Cusamano invites him to play golf at his country club. Later,
Cusamano’s club friends suggest that Tony’s business ethics are no worse than those
who plot felonies in corporate boardrooms, not strip clubs. If we define fortunes made on
Wall Street or through for-profit health care as legally sanctioned theft and extortion, it
becomes hypocritical to distinguish between the Sopranos’ bloody form of success and
theirs. Either they all belong in fancy homes on leafy suburban streets, or none of them
do. Martha Nochimson observes that The Sopranos

confirms the worst fears lurking in the subtext of the traditional Hollywood gangster
movie that the American Dream has somehow become interchangeable with
gangster greed. The series repeatedly shows the emotional and spiritual poverty of
gangsters and straight citizens alike who have been mistaken in regarding the Dream

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in materialist terms, the clichéd pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, our material
reward for hard work—never mind what that work consists of. (Nochimson 2011: 24)

Is Tony a holdout against assimilation into the American socioeconomic mainstream, or

have late capitalism and the mafia become indistinguishable? Where does his family
belong, if not on a cul-de-sac in North Caldwell?
To sum up The Sopranos as “a mobster in a McMansion” does not diminish the show’s
depth and complexity, but helps reveal it. Except for one thing: we have not yet established
whether this is an appropriate label for Tony’s house. Its real-world counterpart seems to
have as much (or as little) architectural integrity as the Palazzo Medici. The actual residence
was not a development home, but designed by architect James Constantin and custom
built in 1987, three years before the label’s first documented use (Trebay 2002). At 6,000
square feet (557 square meters), it is also larger than the 3,000–5,000 square foot (280–
470 square meter) size range listed on Wikipedia’s “McMansion” entry, unchanged since
2008. Since ostentation is an unstable criterion, with all due respect to David Remnick,
the evidence suggests the Soprano home is indeed a mansion, without a “Mc.”
There is, however, a second Soprano house to consider. When Tony and his wife
reconcile after a separation, she makes only one real demand: that he finance a house
she will build on speculation to sell. Tony accepts, since this promises to help occupy
Carmela, a stay-at-home mother with an empty nest. But it also makes an ironic condition
for resuming to her role as a mob wife; a separated household is reunited by building a
second house. This odd request underscores the show’s thematic linkage between house
and identity: Carmela may never live there, but “her” house will express the individuality
and dignity she left Tony to reclaim. On many occasions Carmela proudly takes credit for
decorating the family home, notable for its pastel-toned formality, which suggests she has
more general design interests.
The house’s construction takes place during the final season, and the result is
undeniable: Carmela builds a McMansion. Its spacious design is consistent with the
design pretensions of a move-up home but smaller than the Soprano house, so it likely
falls within the accepted size limits. The nail in the coffin is the code inspector’s refusal to
issue an occupancy permit because of its shoddy construction. There can be no doubt:
it lacks architectural integrity. Carmela’s “dream house,” her compensation for total
dependence on a murderous and unfaithful spouse, is hardly a solid alternative to her
morally compromised married life. She chooses to construct another illusion, a flimsy way
to pretend to herself and to the world that she has more to do than spend her husband’s
ill-gotten wealth. When Carmela has Tony threaten the inspector (successfully), this
proves—disappointingly, perhaps, to her character’s fans—that they share the same
priorities: profit, power, and a fictive image of prestige built on a foundation of violence.
Carmela and Tony may not live in a McMansion, but critics are not wrong to use this
label. There is no better architectural expression of the Soprano family values. Even the
McMansion’s ambiguities as a category are consistent with the show’s refusal to provide
easy answers. The Sopranos’ final, enigmatic cut to black left a mystery: had Tony met a
richly-deserved violent end, or would his contradictory choices win his family a tainted
happily ever after? Although Chase claims the show itself provides the answer, his omertà
102 Archi.Pop

ensures debates about the show will—to cite the Journey song from its last scene—go
on and on.
History tells us Cosimo’s fate: he only lived in his new house for his final six years, but
it turned his family of parvenus into a prestigious dynasty (Saalman and Mattox 1985:
329–45). The home’s effectiveness vindicated the contemporary critics who saw Cosimo’s
new palace as a threat, and also set a dangerous precedent for his neighbors. Several
Florentine families who tried to keep up with the Medici built ambitious homes that brought
financial ruin. Giovanni di Bono Boni, the Palazzo Antinori’s builder, went bankrupt and
sold his palace a mere decade after its completion. Luca Pitti never even lived in the
palazzo that still bears his name. It left him with “a host of debts, hundreds upon hundreds
of florins,” before becoming literally tied to the Medici Grand Dukes’ stranglehold on their
formerly republican city through the corridoio vasariano (Goldthwaite 1987: 993).
Just as many of Cosimo’s neighbors followed his example, viewers have identified so
strongly with Tony that his house has become a “model home.” In 2001, its owner-builder
began to offer copies of the house plans for $699. Hundreds of families supposedly took
up this offer, and at least one clone was built in the Hamptons (Frank 2002: 106; Trebay
2002). Multiple websites continue to offer frame-ready “blueprints” of the house so fans
can envision themselves in the Sopranos’ domestic architectural envelope.3 Countless
others identified with this home in a less literal but much more influential way, as a
confirmation of the faith that a bigger, grander house will increase their family’s security.
Cosimo’s house reminds us that this idea is centuries old, even as his unlucky neighbors
and the post-2008 housing market prove this faith can be misplaced, and a dream house
can turn into an underwater nightmare.
The reveries embodied by our dream houses reflect many sources: the homes we see
around us; the architecture we encounter when we travel; ideas absorbed from books,
magazines, and other media. Theater, film and television sets function by echoing the
audience’s architectural experiences, but they also inform and inspire collective fantasy.
Some of The Sopranos’ viewers see in Tony’s house an image of tasteful elegance that
mirrors their own architectural hopes. Others instead see the dreams of other less refined
people, and interpret the home as an expression of ordinary, tasteless banality. In either
case, this central element adds yet another thought-provoking layer to a show whose
depth and intelligence brought together a fan base diverse enough to disagree about
almost everything. As dozens of characters came and went (often brutally) over the course
of six seasons, the Soprano house remained an anchor, as much a home for the audience
as for Tony and Carmela. The creators’ stated goal in selecting their house was “not to
treat the characters with condescension” (Trebay 2002). Their choice, like so many others,
shows the same respect towards the show’s viewers.

Notes
1 Castelluccio played Neapolitan enforcer Furio Giunto, with whom Carmela shares an
unconsummated passion. He was inspired to produce his oil on panel while viewing Piero’s
original in the Uffizi, because he saw the “same presence” in Federico’s gaze and Gandolfini’s

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portrayal of Tony. Castelluccio discusses the painting’s history in an interview on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CStgtPzUhhg
2 No records of the Palazzo Medici’s construction costs survive. Hatfield cites an anonymous
poem of 1459 which proclaims the palazzo cost 100,000 florins, and Vespasiano da Bisticci’s
estimate that its construction cost 60,000 florins in 1492, the year its movable contents were
valued at 81,000 florins. The larger Strozzi palace of 1489–1504, whose accounts survive, cost
30,000 florins to build; R. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic
and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: 167). The Riccardi
purchased the Palazzo Medici in 1659 for 40,000 ducats, a currency roughly equivalent to the
florin; F. Büttner “ ‘All’usanza moderna ridotto’: gli interventi dei Riccardi,” in G. Cherubini and
G. Fanelli (eds), Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze (Florence: Giunti, 1990: 151).
3 See for example http://fantasyfloorplans.com
104

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Chapter 7
Invitations to a Candy-Floss
World
Barbara Penner

When we raise the question of how architecture is mediated through popular culture, the
question of how popular culture is mediated through architecture soon follows (at least for
those in the architectural field). Obviously, there is no singular answer to this last question,
but this essay will take as its starting point the musings of critic and historian Reyner
Banham on the subject between 1960 and 1962. During this period, Banham, one of the
most perceptive and sympathetic analysts of popular design, returned repeatedly to the
issue of how architects might draw on the characteristics of pop culture to create
architectural form and to the related question of the role architects might play in a pop
world.
Despite the consistency of his themes, Banham’s conclusions on the subject are
anything but fixed: he comes across as probing, restless, and skeptical. He is an
unabashed lover of pop culture and its styled products. He understands, indeed,
embraces, the conditions that underlie pop culture and the way in which their forms
symbolize people’s desires. But he sees that it is in no way evident how these qualities
can be formally translated into architecture. If anything, in this particular period, he mainly
seems struck by their incompatibility—by the expendability of pop versus the permanence
of architecture. In fact, Banham’s well-known article “Design by Choice” (Banham 1961),
is premised on the idea that a formal engagement with pop is not possible, leading him to
propose another strategy by which architects might be relevant in a mass-market world.
This essay does not attempt to link up Banham’s thoughts at this time with formal
developments in architecture, notably the rise of Archigram (which he championed) or of
Post-Modern architecture (Whiteley 2002: 167–78). Rather, it seeks to cross-reference
Banham’s shifting thoughts on the relationship between pop culture, architecture and
architects with contemporary developments in commercial architecture, taking the
London Playboy Club, opened in 1966, as a case study. In terms of the way it was built
on fantasies and dreams—“dreams that money can buy”—Playboy was a pure pop
product (Banham 1981b: 61). And as places dedicated to bringing Playboy culture to life,

105
106 Archi.Pop

the Playboy Clubs are ideal places to consider architecture’s role in mediating pop culture
in greater depth.
For architectural historians, the story of the London Playboy Club becomes positively
tantalizing once we learn that 45 Park Lane, the ten-story building in which it was housed,
was designed by a modernist dream team that included Walter Gropius. (Gropius and
Playboy—has any connection ever seemed more unlikely?) While the connection is

Figure 7.1 45 Park Lane, London, 1963. (The building is still under construction.) Courtesy of
RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

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 Invitations to a Candy-Floss World 107

intriguing, how meaningful was it? And how important, ultimately, was architecture and
design to the way in which Playboy articulated its identity and its culture? In short, what
role—if any—did architects or designers have in creating the self-referential, swinging
world of the London Playboy Club?

Banham, pop culture, architecture and

architects
To better understand Banham’s thoughts on pop culture and architecture between 1960
and 1962, we first need to situate them in the context of his earlier engagement with
the Independent Group (IG), a loose affiliation of artists, architects and critics active in
the 1950s in London. The IG participants engaged with pop culture, but did not glorify
it. Rather, they subjected its operations and aesthetic effects to close examination,
analyzing the themes and techniques that characterized forms of popular culture from
billboards to tabloids to television. If we think of the work of artists such as Edoardo
Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, it is clear that they became experts in decoding
the symbolic language of pop: Hamilton described one of his pieces as a “sieved reflection
of the ad man’s paraphrase of the consumer’s dream” (quoted in Foster 2012: 35). The
pop artists’ “sievings” through commercial imagery and design, not to mention the
exhibitions in which they took part (“Parallel of Art and Life” in 1953 and “This is Tomorrow”
in 1956), were then supplemented by the critical writings of Lawrence Alloway and
Banham.
The intellectual and analytic approach that marked the IG had a long lineage. Popular
culture in Britain studies dated back to works by Wyndham Lewis and F. R. Leavis in the
1930s, whose insights were to inspire Marshall McLuhan, Raymond Williams and Richard
Hoggart in the 1950s. While acute and serious, however, these studies of pop culture
were not always admiring. Hoggart, in his best-selling 1957 book The Uses of Literacy,
was alarmed by the influence of Americanized forms of mass culture on the cohesiveness
and integrity of English working-class life. Quite apart from his objections on social
grounds, Hoggart simply found many products of mass culture aesthetically repellent: he
described American-style milk bars, for instance, as representing complete “aesthetic
breakdown,” thanks to the “nastiness of their modernistic knick-knacks” and “their glaring
showiness” (Hoggart 1992: 220).
While keenly aware of the progress of Americanization, the confreres of the IG were far
more alive to its aesthetic allure. Richard Hamilton’s surrender to pop styling is obvious if
we consider works like Hommage à Chrysler Corp. (1957) or Hers is a lush situation
(1958), which simultaneously break down and reassert the erotic effects of shiny patinas
and exaggerated curves of American automobiles. Hamilton precisely identified the pool
of imagery and associations that Detroit stylists and advertisers used to draw in consumers
(especially the links with female bodies and sex), but at some level he remained seduced.
This sense of both being attracted to and repelled by American culture characterized the
IG’s stance in these years. As Banham remarked, “In that period there arose a situation
where one’s natural leanings in the world of entertainment, and so on, were to the States,
108 Archi.Pop

but one’s political philosophy seemed to require one to turn one’s back to the States”
(quoted in Curley 2013: 31).
In truth, however, Banham seemed far less troubled by the social and political effects
of popular design than were some of his colleagues and his spirited iconological defenses
of pop aesthetics appeared in many journals. Like the American journalist Tom Wolfe, who
Banham esteemed, no subject was off-limits. Where Wolfe tackled subjects like car
customizing, Las Vegas and demolition derby disc jockeys, Banham took on Cadillac
tailfins and Playboy magazine (to which we will return). He had no time for outmoded
aesthetic and moral standards and dismissed the idea that Cadillacs represented bad
design out of hand, as “nonsense” (Banham 1996c: 4–5). But, even if he was unmoved
by charges that pop aesthetics were inferior, and mused about how they might influence
architecture, Banham was fully aware of the challenges commercial design generally
posed to the architectural profession and to the architect’s claims to authority over design
in a broad sense.
Banham laid out these challenges in a 1961 article “Design by Choice,” published in
The Architectural Review, in which he traced how architecture’s authority over all other
forms of design had been established between 1900 and 1930. He noted: “When the
Modern Movement was young, there were obvious and valid reasons for giving architects
hegemony over the training of designers and the formulation of theory. . .,” not least that
they seemed to be the only ones attempting to theoretically engage with design (Banham
1996b: 68) These reasons were no longer valid in the age of pop culture, with the result
that architecture had been displaced from the top of the design hierarchy. Banham did not
welcome this development, as he believed it made “operational sense” for architects to
have a voice in the design of cars, lamp-posts, refrigerators, crockery, and lighting
(especially lighting)—anything that shared views and spaces with buildings or were
essential to their functioning (Banham 1996b: 70). He stated: “Even if we no longer regard
the architect as the universal analogy for the designer, a large area of the architectural
claim is rightly his” (Banham 1996b: 71).
Up to this point, Banham came across as somewhat jealous of the new power of
stylists and one might have reasonably expected a defense of the rights of architects to
follow. Instead he turned the tables, essentially blaming architects for their own irrelevance.
He asserted that the average architect was not actually qualified to act as a designer due
to his or her “training, experience and habits of mind.” And he delivered a knock-out blow:
“This combination of intellectual factors tends to make an architect not only unfit to design
free-standing appliances but even the interiors of his own buildings” (Banham 1996b: 71).
Banham believed a key problem was that architecture remained invested in values of
permanence and durability, in part because the need for technical improvements moved
at a different pace in buildings than in industrially designed objects. These differing time
scales were almost impossible to reconcile. Banham could think of only one “styled” piece
of architecture that embraced industrial design-paced obsolescence: the Smithson’s
1956 House of the Future (Banham 1996a: 55).
Presuming that this situation was not set to change anytime soon, Banham proposed
a strategy that would still allow architects to retain meaningful control over design at a
mass level. He called it “design by choice”: rather than designing industrial products,

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 Invitations to a Candy-Floss World 109

architects were to exercise “creative choice” in selecting existing products (Banham

1996b: 73–4). The strategy was a triumph of mass-market logic. Thanks to contract
furnishing, where architects might place orders for large numbers of items, Banham saw
them as a category of super-consumer. This gave them real power in the market, which
they could use to kill poor designs and to encourage good or new ones. Banham was
clear that on no account should architects “hand over the interior to Jacobsen, Noguchi,
Bertoia and Co.”; rather, they should be aiming “to exercise choice and background
control over the choice of others, to advise, suggest and demand on the basis of
knowledge and understanding” (Banham 1996b: 77). In terms of interiors, “design by
choice” meant that architects were no longer playing the part of actors in a drama: they
were to be producers, organizing the scenes and effects around them. This task required
sophisticated visualization skills, as architects now needed to understand: “. . .just how,
and how strongly, some desirable and visually fascinating piece of equipment like a tape
recorder or a coffee-percolator focuses attention and thence organizes the visual and
functional space around it” (Banham 1996b: 76).
Throughout this piece, along with others in which Banham ponders the possible
contribution architects might make to pop, his underlying motive remains nebulous. He is
adamant that he does not want a return to the Modern Movement paradigm in which
architects exerted total control over environments and sought to enforce a particular way
of life—a moralistic exercise he believed was doomed to failure. But, apart from ensuring
their continuing relevance, why then should architects wade into the pop culture world?
In “Design by Choice,” Banham argues that architects need to do so on the grounds of
“operational sense”—to ensure a kind of consistency in the visual environment—and on
the grounds that they should help raise the overall standards of industrial design and
ensure “better goods” are manufactured (Banham 1996b: 74). This unavoidably raises the
question of how “better goods” are defined in this context and by whom: since Banham
insists that architects in a pop age are no longer vested with special aesthetic powers like
“taste,” he argues that their superior skill at choosing is based on their greater experience
in purchasing furnishings and judging functionality.
For all its good sense, Banham’s strategy for making architects indispensable in a pop
world had its flaws. For one thing, the “design by choice” philosophy was already being
effectively practiced, not by architects, but by enterprises like Playboy. The Playboy
Penthouse Apartment of 1956, for instance, oversaw the deployment of a remarkable
number of the same “better goods” listed by Banham in his article, from the Saarinen
womb chair to the Noguchi table, in a consistent and carefully planned environment
(Sanders 1996: 55–67). Many of these same pieces also appeared in the even more
elaborate Playboy Town House, reproduced in the May 1962 issue of Playboy, based on
Hefner’s abandoned plans for a four-story, purpose-built bachelor pad in Chicago (Edgren
1998: 6–9). Banham was well acquainted with the Playboy formula and the part design
played in it. In a short piece written a year before “Design by Choice,” Banham had outed
himself as a Playboy fan. He approvingly mentioned the magazine’s devotion to furnishings
and its custom-designed bachelor pads, noting that they were not produced “by any
designers you have ever heard of but none the worse for that. . .” (Banham 1981a: 130).
While its clean, modern style distinguished Playboy Penthouse from other examples of
110 Archi.Pop

pop architecture that Banham cites (hamburger bars, Odeon cinemas), it also showed
that “better goods” and commercial design were not necessarily antinomical and,
moreover, did not require architects to unite them (Banham 1981b: 61).
What is also striking about “Design by Choice” is that Banham is so vested in
architectural control over the interior. This concern is not hard to understand, given that
the design and technology that most fascinated pop artists, from toasters to television,
was sited in the domestic interior and frequently appeared in their works. Yet in his other
writings at this time, and in keeping with his iconological approach, Banham was more
usually concerned with popular architecture’s exterior and its ability to act as a visual
media of communication. This concern with commercial architecture’s communicative
and symbolic functions related to Banham’s obsession with the United States and its rich
culture of roadside architecture, billboards and signage and was a line of inquiry that
would be later pursued by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, Stephen Izenour and
Charles Jencks.
But again, the example of Playboy suggests that there was also another model of pop
architecture in circulation at the time, one that far more interiorized. The spaces connected
to Playboy were quite different to the ones evoked by Banham (and which we most often
associate with pop architecture today); namely, Banham tended to speak of popular
architecture as an outward-facing phenomenon—suburban, sprawling, car-oriented, and
covered with advertising. By contrast, the spaces produced by Playboy, from the Playboy
Mansion to the international network of Playboy Clubs, turned this formula inside-out. In
part, this is what we might expect, given the context in which they operated: Playboy
Clubs were located in urban city centers and in existing buildings, some of which were
historically significant. Playboy usually did not extensively alter these exteriors, beyond
putting up marquees and brass plaques with rabbit logos that, with some exceptions,
were fairly discrete.
The reason for this was probably not that Hugh Hefner was a proto-conservationist,
though he did relish the historical associations that came with certain properties. He also
seemed to appreciate how the schism between a historic façade and a contemporary
interior could heighten a visitors’ sense of surprise on entry. Of the Playboy Mansion,
located in a turn-of-the-century Gold Coast pile in Chicago, an anonymous Playboy writer
(possibly Hefner), wrote:

The elegant brick and stone exterior, and the high iron fence that surrounds it, have not
changed in the half century since construction was completed, and they give no hint of
the contemporary decor and doings within. In sharp contrast to its formal façade, the
swinging interior of this ultimate Playboy Pad has prompted such descriptive phrases
as: “A bachelor’s dream,” “Mr. Playboy’s palace,” “Hef’s hutch,” “An adult Disneyland,”
and “Shangri-La ’70.” (“The Playboy Mansion” 1966: 105–6)

The exterior, however, was clearly never the main focus of the Playboy Clubs. Rather they
were places where all richness, all meaning, was manifest in the interior—but not an
interior as we know it, a private, bounded space. As architectural historian Beatriz
Preciado remarks in her illuminating analysis, Playboy created a “non-domestic and yet

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 Invitations to a Candy-Floss World 111

interior regime” that profoundly reconfigured conventional senses of inside and outside,
public and private, work and leisure (Preciado 2004: 219). Playboy interiors were inwardly
focused and all-embracing, but their meaning was highly mediated and dependent upon
external referents; in this case, the “world” of Playboy as depicted in other sites, including
the magazine. We can see these conditions at play if we turn to our case study: London’s
Playboy Club, 45 Park Lane.

45 Park Lane
The story of the building of 45 Park Lane is a complex and obscure one, yet it tells us a
great deal about the factors that shaped commercial architecture in the 1950s and 1960s.
It involves the property market, the media, and a large cast of colorful characters. At the
center of the building’s history was a property developer named Jack Cotton. At the time
of his death in 1964, according to journalist Oliver Marriott, Cotton was “the best known
to the public of all the [British] property developers. . .” (Marriott 1989: 132). He was an
idiosyncratic, larger than life man, who was given to hyperbole and had a close and
occasionally damaging relationship to the British media.
Through his development company, City Centre Properties, Cotton was the main force
behind the development of 45 Park Lane. But prior to this project, he had been involved
in two others that are important to mention. Just a week apart in October 1959, Cotton
held two press conferences, the first in New York and the second in London, at which he
announced his involvement with major development schemes in each city. The first
scheme, announced jointly with American developer, Erwin S. Wolfson, was the Pan Am
Building to be built over Grand Central Station. The second project was the redevelopment
of a former restaurant, the Monico, at Piccadilly Circus. It was an astonishing coup: in the
space of one week, a single developer announced projects that would, each in their own
way, radically reshape symbolically central areas and vistas in both New York (Park
Avenue) and London (Piccadilly).
While the plans proceeded apace in New York (although they were very bitterly
criticized), Cotton’s plans in Piccadilly Circus caused a public outcry, and opened a debate
in England about the extent to which developers should be required to conform to a larger
masterplan in areas of historical importance. Interestingly, it seems that Cotton’s fatal
misstep had been to hold a press conference announcing his plans for the site just prior
to it officially gaining London County Council planning permission: at this conference,
Cotton waved about a perspective drawing of the project which (like most of Cotton’s
projects) was not distinguished architecturally. The specific trigger for the public’s outrage,
however, was that his proposed building was depicted with a crane on top and a large
fictional advertisement that read “Snap Plom for Vigour.” This gesture, which would have
been completely at home in an Archigram drawing, was fatal here. The building was
attacked for its crudeness and planning permission was denied (Marriott 1989: 139–144)
Cotton was not fazed. In order to help secure planning for Monico, he turned to Walter
Gropius who, although approaching eighty years of age, was then at the height of his
fame. Cotton had been advised to speak to Gropius by Erwin Wolfson and knew of him
112 Archi.Pop

through the Pan Am project. (Gropius had served as a consultant on the job.) Gropius
appeared to agree to be involved with these large city-center projects on the pragmatic
grounds that they represented major problems at an urban scale. As he stated in his
unrepentant defense of his work on the Pam Am building:

This suggestion [i.e. that the Pam Am building was too large for its site] is indicative of
a prevailing urbanistic sentimentality, a blindness to new trends and to the changing
order and scale and magnitudes of building masses in cities. The problem is not how
to stem the tide of these new trends, but to find proper solutions for them. (quoted in
Isaacs 1991: 283)

In spite of the seriousness that Gropius gave his mission, journalists were cynical about
his involvement in the Monico site, asserting that the éminence grise had been brought in
“to draw the teeth of the aesthetes. . .” (quoted in Isaacs 1991: 296). Gropius, it seemed,
was also wary of taking on this potentially poisoned chalice, at least unsupported. He thus
welcomed the appointment of British architects, Richard Llewelyn Davies and John
Weeks, future masterplanners of the New Town of Milton Keynes (1967), as collaborators
on the project.
This was a clever choice as few British architects were better regarded or better placed
to deal with masterplanning issues such as traffic circulation (the major sticking point in
the Monico project). Moreover, as well as being an experienced practitioner, Llewelyn
Davies was, like Gropius, a prominent pedagogue: since 1960, Davies was a professor at
The Bartlett School of Architecture and he was deeply committed to the project of applying
social sciences to the fields of urban research and town planning (Fraser, 2007: 163–77).
Consequently, Llewelyn Davies renamed The Bartlett School of Architecture the School of
Environmental Studies and committed it to an ambitious multidisciplinary programme of
research that saw architects working alongside psychologists, economists, planners, and
physicists. In a pertinent sidenote, Llewelyn Davies decided that an architectural historian
should also have a place at the table, which led to Reyner Banham’s first full-time academic
appointment in 1964.
The marriage of these prominent architects on such a significant site was exciting, but
even they were unable to cut through the Gordian knot of the planning process, and
Gropius’s involvement with Monico ceased in 1964. In parallel, he had also been involved
in several other development projects for Cotton, including another city center project in
Birmingham. In the end, however, the only project that came to fruition was 45 Park Lane
on which Gropius and his firm the Architects’ Collaborative (TAC) again worked alongside
Llewelyn Davies and Weeks. Park Lane was to be a multi-use building with shops, offices,
and apartments. Given the number of designers on the project—as well as Gropius, TAC,
Llewelyn Davies and Weeks, Cotton brought in his own firm, Cotton, Ballard and Blow—it
is hard to know the extent of Gropius’s input. But according to Marriott, Gropius’s
contribution was confined to the elevation where he was responsible for changing the
existing Portland Stone façade to a sober concrete one—alterations, which somehow
raised the cost of the project, by £150,000 to £800,000 (Isaacs 1991: 296–8; Marriott
1989: 144).

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 Invitations to a Candy-Floss World 113

Rarely has a project promised so much and delivered so little. The exercise seemed a
disappointment all around. Cotton was reportedly unhappy about the rise in costs
associated with the building; and Gropius, according to one biographer, was not proud of
it (Isaacs 1991: 298; Marriott 1989: 144). But as a branding exercise, the collaboration
had the desired result. Even if his work had been confined to the façade, Cotton now did
have a “Gropius” building and the property agents were not shy about describing it as
such. And in the process of leasing the building, something clearly went very right. The
building was leased to one of the most high-profile and profitable clients of the era:
Playboy.

The Bunnies take Blighty

Given the acreage of column lines that the Playboy Club’s London venture would eventually
generate, the initial announcement of Playboy’s intention to open in Mayfair is surprisingly
meager. A little note in The Times’ property column of 6 September, 1965 (located under
an opinion piece on “British Teeth”) stated: “The whole of the City Centre Properties Group
10-floor development, designed by Gropius, at 45 Park Lane has now been let for just
under £100,000 to Playboy Clubs, who intend to open the first Playboy Club in Britain
there at the end of the year.” Part of the Playboy modus operandi was to occupy prestige
locations, and 45 Park Lane, in the heart of Mayfair, fit the bill: it was visible from the Hilton
Hotel, where Victor Lownes, the man responsible for the Club’s setup, was staying. For
all of Playboy’s championing of modern design, there is no evidence that Gropius was
part of the building’s attraction (Lownes 1983: 83).
By 1966, Playboy was one of the pre-eminent symbols of Americanization, “almost as
well known a symbol of American life as Coca-Cola” as one profile put it (Jacobson 1969:
23). The Playboy empire rested on its magazine (circulation: four million) and also on its
clubs. First founded in 1960 in Chicago, by the mid-1960s, there were thirteen across
major cities in America from Atlanta to St. Louis, as well as one Club-Hotel in Jamaica.
Lownes, who had pitched the idea of Playboy Clubs to Hefner and had set up the original
one, was sent over from America to supervise the £1,600,000 London operation (Lownes
1983: 51, 54–60). Like Hefner, Lownes embraced the free-wheeling, celebrity-filled
Playboy lifestyle, even investing in his own 42-room historic party-pad, Stocks House in
Hertfordshire, complete with giant Jacuzzi pool. In the 1970s, he became the highest-
paid executive in Britain (Mullen 1980: F20).
Even though Playboy was synonymous with Americanization, and Americanization
was the subject of much agonized reflection at the time, the English press and
establishment seemed fairly sanguine about the Club’s appearance on its shores. The
Club’s only real offense was the very American method by which it recruited members:
direct mail, which was still a relatively new phenomenon in Britain. Four hundred thousand
people, including peers, senior Service officers, and managing directors, were sent
membership packs and invited to join. It quickly emerged that packs had been sent to
senior churchman, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Another similarly
solicited churchman, Bishop Cockin, wrote a letter to The Times on 20 April, 1966
114 Archi.Pop

Figure 7.2 “At the London Playboy Club for a Bunny Pictorial—1 August, 1969.” Photo by Ron
Galella/WireImage.

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 Invitations to a Candy-Floss World 115

condemning Playboy’s membership secretary, Robin Douglas-Home, “a name honoured

in British political life,” for promoting “blatant luxury spending on buildings, food and
entertainment.” In his reply of 23 April, 1966, Douglas-Home, a jazz musician who wore
his distinguished political lineage lightly, was unchastened and claimed—rightly as it
turned out—that the Club would benefit London’s tourist economy.
Concern was also aired in the House of Lords about the gambling proposed in the
Playboy Club. Gambling was possible thanks to the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act, known
as the “Vicars” Charter because it originally had been set up to legalize whist drives at
church galas (Lownes 1983: 91). The Lords were united in deploring this loophole: as the
Parliamentary Correspondent for The Times noted on 20 May, 1966, “They were facing
Las Vegas in London, and they liked it not.” On this occasion the Lords did not choose to
take legislative action, but gambling would come to dominate discussions of the London
Playboy Club for the next sixteen years. By 1975, the casino had grown into the largest in
Europe (Churchill 1975: 16) and generated huge revenues. (In an almost surreal piece of
irony, in 1 November, 1978, The Times’ business diary reported that Playboy had displaced
Tampax as the foreign-owned company with the highest profit margin in the UK.) When
its casino licenses were not renewed, the Club closed very soon after, and the loss of its
profits was disastrous for its parent company.
Despite the centrality of gambling, the London Playboy Club, like its American cousins,
was envisioned as a multi-story “entertainment centre” catering to the 20,000 men and
even some women who had paid the eight guinea membership fee (“Gilded Hutch” 1966:
12). One journalist did a walk-through of the building in 1969, describing its crucial
elements. On the first floor (ground floor to Americans), a member would find “girls and
gambling”—blackjack and roulette—the Playboy Grill and Playmate Bar. The Living Room
discotheque was located on the second. At this point, the journalist’s account becomes
somewhat confused (he confesses that he’s lost track of the floors). He skips the third-
floor VIP room, for fine dining and dancing, and heads straight to the fourth-floor cabaret,
the Playboy Playroom, followed by the pièce de résistance, the fifth-floor Penthouse
Casino. He mentions that the floors above the casino were given over to the London Club,
containing seventeen full-serviced flats, and concludes, “A man could check into this
Playboy Club and never be seen again. Something like Hef himself”—an allusion to the
fact that the founder of Playboy, Hugh Hefner, reputedly did not leave his Playboy Mansion
in Chicago for weeks at a time (Leonard 1969: S5–12).
This article was unusual for the amount of detail it provided about the Club’s layout and
features. Inevitably, in the early reporting on the Club, the bulk of attention was given over
to discussing the Bunnies: early articles reported on the recruitment of 94 of them and,
later on, their work experiences (Moorhouse 1966: 6; Murari 1968: 6). Relatively little was
said about the Club’s interior décor, possibly because it faded into insignificance when the
Bunnies were in the foreground (they were meant to be the Club’s main decorative
element, after all) or because a precise description was not necessary. Even in the four-
page letter that accompanied the membership pack, a copy of which is preserved at the
British Library, the Club’s décor was described in a kind of impressionistic shorthand,
making liberal use of what Bishop Cockin derided as “the familiar status-symbol epithets
‘plush’, ‘romantic’, ‘fabulous’, ‘sophisticated’—even ‘swingingest.’ ” While the membership
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letter did talk through all of the proposed amenities and promised a “fun” atmosphere, it
only provided specific details about the color schemes for different rooms: “blue and
silver” for the VIP room, “black, red and gold” for the casino.
One plausible explanation for why a more precise description was not necessary is that
most people already arrived at the Club with a good idea of what they would find. The
London Playboy Club faithfully followed the model that had been established at the first
Playboy Club in Chicago and that had been since replicated in other clubs. And the
Chicago Club, in turn, was “a ‘public’ reproduction of the interior of Hefner’s Playboy
House. . .,” including its organization into rooms that referred back to its founder’s mythical
bachelor pad (Playroom, Penthouse, Library, and Living Room) (Preciado 2004: 252). In
the membership pack that had so ruffled the feathers of the British establishment, the
Club experience was equated to that of an intimate house party:

Every detail of the many floors of the London Playboy Club will suggest to you the
warmth, the intimacy and the fun of a private party. Each floor has its own distinctive
décor and features its own unique form of entertainment. [. . .] From the moment you
present your Playboy Club key at the reception desk to the moment you and your
guests leave, you can select the atmosphere and entertainment that fits your mood of
the moment. At the Playboy Club, members, their wives and guests can enjoy a “night-
on-the-town” without ever having to leave the building.

The Playboy template, and “Hef” himself, was familiar to the readership of Playboy
magazines, which regularly featured the Mansion (see, for instance, “The Playboy
Mansion” 1966: 105–18, 199–207). Advertisements for the clubs, as well as Club
newsletters, regularly appeared in the magazines’ pages. The Mansion and the clubs
were also, of course, much discussed in an endless stream of press reports on Playboy.
As Beatriz Preciado remarks, the spaces of Playboy were saturated by publicity—
especially the “intimate” heart of the whole enterprise, Hefner’s bedroom—in a way that
reversed conventional understandings of private and public. Domestic space and public
space intermingled (Preciado 2004: 219, 252–3). Certainly, the blurring of the space of the
first Playboy Club and the Mansion was done intentionally, as when Hugh Hefner spoke
of them as contiguous, even equivalent, spaces: “Now [i.e. with the opening of the
Playboy Club], everyone would come to Hef’s—to the Club, or to the Mansion, a few
blocks away” (Edgren 1998: 12).
Hef’s assertion was patently untrue: “everyone” was not a member of the Playboy Club
and by no means “everyone” gained admittance to the Mansion. But the illusion of access
to the Playboy lifestyle was crucial to the enterprise’s success. As one astute business
writer commented in 1969: “The really intriguing thing about the group is that it has come
so far not on any specific product but on a carefully developed concept that can best be
described as a ‘Fantasy package’ ” (Jacobson 1969: 23). For all of the exoticism or
excitement promised by the clubs as they spread internationally, their success rested on
a sense of familiar fantasy that verged on homey-ness: this was the significance of the
membership “key,” which opened the door to all Playboy Clubs, as well as the use of
personalized nameplates, which were posted in the lobby upon each keyholder’s arrival

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under a sign that announced “At the Playboy Club Tonight.” Images of arrivals were then
telecast upstairs via closed-circuit television “to those who may be awaiting you” (Playboy
Club News 1965: 5) The sense of entering a known world, in which one was always
welcome, was cited as why the estimated 900,000 American tourists who yearly traveled
to London often chose Playboy over local clubs (Ellin 1973: 7).
Once inside, keyholders and their guests encountered the stylized rabbit motif
everywhere; it was prominently featured on the merchandise sold in the Club gift shop.
And, then, there were the Bunnies, dressed in their Hefner-conceived costumes (Lownes
1983: 56–7): high-cut legs, cuffs, collars, rabbit ears, fluffy tails and cantilevered bosoms.
Yet even the Bunnies were absorbed into the “homey” air of the clubs. Tellingly, in the
membership pack, they were not played up as much as one might expect. Apart from
some almost obligatory mentions of the Bunnies, “pretty girls, almost numberless,” the
membership literature mainly stressed the rigorous training Bunnies would undergo,
supervised by the watchful “Bunny Mother” (Playboy Club News 1965: 3). In the same
way that the “girl-next-door” quality was a vital ingredient in the Playmates’ appeal to men
(Preciado 2004: 232–6), the Bunnies’ non-threatening air and a strict “no dating” policy
was essential to the Club’s acceptability to women. Overt sexuality was downplayed at
the clubs, in order to create what Victor Lownes called an “acceptably frisky” atmosphere
that would cause no embarrassment to spouses, friends or family (Lownes 1983: 58–9).
It seemed to work. One “home-loving wife and mother” who dined at the London Club
with her husband shortly after it opened declared the average bunny to be “so darn nice
and respectable, you’d even let your brother marry her” (Tweedie 1966: 13).
As the example of the Bunnies suggests, however much the clubs was associated
with the twin pillars of the Playboy mystique (the magazine and Mansion), the Playboy
concept was evolving. The need to accommodate wives, friends, and family in the clubs
required that they moderate Playboy’s “Entertainment for Men” mantra and bachelor
lifestyle. This was not to say it became feminized or domestic per se, but it did become
less predatory. This shift was reflected in design too. In the London Club, the urbane
contemporary interior that defined the earlier bachelor pads gave way to a more generic
commercial vernacular style de luxe. The London Club remained just as invested in
technological control as were the Playboy Penthouse or the Mansion, with closed-circuit
television, a 35mm film projector for feature film screening, the latest sound equipment for
the cabaret and disco, and advanced lighting. But the use of technology here was
functionally different: instead of specifically acting as a prosthetic partner in seduction, it
was a more generalized tool of environmental, or more aptly, atmospheric control.
This kind of atmospheric control was not unique to the Playboy Clubs: Venturi, Scott-
Brown, and Izenour observed it in the “interior oases” of Las Vegas casinos which
depended upon banishing daylight to keep gamblers at their seats (Venturi et al 1972: 44).
Of “dim-lit restaurants,” Marshall McLuhan reportedly said: “When you dim the visual
sense, [. . .] you step up the sense of taste. [. . .] You are brought together sensually and
sensorially, forced out of the isolation of visual man” (Wolfe 1999: 153). McLuhan’s remark
draws out the most significant difference between the Playboy Clubs and the spaces
represented in Playboy: the former were less dependent on visual stimulation and the
temptations of the eye (though these existed too). In the clubs, food, drink, entertainment,
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music, dancing, gambling, socializing, and flirting brought the Playboy experience to life.
The highly specific descriptions and perspectives of the Penthouse Apartment and
Townhouse became unnecessary once the Playboy lifestyle could be consumed “sensually
and sensorially,” as a series of tactile impressions, rooms and atmospheres.

Pop after-life
The example of London’s Playboy Club—and of the Playboy Clubs more generally—
simultaneously confirm and complicate Banham’s thoughts on pop architecture. Overall,
however, Banham’s verdict that the creation of pop design did not need architects was on
the mark in this case. Although the genesis of 45 Park Lane’s design sounds promising
thanks to the Gropius connection, his influence did not extend beyond the skin of the
building and he had no involvement with the Club itself. The London Club was merely a
tenant of 45 Park Lane: in keeping with Playboy policy, clubs leased speculative
commercial buildings, rather than buying sites outright. The leasing policy is surely another
reason why the clubs lacked the bold street presence that characterized other forms of
pop architecture.
While such operational factors help explain why the London Playboy Club had a
relatively discrete façade, this development should not be seen only as a pragmatic
response to external conditions. The physical schism between inside and out served to
enhance Playboy’s brand of intense interiority. The Club interior, in turn, operated like a
halls of mirrors, constantly referring to things and places outside of itself. The best-known
exemplars of pop interiors, Las Vegas casinos, were also full of literal allusions to other
historical periods or tropical locales (Venturi et al. 1972: 58) The Playboy Clubs were no
less allusive, but they always referred to other elements of the Playboy empire, creating
what Preciado calls worlds within worlds (Preciado 2004: 219); Lownes, more simply,
described the London Club as “a ship of fantasies” (Lownes 1983: 3).
As we have seen, from the beginning, Playboy magazine appreciated and celebrated
high-end furnishings and contemporary design and continued to do so into the 1970s
with the “Playboy Pad” series (See “A Playboy Pad: Pleasure on the Rocks,” 1971: 151–5;
Sewell 2013: 67–79). By contrast, “better goods” were given less emphasis in the London
Playboy Club, perhaps because they were not needed: details such as Playboy-Mansion-
themed rooms were more effective at concretely connecting the Club back to Playboy
magazines, the Mansion, and Hef. So, too, were Playboy-related artwork, rabbit motifs,
and Bunnies. Beyond the physical links to Playboy, the Club also tried to reproduce the
vibe of Hef’s private parties (at least, in some respects), through lighting, music, artwork
and entertainment. These diverse but highly controlled elements together brought the
Playboy atmosphere to life for keyholders and their guests.
Making all of these elements cohere into a single whole is, of course, a form of design—
and Banham would probably have acknowledged it as such. But, in the case of the
London Playboy Club, this was not a formal process in which trained architects, designers,
buildings or goods played a leading part. At any rate, no architect was mentioned in
connection with the interior: the only name to be cited specifically was that of the

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 Invitations to a Candy-Floss World 119

enormously popular Playboy artist LeRoy Neiman who flew over to London specifically to
paint work for the walls (Lownes 1983: 86). Victor Lownes may have been the chief
decision-maker on the ground in terms of the Club’s layout and arrangements, but there
is little doubt about who controlled the overall Playboy look. The design of the rabbit logo
and bunny costumes had originally been overseen by Hef and he apparently continued to
take a close interest in details such as the design of Playboy Club matchbooks and
glassware (Edgren 1998: 76; Lownes,1983: 56–7).
So, in Banham’s terms, Hefner was the producer in this scenario. But what was he
producing exactly? It is helpful here to recall the journalist who described Playboy as a
“Fantasy package”: it produced images (and sometimes experiences) rather than goods.
Although he may not have had an architect’s functional knowledge of design, Hefner
clearly had an unparalleled understanding grasp of how to create, choreograph, and
circulate these images and experiences. In fact, the way in which he set up a continual
feedback loop between media, space, and lifestyle still feels very contemporary.
But commercial culture today has moved on too. It has become more spectacular and
the demands of “Fantasy” more complete, now consuming whole buildings, inside and
out. Since Playboy’s departure in 1982, 45 Park Lane has housed many other occupants,
even serving in the 1990s as an ultra-luxurious residence for the Sultan of Brunei’s
“playboy” brother, Prince Jefri. Its most recent conversion in 2011, however, is the most
telling. In transforming the building into a sister hotel to the Dorchester (called “45 Park
Lane”), the “starchitect” Thierry Despont totally overhauled Gropius’s unloved exterior by
the addition of metallic fins. It now resembles an Art Deco skyscraper, New York, c. 1930.
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PART FOUR

Cinematic Travels

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Chapter 8
A Place of No Return: Frank
Lloyd Wright’s Undomestic
Ennis House in Film1
Merrill Schleier

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown House (1924) made its cinematic debut in Female
(Michael Curtis, 1933) as automobile tycoon Allison Drake’s (Ruth Chatterton) dwelling,
which introduced it as a site of sexuality, domination, and excess. Drake strides confidently
through her factory in one scene, surveying the muscular bodies of men on the assembly
line, an authority that extends to the boardroom. In a symbolic act of castration, she
informs the suited men in a rapid, staccato voice that their performances for increasing
car sales are inadequate. But before the meeting disbands, she eyes a good-looking
neophyte which prompts her regular seduction ploy, to invite him to dinner at her home,
partly shot on location at the Ennis House. The boundaries between public and private
space are thus blurred; the grand and well-appointed dwelling serves as the factory’s
counterpart. This initiates the house as a site of undomestic inhabitants and events; a role
that would continue throughout its career, pointing to how architecture may be altered or
enhanced by cinema.
Located on a corner hillside plot in the Los Feliz neighborhood overlooking the Los
Angeles basin, the dramatically placed Ennis House has starred in over twenty Hollywood
films and numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials. Explanations for its
frequent use range from its location near Hollywood, its landmark status, and the need to
raise revenue for its restoration after the 1994 Northridge earthquake (Head 2011: n.p.).
As Thom Andersen pointed out in Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), it has assumed a variety
of roles from nineteenth-century haunted house, to contemporary mansion, to sexually
inappropriate psychiatric clinic, to twenty-first century science lab. Its versatility has
enabled it to traverse cinematic genre categories from drama to horror to sci-fi and trouble
hegemonic ideals of gender, work, romance, and domesticity. While architects such as
Joseph Rosa acknowledge that Hollywood has generally stereotyped modernist
architecture as a site of criminality and malfeasance, there has been only a perfunctory

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effort to grapple with how its heterogeneous idioms spawned such characterizations
(Rosa 2000: 159–67). I argue that buildings such as the Ennis House have the ability or
agency to generate their own performative by virtue of their particular stylistic and
structural features, and may even help fuel a film’s visual and narrative story line.
Architecture has additional embedded characteristics, which range from its location, to
events that occurred on its premises to the architect’s own biography, which further inform
cinematic appropriations (Benjamin 1999). Cinema, in turn, can change the character of
architecture and how it is perceived by emphasizing certain elements through
cinematography and production design. Hence the Ennis House is consistently rendered
in film as a strange, eroticized “other,” a site of non-normative sexuality or “queerness,”
where forbidden happenings and practices occur and even thrive, repeatedly typecast as
atypical of domestic architectural space. In Female, its size, modernity, and exoticism
serve as a place of sexual predation, conquest and gender abnormality, which set the
stage for its future appropriations as a place of otherness and excess that became part of
its lore. In House on the Haunted Hill (William Castle, 1959) its decorative surplus and
putative isolation render it a peculiar site in which an adulteress and her lover plot murder;
and in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), its archaeological references and implied
mechanical futurity serve as a springboard for Deckard’s apartment and may be a key to
one of the film’s important mysteries concerning his odd identity.
Yet the Ennis House is never a passive location; rather it is transformed by Hollywood,
thereby accruing additional meaning, which in turn continues to inform perceptions and
depictions of the house. Charles and Mirella Affron in their discussion of cinematic
production design employ the term embellishment in their formal taxonomy, whereby
powerful images that are either superimposed on real architecture or created fictionally
may influence a film’s narrative or evoke strong emotions in viewers (Affron and Affron
1995; Ramirez 2004). Elisabeth Bronfen claims that anxieties projected onto conventional
domestic spaces in post-World War II noir films, for example, may not even ostensibly
concern notions of home or even cinema, but are often displaced onto it (e.g. psychological
effects of combat on veterans’ homecoming) (Bronfen 2004: 159–61). While the Ennis
House’s special features (Pre-Columbian styling, imposing size, concrete block
construction, opaque impermeability) were consistently highlighted by Hollywood
filmmakers, they were supplemented to emphasize visual or narrative meaning, thereby
changing the house’s significance and identity, further enhancing its reputation as an
unconventional space.
Unlike Colonial style dwellings in film and television (Rosa 2000; Wlodarczyk 2013), the
cinematic Ennis House is never that of a normative nuclear family or a place of domestic
tranquility; rather, it is frequently presided over by outliers, such as vamps, unhappy
bachelors, aliens, or effete snobs. Its actual unorthodox properties, many of which were
newly employed by Wright, may have spawned such characterizations. For example, the
interior walls and columns are comprised of the same concrete blocks as the exterior,
which confounds ideas of inside and outside space, emphasizing its otherness and
prompting depictions of confusion, disequilibrium or ambiguity. In the Postmodern vision
of Blade Runner, the house’s decenterness is appropriated as the spatial metaphor for
claustrophobia and alienation (Fortin 2011: 48–51). This is continued in the relative

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darkness of parts of the Ennis House, which ranges “from medium tones to the darkest
of darks,” which prompt similar cinematic interpretations that suggest the mysterious and
sinister (Heinz 1979: 107). These, combined with its overly decorated façade and imposing
size render it “umheimlish” or as architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock
pronounced the Ennis House in 1942, “rather undomestic” (Hitchcock 1942: 76–9; Freud
1919: 368–407).
Most importantly, the monument-like Ennis House has the unusual ability to
simultaneously imply the archaeological, modern, and even imminent time, a “past
present” as Andreas Huyssen refers to memorials and monuments, or even a “past
future,” seemingly discordant chronotropes which imbue it with the capacity to fuse eras
through its historical Neo-Mayan massing and lofty placement, and innovative construction
techniques and materials respectively (Huyssen 2003: 5–6). Its time traveling and non
representational, mechanomorphic design, which is employed in its standardized concrete
block construction have also encouraged associations with the technologically-advanced
and the forward-looking, meshing well with images of conduits and computer boards in
science fiction films.
Robert Twombly has even suggested that Wright’s conflicted personal life, which
included the abandonment of his first wife and six children, followed by a short-lived
marriage with a mentally unstable spouse while commencing another affair, and a second
acrimonious divorce, may have added to the house’s domestic lack and its private,
guarded quality (Twombly 1979: 198). The earlier murder of Wright’s mistress at Taliesin
East in 1914 by a crazed butler and the concomitant tabloidization of these events may
further explain the architect’s search for architectural protection and concealment. Neil
Levine contends that Wright was also building his California dwellings to defend against
the possible effects of a devastating earthquake, which he had earlier witnessed in Japan
(Levine 1996: 124). Filmmakers may have intuitively understood these embedded
characteristics from the architect’s biography, hence its appropriation by them for
unseemly purposes and a possible site of discord and trauma.

Archaeology and modernity

The Ennis House is the fourth and the grandest of Wright’s concrete block houses built for
men’s clothier Charles Ennis and his wife Mabel in southern California. Drawn to Los
Angeles by the promise of more lucrative opportunities and to renew his credentials upon
his return from Japan in 1922, Wright continued his commitment to the region’s particular
topography, indigenous materials, and architectural traditions in the western United
States, such as Mexican and Native American. Later Wright recalled how he was awed by
the “Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Inca” which stimulated his wonder, hoping that someday, he
might “have money enough to go to Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru to join in excavating
those long slumbering remains of lost cultures” (Wright 1957: 11–12). The 1920s began
a period of what I term Wright’s “archaeologizing” sensibility, which was consonant with
the stripped down historicism of the Art Deco style. The size, particular historical
borrowings, and sublime viewpoint digressed from Wright’s usual practice and may have
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further cemented the perception that the house was more theatrical and monument-like
than his other typical family dwellings. Drawing from a variety of past architectural sources
from the Pre-Columbian to the Amerindian to the Japanese, he created several such
residences in southern California, but the Ennis House was the most ambitious, translated
into the exotic and primal in the cinematic imaginary.
Its one-half acre-large hillside plot seems to partially determine its design and prompts
a sublime viewpoint, adding to its cache as a dramatic cinematic site. As one approaches
the front of the house from the ever-ascending road on Glendower Avenue, it appears like
a dramatic and isolated Pre-Columbian ziggurat, while the back emanates from the lofty
terrain and echoes the mountains beyond. Wright’s homage to nature’s towering
formations derives from his dual admiration of indigenous Mexican and Japanese sources.
Mayan buildings were regarded by Wright as “earth-architectures: gigantic masses of
masonry raised up on stone-paved terrain, all planned as one mountain, one vast plateau
lying there or made into great mountain ranges themselves.” He acknowledged that many
Pre-Columbian cultures built in mountainous regions for religious purposes to establish a
proximity to the sun and the heavens, veritable “monuments to the gods” (Wright 1957:
111–12; Levine 1996: 141–2). Kathryn Smith locates further the source of Wright’s belief
in nature’s spiritual import to one of his favorite artists, Hokusai, who paid homage to
Mount Fuji (Smith 1992: 21, 43).
Wright’s multiple sources for the Ennis House are eclectic and difficult to parse out; its
stepped back massing, tapered walls, 6,200 square footage, flat roof, pastel color, and
decorative bands of ornamental blocks evoke the Mexican holy sites of Chitchen Itza,
Uxmal, and Palenque (Tselos 1969: 58–72; Weisberg 1967: 41–51; Levine 1996: 140–1).
Parts of the exterior and interior walls are dominated by repeated, abstract geometric
block designs not all of which are identical that create an overall decorative surface,
which may also have been adopted from the varied exterior ornamental carvings on the
walls of Uxmal. The Ennis House’s magnitude and complex, patterned exterior is also
reminiscent of the flat, embellished character of Japanese prints or the nonrepresentational
imagery of Moorish tiles, which are meant to conjure up the infinitude of the universe.
The vertical and horizontal steel rods that are woven throughout the “textile blocks,” like
the warp and weft of a fabric further imbue it with an all-over decorative quality. Jane Chi
Hyun Park identifies such appropriations as “ornamental orientalism,” which refers to the
near or far east and its implied exoticism (Park 2011: 53). In the western mind, these
diverse sources are viewed in generic terms, often “orientalized,” according to Edward
Said and others, associated with decadence, eroticism, decay and excess (Said 1979;
Nochlin 1991).
In spite of the fact that the Ennis House’s decorative scheme is more closely aligned
with Central America than Asia, in Hollywood, a slippage occurred—its over-abundance
prompted filmmakers to exaggerate its orientalist tropes, both formally and thematically.
Wright himself acknowledged the house’s immoderateness; stating:

I built the Storer house up on a hill—it’s a little palace. It looks like a little Venetian
palazzo. Then I built the Freeman house, and then there was finally the Ennis house,
which was way out of concrete block size. I think that was carrying it too far—that’s

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what you do, you know, after you get going, and get going so far, that you get out of
bounds. And I think the Ennis house was out of bounds for a concrete block house.
(Wright 1954)

Hence he may have infused the house with traces of barbaric surplus; when discussing
Pre-Columbian architecture, he employed primitivist language that associated it with
brutality, referring to the early man or slave who constructed a religious edifice “with his
hands. . .tied behind his back” at the behest of a powerful despot (Wright 1957: 111).
Scholars and popular observers of the house likewise imbued it with similar overwrought
emotionalism; Robert L. Sweeney asserted that “no space in twentieth-century architecture
is so suggestive of a pagan ritual,” which parallels Wright’s statements about Pre-
Columbian architecture (Sweeney 1994: 57).
The Ennis House’s conflicted nature in cinema may be a function of its concurrent
ability to evoke progressive modernity and the archaeological past. Its modernity is seen
in its materials and design, resulting from the use of steel-reinforced concrete blocks
arranged in a standardized, grid-like pattern, as logical as a steel skeleton frame. The
concrete is comprised of materials from the site and fabricated mechanically by worker-
artisans, insuring its cost efficiency. In order to aestheticize a substance previously
considered “ugly,” Wright designed a pattern that was imprinted on its surface via the
machine (Wright 1928: 258). He viewed the material’s manufacture and patterning as the
“salvation of the concrete in the mechanical processes of this mechanical age” (Wright
1928; Pfeiffer 1992: 300). Architect and Taliesin apprentice Edgar Tafel claimed that the
textile block system was created to standardize the production of building components,
an analogue to the standardized factory (Tafel 1979: 125–6). Wright envisioned the new
method as the first step in providing affordable, mass-produced housing in the United
States, which was realized eventually in his Usonian architecture. As early as 1927, his
invention was praised in the Architectural Record as the epitome of a logical, modern
technique, representative of the Machine Age:

We are living in a scientific age of development, with the aeroplane and the automobile
an everyday accessory. Yet, in the general practice of architecture we are still bound to
the traditional stock and trade of Old World buildings and ideas. Wright has succeeded
in breaking the old traditions by making use of mechanical methods, modern structural
forms and their application by the shaping of monolithic masses. . . (Architectural
Record 1928: 452)

Echoing its mode of construction, the concrete blocks are each comprised of simple,
rectilinear forms, their simplicity announcing them as stripped down machine products.
Geometric, layered and convoluted, they evoke mechanical innards or equipment,
especially adaptable to later cinematic settings containing computers, spaceships, and
complex industries.
In accord with his earlier prairie-style dwellings, the massive Ennis House is arranged
in a variety of cubical planes, which result in the interaction of convex and concave forms.
Taken as an aggregate, these dense, seemingly impermeable shapes evoke a solid
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presence that is relieved by its concavities, including recessed windows and passageways
that appear cavernous and dark, thereby enshrouding the house in mystery. Thomas A.
Heinz describes the windows as “deeply hooded” deliberately blocking out the bright
southern California light, appearing as “black voids” (Heinz 1979: 107). Filmmakers
explored these empty spaces to convey the unknown—what or who is lurking within or
without, the camera seemed to inquire, a characteristic which is underscored by its
hidden main entranceway which is located behind an exotic, Mayan-inspired gate
designed by Julius Dietzmann. The entire perimeter is enclosed by a wall, which is
intended to provide privacy and protection but instead further emphasized its impermeability
and secrecy.

Female: Primitive excess and the modern

Allison Drake in Female is depicted as a hypertrophied version of a New Woman—she is
autonomous, professional and commanding, resembling the predatory, mercenary male
bosses who are presented in Depression-era cinema, including Big Business Girl (William
Seiter, 1931), Under Eighteen (Archie Mayo, 1931) and Skyscraper Souls (Edgar Selwyn,
1932) hence as grandiose as the Ennis House itself. Indeed she aims to treat men “exactly
as they have always treated women.” However Drake’s ruthless independence is depicted
as an aberration and an anathema to gender normativity. A “pseudo Henry Ford,” type,
she presides over a large International Style building complex that resembles the latter’s
newly opened River Rouge plant, which includes a factory with a modern assembly line
that churns out cars (“Female” 1933: 59; Smith, 1992). She likewise heads an efficient
office bureaucracy with salesman, managers, and designers who are handled with
intimidating resolve. In accord with the factory, the office is well appointed with all manner
of the era’s modern mechanical conveniences, including an intercom system, panoply of
telephones, and various adding machines.
The imposing Ennis House serves as the analogue of the commodious, mechanical
factory for Drake who lives alone, attended to by servants. Our first glimpse of the dwelling
occurs when she returns from work. Disembarking from her spacious automobile she is
greeted by two Great Danes; both car and pets are meant as analogues to the excessive
enormity of the palatial-sized dwelling. In accord with office and factory, the house has
up-to-date mechanical amenities and luxury items such as an intercom, numerous
telephones, a large driveway, an oudoor pool and even a massage room. The film’s use
of the house’s own large driveway which the camera tracks, and the chauffeur’s quarters
support the automobile’s hegemony, while Drake’s command of the car at work and at
home, are employed as detrimental to her natural womanhood at a time when the efficacy
of allowing females to drive was still a hotly debated issue (Scharf 1991: 196). Furthermore,
she uses the house frequently as an extension of her workspace, often completing
numerous tasks while breakfasting in bed, troubling the boundaries between professional
and domestic space. “I’m not a bit domestic,” she quips.
Art director Jack Okey designed the interior, extending its ideological intent while
interfacing with a few of the Ennis House’s actual structural and design features. Hence

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the main foyer with its pale color scheme and swirling majestic stairwell conforms to the
Great White Deco style of Cedric Gibbons at MGM or Van Nest Polglase at RKO, which
was employed to convey stylishness, sophistication, and wealth, dovetailing with the
exterior (McClendon 2003: n.p.; Heisner 1990: 57–114). There is a further attempt to
integrate the Deco inside and Wright’s outside; seen in the concrete block-like pattern on
the stairwell railing that also casts a large shadow on the soaring wall. Indeed in several
other scenes, Wright-inspired concrete columns are observed behind transparent glass
doors, suggesting the conflation of inner and outer space that characterizes the real
house, but is here employed to convey Drake’s identity crisis which is played out in her
confusion of the public and private sphere.
Drake further uses the ersatz Ennis House as the site of her predation of young male
staff members who strike her fancy. This occurs after work hours, locating her as a woman
of the night, which is reinforced by the reference to her as a “pick up” by employee Jim
Thorne (George Brent). Subsequent to most of her seductions, the smitten victims are
discarded and transferred to other company locations. The set-designed library is the
site of her mercenary transgressions, a place of exotic modernity consonant with the
Ennis House’s decorative and thematic orientalism, replete with primitive objets d’ art
and a phonograph enlivened by racy jazz music. An appropriate array of tropical, jungle
motifs are employed to underscore her primeval urges, including verdant plants, a zebra
skin mat, and a stuffed rhinoceros head which identifies her as a hunter and trophy
collector of men. With a telltale glance, she flings a satin pillow on a plush bearskin
rug adjacent to the fireplace to signal that a passionate encounter is about to begin on
the floor.
A luxurious swimming pool is the most elaborate aspect of the house’s production
design to enforce the theme of decadence, which Okey adapted from his own work with
Warner Brothers’ chief art director Anton Grot on Busby Berkeley’s Footlight Parade
(Lloyd Bacon, 1933), which did not exist in the real house until Wright added one for the
new owner, John Nesbitt in 1940. Theatrical pools of this type were built on estates
and popularized by Hollywood’s elite and industrial magnates alike, beginning in the
1920s, to advertise their star power and financial success. For example, Douglas
Fairbanks and Mary Pickford’s Pickfair Estate (1920) boasted a pool of 55 feet in width
and 100 feet long, while oil tycoon Edward Doheny’s Beverly Hills mansion’s hillside
pool (1925) included a waterfall (Reft 2009: n.p.). Okey appears to have inserted the
set-designed pool at the western portion of the house, its geometric Deco design
harmonizing with both the exterior and interior of the house. A large cascading fountain
at the pool’s rear highlights the party’s celebratory decadence and spectacle. It is
reminiscent of the Yoshiwara Club’s fountain in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) infusing
it further with traces of orientalized eroticism. Okey supplemented the house’s Wrightian
design with Cubist-inspired sculptures and strange animal figures that line the pool
wall, which correspond to the interior’s trophy animals and the house’s primitivist
features.
One of the poolside scenes in Female features Ms. Drake’s new object of desire, a
lanky, effeminate young man in a tight swimsuit who is immune to her advances, referring
to her erroneously as pure and goddess-like (see Figure 8.1). With obvious frustration,
130 Archi.Pop

Figure 8.1 Poolside seduction, frame enlargement (Female, William Curtis, 1933, art direction by
Jack Okey).

Drake declares him inexperienced in the ways of women, a characterization to which he

agrees. In response, she decides to send him to Paris to study art, a coded reference to
his homosexuality. Later Drake hosts a swanky pool party that is comprised of sumptuously
dressed invitees and an array of swimmers, some of whom, in turn, prey upon her. While
she is dancing with one guest, he flatters her in an effort to sell her insurance. Extricating
herself from this sycophant, another emerges from the pool and professes his love.
Questioning him further, she learns that he is an opportunist—his real goal is to form a
business rather than a romantic partnership.
The house’s final seduction scene involves Jim Thorne who she plies with vodka in
the house’s exotic library lair. She met him previously at a lowbrow amusement park’s
shooting gallery (beginning the battle of the sexes) after escaping from the poolside
fortune hunters, wishing instead to be valued for her personhood. Because she is
disguised in everyday attire, Thorne is unaware of her real identity, and she his—he
has recently been hired at the corporation as a designer. When he encounters her at
the office, she tries to seduce him in the same manner that has worked in the past,
prompting him to later storm out of the Ennis House indignantly. Drake wins him over
finally by playing a helpless damsel at a picnic in the country, far away from all things
industrial and lavish, finally agreeing to marry him and relinquish the company’s reins.
Thus modernized factory and luxurious Ennis House alike have been symbolically
renounced, the latter as both too primeval and too modern, an antidote to healthy,
normative femininity.

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House on the Haunted Hill:

Perverse predator
A shot of millionaire Frederick Loren’s (Vincent Price) monumental visage is superimposed
on the imposing Ennis House’s façade in House on the Haunted Hill, again inextricably
linking an overarching deviant persona and excess with that of the house (see Figure 8.2).
Here it is cast as one hundred years old in which seven murders have occurred, establishing
it as a violent and traumatic site. To remind viewers of its dominating presence, the camera
crosscuts to its exterior throughout the film to punctuate scenes, and augments its sense
of isolation and entrapment. Loren has rented it for the evening from its emotionally
unstable, alcoholic owner Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook) for an expensive party, promising
to pay five invitees $10,000 each if they stay the night, even issuing all of them guns for
their protection. We discover that Loren arranges the party to ensnare his cheating
wife and her lover, the seemingly upstanding Dr. Trent, who are themselves planning his
demise on the selfsame premises. The evil doctor with the help of Mrs. Loren (Carol
Ohlmart) intend to induce hysteria in the innocent and voluble Miss Manning (Carol Craig)
through scare tactics and various props, such as a severed head, the feigned hanging of
Mrs. Loren, and ghost-like apparitions. The illicit couple hopes that Manning will lose her
composure and kill Loren so that they may inherit his fortune. Typecast once more as a

Figure 8.2 Loren and Ennis House, frame enlargement (House on the Haunted Hill, William
Castle, 1959, art direction by David Milton).
132 Archi.Pop

place of primeval passions and now mental derangement, the Ennis House’s owner
and tenants display various forms of aggression, erotic overindulgence, and mental
dysfunction, including sadomasochism, ludomania, alcoholism, possible hysterical
tendencies, and an extramarital affair; the dwelling seemingly has the properties to
sponsor such actions and states of mind, which are enhanced via the use of production
design (Lampley 2011: 36–7).
A line of hearses seen in long shot, carry the guests to the Ennis House, which is
Loren’s wife’s idea of gallows humor, by ascending the steep incline of Glendower Avenue
on a grim, rainy night. Filmed in lonely isolation, the house’s seeming spatial detachment
from both town and country associate it with other haunted dwellings in cinema, removed
from all things rational and far from any safeguards if such needs arose. In spite of the fact
that its exterior is not the traditional Victorian style of the horror genre, its stepped-back,
Pre-Columbian temple-like appearance and archaeological borrowings freeze it in time
and space, rendering it capable of fixing past spirits. Wright’s own association of such
architecture with primitive and cruel methods is thus embedded in its history.
Once the guests disembark, the automobiles continue down the Glendower Avenue
hill and away. From then on, the house becomes a trap and now resembles a prison-like
fortress or a locked psychiatric facility. The camera pans its seemingly thick and solid
walls, emphasizing the dark caverns created by the recessed windows and doors at
night. Production designer David Milton added jail-like bars to the windows, lending the
house a further air of menace and foreboding. After the guests proceed through the
driveway and imposing Mayan-inspired gates, which provide entrance to the inner
courtyard and main doorway, they spontaneously slam shut behind the invitees, either
controlled by ancient spirits or the autonomous electronic means of modernity which
signal the house’s power to cause such havoc. In order to emphasize that it is inescapable,
a point of view shot from the visitors’ perspectives shows the vast panorama of the Los
Angeles basin, the twinkling lights of which appear remote and distant. The contrast of
the house’s density with the ineffable space beyond accentuates the subsequent focus
on its interiority, which is contained by its fortress-like presence. Unlike International Style
houses that are comprised of glass and permit surveillance from without and within, the
Ennis House thwarts such ocular penetration; rather it seems to have the omniscient
power to survey its inhabitants.
Effete Frederick Loren is the house party’s master of ceremonies. Played in character
by Vincent Price, he sports pomaded hair, a manicured mustache, an affected voice, and
a divided name that references his gender confusion. As Harry M. Benshoff claims, in his
private life Price was an educated esthete who perfected his queer “male diva persona”
in cinema by the 1940s (Benshoff 2008: 146–7). The film’s character has been married
four times and currently has an adversarial relationship with his current, younger wife, with
whom he exchanges barbed remarks and on whom he occasionally inflicts physical pain.
Despite Pritchard’s ownership of the house, he has never lived in it; rather its interior décor
coincides with Loren’s sumptuous and eclectic tastes, which generate disharmony. In
accord with Female, the interior does not ostensibly reflect the style of the outside, which
was perhaps already a part of the house’s conflicted nature. As a Los Angeles Times critic
commented, the interior and exterior were never really consonant, at odds with Wright’s

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stated aims of harmonious integration: “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” (“Architecture in the Movies” 2009:
n.p.).
Production designer Milton attempted to assimilate his designs with the actual house
by employing repeated geometric motifs in the flooring and door moldings. However, he
exaggerated aspects of the original dwelling in its cinematic counterpart, especially its
decorativeness, which is seen in the living and upstairs bedrooms. The interior décor
which reflects the tastes of a decadent aesthete like Loren are a wide-ranging mixture of
master paintings in gilded frames, Italian Renaissance bronzes and tapestries, lugubrious
Victorian furniture, and crystal chandeliers and cutlery, much of which are covered in
spider webs and dust, lending the whole a funerary air.
All of the sleeping quarters register a decorative overindulgence consonant with the
exterior’s “ornamental orientalism,” perhaps referring to the neurotic femininity of both
Loren and his wife, further extending the confusion and entrapment via architecture
and interior décor. In late nineteenth-century American architectural discourse, over-
embellishment was frequently linked to psychopathology and gender dysfunction, which
dovetails with its use in House on the Haunted Hill. For example, Louis Sullivan diagnosed
the unjustified use of ornament in architecture as “profoundly antisocial,” “hysterical,” and
“neurasthenic” (Sullivan 1940: 91). One is reminded of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short
story The Yellow Wallpaper (1889) in which the neurasthenic protagonist is prescribed
bed rest, prompting her to imagine the ornate room coming to life. The most hyperbolic
in the cinematic Ennis House is the Lorens’ assigned quarters, which include exaggerated
William Morris-like wallpaper with curvilinear, floral motifs that even extend to the furniture.
The overall compositional pattern creates a visual horror vacui or cenophobia, evoking
something both physically and psychologically stultifying, even suffocating.
The wine cellar is the dwelling’s most disturbing space in House on the Haunted Hill
and references the Ennis House’s actual façade and interior columns. It includes stacked
Wright-like concrete blocks that rise throughout the underground chamber, linking the
outside to the inside most emphatically, highlighting the real house’s unorthodox
interchange of spatial interiority and exteriority. The Ennis House’s asymmetrical plan and
main entranceway, hidden behind the gates on the leftward side, creates disorientation for
visitors. Structurally the cinematic underground chamber echoes the original’s lower
story; after arriving at the door of the latter, one must descend below street level to a
darkened space before ascending the stairs to the dining room’s bright natural illumination.
In the film, upstanding Lance Schroeder (Richard Long) and Miss Manning explore the
subterranean space and discover its myriad doors, many of which are unfathomable,
impossible to discern why some are locked or where they lead, prompting bewilderment
and precluding flight. Gaston Bachelard regards the lower level of residential dwellings as
their unconscious, the bearer of dark and often repressed secrets (Bachelard 1958:1969:
17–25). Barry Curtis concurs, asserting that houses and the objects within them are
memory vessels for all current and future inhabitants, molding and even crafting their
134 Archi.Pop

behavior (Curtis 2008: 34, 40–6). The historical styles employed by Wright combined with
the production-designed furnishings and décor of Loren’s dwelling act as such containers
of recollections for past inhabitants who seek expression and perhaps revenge. While the
windowless basement appears dark and dank and suitable for wine equipment, it also
houses something sinister that has formerly wrought mayhem, a murderous acid pool
installed by a previous owner. Mrs. Loren and Dr. Trent fall in and are reduced to skeletons
at Loren’s hands, aware of their plan to murder him all along.
Haunted houses like the Ennis seem to possess their own agency. While these were
employed by David Milton in the typical fashion reserved for the horror genre; the house’s
mechanical contrivances point to its properties as a technologically sophisticated
machine, capable too of causing entrapment—iron gates, self-governing doors and
windows bars, registering the dystopian effects of modernity. Hence the Ennis House has
been transformed into something queered and gender-confused, a combination of the
exterior’s cinematically exaggerated masculinized modernity and an overly embellished,
exotic, feminized interior, a cruel and sadistic space peopled by mentally-deranged
inhabitants who employ its structural features for their own ends.

Blade Runner: Time traveler

The Ennis House’s ability to time travel renders it a perfect vehicle to explore post-industrial
notions of home in urban America, while continuing to maintain its queer, unorthodox
cinematic persona. Blade Runner appropriates aspects of the dwelling for its hero, outlier
Rick Deckard whose identity is ambiguous. His charge is to hunt down and rid the earth
of replicants, of which he may be one, technologically-produced humanoids who have
been banished from the earth, but who have returned to plead for extended life from their
creator who heads up the Tyrell Corporation. The film is set in Los Angeles of 2019, but it
references the past, present and future in its thematic, visual language (references to
previous film genres such as film noir) and architectural appropriations. Cinematographers
Herb A. Lightman and Richard Patterson, writing on Blade Runner, claimed in 1982: “One
of the principles in the design of the film is that while it is 40 years in the future, it is
also 40 years in the past” (Lightman and Patterson 1982: 719). In this dystopian setting
in which First World inhabitants have fled the earth for greener planetary pastures,
leaving behind a polyglot underclass of mostly Asians and misfits, the urban landscape
and its technological appurtenances have begun to fall apart, requiring residents to retrofit
extant buildings, which director Ridley Scott sees as a metaphor for the whole film
(“A Good Start Designing the Future” 2007). The result is a kind of historicism gone
wild, where futuristic spinner cars coexist with George Wyman’s nineteenth-century
Bradbury Building (1893) and Wright’s Ennis House. This led Giuliana Bruno, expanding
on the observations of Frederick Jameson, to refer to the film as a Postmodern pastiche,
characterized by an “excess of scenography” (Bruno 1990; 183–95; Jameson 1983:
111–25). Scott who was trained as an art director, views the film’s production design in
general, hence the Ennis House in particular as a character as important as the actors
and the dialogue.

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I would like to circumscribe my discussion of the Ennis House’s function in Blade

Runner by briefly sketching out three aspects of its visual and thematic significance—its
reference to a Pre-Columbian archaeological past which conjures up memories of empire
and cruelty consonant with the designs of the Tyrell Corporation, the crowded space of
Deckard’s apartment which dovetails with the containment of bodies in the city below
creating a dialectical space of alienation and intimacy, and the dwelling’s role as a replicant
or “alien,” both a possible analogue to Deckard, and by association Rachel.
Both the Tyrell Corporation’s double, stepped-back pyramids in which replicants are
fabricated and monitored and Deckard’s apartment, which borrowed from the Ennis
House, were inspired by Pre-Columbian temple architecture, linking them visually and
symbolically. Special effects artist Doug Trumbull is credited with deciding to reference the
“Mayan pyramids in Mexico” for their stony quality, varied textures, stepped-back design,
and gargoyle figures which could be employed as landing gear, realized finally through a
series of miniatures and matter paintings by Matthew Yuricich (Shay 1982: 12–13). The
Tyrell’s exterior elevators were even appropriated from the central stairs of such temples.
Briefly noting the similarities between the corporate headquarters and Ennis-inspired
dwelling Dietrich Neumann claimed that these formal analogies contained the clues to
one of the film’s nagging questions—is Deckard a replicant? (Neumann 152; Bukatman
1998: 81).
A bird’s eye view of one of the Tyrell’s imposing megalopolitan structures that survey
the Los Angeles basin with its omniscient external eye echoes the Ennis House’s removed
hillside placement, both of which refer to the isolated and elevated position of Pre-
Columbian temple architecture, built closer to the celestial sphere. The connections
between these public and private buildings extend further; the stepped back, gridded
windows of the Tyrell’s façade was adapted from the house’s dining room’s floor-to-ceiling
tripartite art glass windows, the recessed shapes of which are emphasized on the back
exterior. In accord with many of Wright-architected dwellings, the Tyrell Corporation’s
shielded windows placed within its impermeable walls appear to likewise survey Los
Angeles from within, maintaining a sense of privacy and secrecy, useful for the corporation’s
all pervasive gaze.
The borrowings may serve an additional iconographic function. Wright associated Pre-
Columbian cultures with barbaric practices of a primitive, despotic empire, which
employed forced labor to build its massive temples. Kaja Silverman has noted that Blade
Runner’s replicants assume the subject position of slaves, with chief replicant Roy Batty
(Rutger Hauer) heading up their rebellion (Silverman 1991: 109–32). One may add that
Meso-American priests who believed that spilling blood for the gods was a means of
giving thanks for creating life, practiced human sacrifices at many temple sites. Hence
while the Tyrell Corporation pyramids may possess the latest scientific engineering
principles, its architecture speaks to its god-like pretensions and inhumane methods, to
generate and destroy life.
The exterior of Deckard’s apartment was shot on location at the Ennis House; however
in the film, through special effects, it is transformed into a 700-story skyscraper, linking it
through height to the Tyrell Corporation. Pam Robertson Wojcik has written insightfully
about the differences between traditional residences and apartments in cinema, arguing
136 Archi.Pop

that the latter may serve as a narrative device, key to the imaginary of single and queer life
rather than that of the nuclear family; hence the setting reinforces Deckard’s status as an
outlier, or even an “alien” (Wojcik 2010: 5–7).
The interior of his ninety-seventh floor abode is dialectically related to the labyrinthine
and densely packed city below. Its orientalist decorative excess which is further
underscored by the inclusion of a Buddha head and a Japanese screen is indexical of the
bodies of the generic, anonymous Asian population who are left to reside in a dystopian
Los Angeles, closely resembling the crowdedness of Hong Kong or Calcutta. Ridley Scott
admired Moebius’s post technofuturist vision and sketched many views of similar
congested cityscapes and private living spaces, which were passed to designer Syd
Mead to develop into more complete drawings and, in turn, constructed by production
designer Lawrence Paull (Sammon 1996: 74–5). An exploration of the relationship
between interiority and exteriority is a hallmark of the Ennis House, seen in the columns
within and without and spatial amplitude of some rooms and the claustrophobic sense of
others, a constriction and confounding of space, which is transferred to Deckard’s
residence. Although the apartment echoes the chaotic, mechanized city, its darkened
ambiance and dirt-encrusted surfaces allude to a kind of claustrophobic intimacy, a
perverse domesticity.
As Scott Frank noted in passing, the apartment is similar to the replicants who occupy
it, Rachel and possibly Deckard (Frank 1997: 90). It is composed of 16 × 16 inch
molds of the Ennis House’s concrete blocks, its modular structure actually retrofitted
for cost efficiency, according to Ridley Scott, and reconfigured on the New York street
set at Warner Brothers. In accord with the architectonic replicants who are built and
provided with a prefabricated memory, the apartment’s blocks are likewise imbued
with layered recollections, which include traces from past architectural styles and their
concomitant histories and modes of use. Rachel’s visual link to the block’s grid-like,
knitted character, horizontal arrangement, and dusky beige is echoed in her dress’s
colors and stripes (see Figure  8.3). Trying to establish her authenticity, she brings
childhood family photographs of herself to convince Deckard that she has a human
past. As Giuliana Bruno claims, “the mother is necessary to a claiming of history, to the
affirmation of an identity over time and to one’s origins,” that are supposedly
corroborated by the photographic documents (Bruno 1990: 183, 191). Deckard
informs Rachel that the images represent false memories, which the Tyrell Corporation
has implanted, but he too collects photographs as a way to access his own history.
Rachel and Deckard’s search for origins is repeated in the manner in which the ersatz
Ennis blocks have been artificially retrofitted to render the apartment a cave or womb-like
space (especially the kitchen and bathroom) according to Lawrence Paull, which echoes
the dark claustrophobia of parts of the Ennis House, to create a spatial mother and
a domestic familiarity which is absent from the rest of post-industrial city (LoBrutto
1992: 71).
While preserving traditional spatial ideas associated with domesticity, the interior also
is appointed like the replicants with an array of futuristic conveniences, including a
Holoprint Viewer, “a supra-intelligent computer system used as a monitoring device by
the police of the future,” which is woven like the knitted blocks themselves into the

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Figure 8.3 Rachel in Deckard’s apartment, frame enlargement (Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, 1982,
art direction by Lawrence Paull).

complicated interior (Blade Runner Sketchbook 1982: 83–4). A “past future” is likewise
seen in Deckard’s apartment lobby which features an electronic key, which he must use
in order to gain entry, intermingled and congruent with the a wall of Ennis blocks.

Conclusion
The Ennis House’s adaptability to various cinematic genres is a function of its multivalent
vocabulary, its ability to reference historical architecture while anticipating future trends,
and a testament to Wright’s prescience. In the films I have explored, it registers an
apprehension of modernity and/or technological domination, by recalling an often cruel
and primeval past. Hence while Wright may have sought a stylistic rapprochement
between the historic and contemporary, filmmakers perceived this union as a threat to
domestic calm. Simultaneously, the house has the transhistorical ability to prompt
cinematic themes of passionate excess—both erotic and violent—through its imposing
size, dark and mysterious interior spaces, and prolific use of exotic ornament. Wright
himself realized its extravagance and theatricality, perhaps prompting him in the 1930s to
design a different type of mass-produced house, his simple Usonian dwellings for middle-
class families. However his son Lloyd Wright continued to build concrete block houses in
southern California, which never received the attention or publicity of his father’s dwelling.
Currently the Ennis House is being restored, purchased by billionaire Ron Burkle, and is
now a registered historical landmark and will remain unoccupied. Is this a function of
economic exigencies or has film also irrevocably altered its potential for domestic normality
and tranquility? Ultimately the cinematic Ennis House provides no security and comfort;
rather its unhomeliness is interpreted as a residence from which to escape, a place of no
return.
138 Archi.Pop

Note
1 Appreciation is extended to Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives and
Sandra Joy Aguilar, formerly of the Warner Brothers Archives at the University of Southern
California.

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Chapter 9
Gidget and the Creature from
Venus: Madness, Monsters, and
Dangerous Roman Ruins in Film
Sarah Benson

“Between an American and a crazy one, how can you tell the difference?” one museum
guard whispers to another. We are in the Museo Nazionale Romano, watching as the
teenage title character of Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) loses it. She wanders into a closed
area of the museum, drifts into her own fantasy world, and finally attacks a statue. The
guards are perplexed by Gidget’s behavior. Is she mad? Or maybe an art thief? But we
can hear something they do not. The statues are speaking to Gidget. And this is not the
first time something like this has happened to her in Rome. Over the course of the film
Gidget experiences first wishful fantasies and then paranoid delusions among the city’s
ruins. The guards hustle Gidget to the authorities, but perhaps they should have sought
medical attention instead; Gidget is exhibiting symptoms of Stendhal Syndrome, an
experience of being overwhelmed in the presence of art, to the point of rapid heartbeat,
fainting spells, or even hallucinations. This is a clinically recognized condition, named in
the 1980s by Graziella Magherini, a Florentine psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who first
described its characteristics (Magherini 1989 and 2007). Although when Gidget Goes to
Rome was released this diagnosis would not have been available either to doctors or
moviegoers, the film’s view of ancient architectural monuments as posing a psychological
menace did not come out of nowhere.
In the 1957 science fiction film 20 Million Miles to Earth, Roman ruins do not just
disorient but actually kill. This essay will situate the motif of the menace of monuments in
this pair of mid-century movies within the history of attitudes to ruins in popular and mass
culture while also arguing that cinematic representations of Roman ruins themselves
construct inhabitable architectural spaces. Film is not just a vehicle that suggests how to
see Roman architecture but one of the structures out of which Rome’s ancient architecture
has been rebuilt. Rome was well represented in the American cinema of the 1950s and
1960s. Hollywood produced a string of big-budget epics where Rome was the setting of

139
140 Archi.Pop

ancient and biblical history, among them Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953), Ben Hur
(1958), Spartacus (1960), and Cleopatra (1963). These pop-culture representations of the
ancient world have recently received legitimacy as an object of scholarly study by both
classicists and film historians. In their introduction to Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome
in Modern Popular Culture, the editors write of the success of the more recent film
Gladiator (2000) that its

advertising campaign, and the film itself, instance the experience of ancient Rome
available to most Americans and Europeans in the twentieth century. They receive
their principle [sic] contact with the ancient world through popular culture in its diverse
manifestations: films and television programs, historical novels and plays, comic books
and toys, advertising and computer games. (Joshel et al. 2001: 1)

For these movies ancient Rome was splendidly renewed and rebuilt on the studio lots and
sound stages of Hollywood or Cinecittà, headquarters of the Italian motion picture industry
just outside of Rome. Movies like Gidget and 20 Million Miles, on the other hand, were
shot on location in Rome amid its palimpsest of architecture from different eras. Like the
big-budget epics, these movies are also places to explore the modern relationship to
ancient Rome, but antiquity is accessed here through the presence of monuments that
show their age.
The relationship between Roman monuments and popular culture goes back much
further than the twentieth century. Classical architecture, art, and texts, and the
appreciation of them, may be the shared high culture of Western civilization. But that very
sense of shared heritage was enabled by mass production. Reverence for ancient Rome
is itself, therefore, a pop-culture phenomenon. Renewed interest in the ancient world
spread across Europe in the fifteenth century thanks to the invention of printing texts from
moveable type and of techniques for reproducing images from woodcuts and engravings.
The first technology reacquainted Europeans with Greek and Latin texts on history,
philosophy, politics, and the natural sciences. The second circulated images of ancient
buildings that could serve either as imaginative settings for the great deeds of ancient
history or as models for new buildings. Actual travel to visit these monuments was
originally only an option for the wealthy, it is true. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries the youth of Europe’s elite classes went to Italy to complete their classical
educations with first-hand experience of ancient monuments. We can think of this so-
called Grand Tour as a ritual of high culture that was nevertheless informed ahead of time
and commemorated after the fact by mass-produced mementos of Italian monuments.
New technologies that sped up travel—rail, steam, and the jet engine—transformed the
Grand Tour into the mass tourism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tourism and
its paraphernalia are also pop-culture phenomena that we cannot ignore as media through
which twentieth- and twenty-first century people have their “principal contact with the
ancient world,” along with movies, video games, comics and the rest of it.
Though ruins may always have been seen as having a dark side, pop-culture
representations of the danger of historical monuments seem to coincide especially with the
advent of rail and jet travel and the resulting increase in non-elite travel to Italy. Precursors

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to the cinematic representation of perilous monuments include three works of popular

fiction from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when travel to Italy was becoming
possible on a large scale to members of the middle class, women, and Americans—people
who are unlikely to have had the classical education that would entitle them to feel like the
cultural heirs of ancient Rome or prepare them for the encounter with Roman monuments.
In The Marble Faun (1860), American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne explores the art and
architecture of Rome as a noxious setting for murder. The young American title character
of Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1878) dies as the result of a moonlight visit to the Colosseum.
Ruins are equally dangerous in British author E. M. Forster’s story Albergo Empedocle
(1903), in which a young Englishman loses his mind among the Greek monuments in Sicily.
These stories were widely accessible works of popular fiction. Albergo Empedocle
appeared in Temple Bar magazine, which promised literary entertainment for the whole
family. These works, furthermore, did not just comment on tourism but were absorbed into
the feedback loop of its rituals. Hawthorne’s novel follows four friends (one Italian and three
artist expatriates) through all the sights of Rome and became itself a guide for tourists to
the city. The publishing firm Tauchnitz allowed visitors to Rome to customize their own
copies with a selection of standard photographs (Williams 1997; Pelizzari 2003). An early
reviewer of Daisy Miller thought the story ought to be required reading for Americans going
abroad, hoping that Tauchnitz would publish it and that it would “be in the bookcases of all
the ocean steamers, be so presented to the ‘moral consciousness’ of the American people
that they, being quickwitted, may see themselves here truthfully portrayed, and may say,
‘Not so, but otherwise will it be’ ” (“Recent Novels” 1878).
Both Gidget and 20 Million Miles follow the stories of visitors who are out of place in
Rome and who have no clear relationship to the past embodied in its ancient architectural
remains—in one case this is an American tourist, in the other an alien from Venus. Where
ancient architecture provokes a deeply personal crisis in Gidget, the destruction of parts
of the Forum and Colosseum in 20 Million Miles is used to raise more universal human
questions about how technological progress may disrupt our relation to history.

The crushing weight of history

The ancient architecture of Rome stars as itself in the 1957 monster movie 20 Million
Miles to Earth, while also playing a deadly allegorical role. This low-budget movie might be
forgotten today if it did not feature the work of beloved stop-motion animator Ray
Harryhausen. For this movie, Harryhausen and director Nathan Juran brought to life a
fast-growing alien, captured on the planet Venus by an American team. Venus turns out
to be rich in minerals “that would be of vast benefit to our own civilization.” The atmosphere,
however, is toxic to humans, and several of the American explorers die. By studying a
Venusian native, the Americans hope to learn how to survive on its planet. When the
American spaceship crashes off the Sicilian coast on its return voyage, only one of the
remaining crew members survives, Colonel Robert Calder (William Hopper). The “animal
specimen” from Venus, still in its egg case, washes up on the beach where it is found by
a fisherman’s child (Pepe, played by Bart Braverman). Pepe sells it to a visiting zoologist
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(Frank Puglia) for 200 lira, a sum that will allow him to buy “the hat from Texas,” a real
American cowboy hat. Calder is cared for by the zoologist’s niece, Marisa Leonardo (Joan
Taylor), a doctor in training, and the two fall in love. The creature hatches, escapes, grows
at an alarming rate, and is recaptured and taken to the Rome zoo for study. An electrical
failure allows the creature to escape again and wreak havoc among the historical
monuments before it is finally killed at the Colosseum.
Though the trailer promises a “COLOSSUS ASTRIDE COLISEUM!” the creature gets
loose in Rome only in a final brief sequence of the film (see Figure 9.1, upper frame). The
cinematic spectacle of destruction was a specialty of Harryhausen’s films in the 1950s.
He brought down the Golden Gate Bridge, the Washington Monument and much of New
York City. Harryhausen recalled that Chicago had been next on their list of cities to destroy
on screen, but his movie about the Venusian alien moved to Rome, where the slow
postwar economic recovery in Italy made it cheaper to film in the 1950s. In his earlier
movies Harryhausen had demolished the architectural and engineering marvels of the
New World, its skyscrapers and suspension bridges. It meant something different to
destroy ancient monuments. Unlike American monuments, those of ancient Rome are not
merely national but belong to the collective sense of heritage of the West. It also meant
something different for tanks and troops to be rolling through Rome with buildings
tumbling around them because Rome was a city that had suffered through the violence of
real battles and occupation just a decade before.
Moreover, by setting their movie in Rome Harryhausen and Juran were now ruining,
well, ruins. The fun or the horror of destroying the architectural structures of ancient Rome
was not precisely equivalent to destroying the gleaming new architectural achievements
of the twentieth century. Granted, buildings like the Pantheon and Colosseum still
represent a highpoint in the history of architecture for both their formal aesthetics and the
ingenuity of their engineering. And their triumph over time, wars, earthquakes, barbarian
invasions, and looters is certainly one of the meanings of these ruins. But as ruins, as the
partially decayed remains of elderly buildings, there is something macabre about ancient
architecture. 20 Million Miles to Earth invokes a negative way of reading Roman ruins, as
a memento mori, that goes back at least 1,400 years. In the sixth century the statesman
Cassiodorus wrote a letter from Rome to the Roman emperor (whose capital had been
not Rome but Constantinople for two hundred years). Standing on the Capitoline Hill,
among the old state cult sites of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, Cassiodorus remarked that
to look upon these crumbling buildings “is to see human ingenuity overcome” (Cassiodorus
1894: 205). The spectacle of Roman architecture had become a grim reminder that even
the mighty must fall.
When Roman architecture falls in 20 Million Miles it takes us with it, and that, I would
argue, is key to understanding the role that ruins play in 20 Million Miles to Earth. The
creature fights with men, a dog, and an elephant but does not seem inclined to kill (“they’re
not ferocious unless they’re provoked,” explains the American hero). Though Harryhausen
gives himself the challenge, and the audience the thrill, of animating a fight between an
elephant and an alien, he elicits sympathy for both. And he makes sure we know that the
elephant, though the loser, is not dead. As the monster moves on into the heart of Rome,
the camera does not at first follow it but lingers on the downed elephant to show us, with

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a delicately animated stop-motion model, that the animal is still breathing. The only
earthlings actually killed in the movie are victims of falling rubble. The Temple of Concord
in the Forum is the first architectural killer, then the Colosseum strikes. At the Temple of
Concord the fatal rubble is loosed as the alien struggles to get away from a tank-mounted
flame thrower. Apparently terrified and in anguish, he stumbles through the colonnade of
the first-century temple, causing it to buckle and come down on his tormentors. Once
again the camera lingers on the aftermath of the struggle. Unlike the elephant, these
humans are definitely dead. The massive blocks of the temple architrave have left no
survivors and even cover the upper body and face of one of the men (see Figure 9.1,

Figure 9.1 20 Million Miles to Earth, 1957, Nathan Juran, Columbia Pictures Corporation.
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lower frame). Cornered at the Colosseum a few minutes later, the creature is finally
provoked to defend himself with what is at hand: the travertine masonry of the Colosseum
itself. He hurls pieces of Rome’s history with lethal effect.
This is exactly the kind of spectacle that the Colosseum staged in its heyday. Exotic
animals were provoked to fight to the death as a gruesome entertainment. Even if the
Colosseum is a wreck, it seems to exert a malicious influence in 20 Million Miles,
possessing those who enter it to reenact ancient scenes of mortal combat. Though the
creature from Venus is not your typical tourist to Rome, the film’s menacing view of the
Colosseum has deep roots in the history of travel to, and travel narratives about, Rome.
Chloe Chard tracks changing attitudes in travelers’ responses to the Colosseum in her
essay “Horror on the Grand Tour.” In 1670 Richard Lassels praised the spectacles in the
Colosseum as a political tool: “all this was done by the politick Romans, to teach men not
to be affrayd of bloodshed and death in times of warres” (Chard 1983: 4). A century later
Charles Duptay reflected his times in expressing moral repugnance instead of admiration:
“Heavens! how sullen and savage the Roman ennui must have been! Nothing but effusion
of blood could dissipate or amuse it.” The change in evaluations of the Colosseum
corresponds partly to changing attitudes to violence, but also (and this will be especially
pertinent to Gidget) to changing attitudes about the purpose of travel and its effects on
the individual. Judith Adler has shown that over the course of the eighteenth century
travelers increasingly recorded their own individual responses and sentiments to the
sights of the Grand Tour (Adler 1989). Chard argues that the reaction of horror has a
special place in this trend as marking out what is truly foreign to the traveler. A monument
like the Colosseum was twice-over foreign to continental, British, and American travelers
since it belonged both to Italy and to the ancient Roman past.
The menace of Roman ruins in 20 Million Miles is also inflected in some particularly
American ways. We can turn again to Hawthorne’s influential Marble Faun. Walking
through the Italian countryside, a young American sculptor, Kenyon, expresses to an
Italian friend an American distaste for ancient architecture:

All towns should be made capable of purification by fire, or of decay within each half-
century. Otherwise, they become the hereditary haunts of vermin and noisomeness,
besides standing apart from the possibility of such improvements as are constantly
introduced into the rest of man’s contrivances and accommodations. [. . .] So, we may
build almost immortal habitations; it is true, but we cannot keep them from growing
old, musty, unwholesome, dreary, full of death-scents, ghosts, and murder-stains; in
short, such habitations as one sees everywhere in Italy, be they hovels or palaces.
(Hawthorne 1876: vol. 2, 93)

Whereas, says Kenyon of his own country: “In that fortunate land, each generation has
only its own sins and sorrows to bear. Here, it seems as if all the weary and dreary Past
were piled upon the back of the Present.” Rather than feeling inadequate about belonging
to a new country without an ancient trail of architectural heritage to prove its worth,
Hawthorne’s Americans feel a certain disgust at the idea of being bogged down by
architectural clutter. On the one hand, the problem is technological; the old must go to

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make way for innovation. And on the other, the problem is psychological. If we look at
ancient architecture as a visual archive of history, to live with it is to be oppressed equally
by the great deeds of our forebears (to which we cannot measure up) or by their sins
(whose taint we cannot rub off).
Both the technological and psychological oppressiveness of Kenyon’s view on ancient
architecture are at play in 20 Million Miles to Earth. As a science fiction film, 20 Million
Miles is unsurprisingly concerned with technological innovation. The opening narration
makes it clear that technological innovation is the context of the story, and in ways that
may be impressive or deadly and “unexpected”: “Great scientific advances are oftentimes
sudden accomplished facts before most of us are even dimly aware of them. Breathtakingly
unexpected, for example, was the searing flash that announced the atomic age. Equally
unexpected was the next gigantic stride, when man moved out of his very orbit to a point
more than 20 million miles to earth.” The American journey out of our orbit—and into a
future made better through exploiting Venus’s mineral resources—ends badly among the
ruins of our collective past. Somehow ancient architecture has a role to play in keeping us
moderns back. But the architecture, like the creature from Venus, only becomes ferocious
when provoked. Is the weight of our past preventing innovation? Is it the Colosseum’s
fault? Have its “death-scents, ghosts, and murder-stains” weighed on our psyches? Or
have we failed to read the ruins, to understand the lessons of cultural triumph or shame
that accrue to them? Harryhausen said of the Colosseum sequence in 20 Million Miles to
Earth, “I thought it would be a dramatic way of ending it. Man, of course, destroys what
he doesn’t understand.”1 He means, presumably, the creature from Venus to be the
misunderstood one, but his film suggests that we also fail to understand the past
embodied by the Colosseum.
For many viewers of 20 Million Miles, the dark side of the Colosseum’s history would
have been vividly present thanks to Quo Vadis, the highest grossing movie of 1951.
Released just two years before 20 Million Miles, this film was set in Rome in the reign of
the emperor Nero. The film made a great spectacle of the dissipation and cruelty of the
Roman empire, traits that were epitomized in its arena scene (though the Colosseum had
not yet been built in Nero’s reign). Peter Bondanella writes that these epics of ancient
Rome presented the “perils of overreaching power” while also appealing to their own
audience’s desire to see “Roman decadence” and “unbridled sensuality” (Bondanella
1987: 210). In mid-century toga films like Quo Vadis, Americans both distanced themselves
from Roman imperial decadence and saw a reflection of their own nation’s growing
military power, consumer culture, and taste for sensuous or violent spectacles (see Wyke
1997; Joshel et  al. 2001; Cyrino 2005). 20 Million Miles also invites this simultaneous
identification and repulsion. The America that overreaches in its attempt to colonize
Venus is like the Imperial Rome we see in ruins at the end of the movie. The ancient
Romans who enjoyed blood spectacle in the Colosseum are like us, the movie audience.
Harryhausen and Juran invite us at several points to reflect on ourselves as consumers
of violent spectacles. Remember that hat that the Sicilian child Pepe wanted? He wants
it because “it is the hat the cowboys wear when they shoot the bandito. Bang! Bang!”
When he explains this, the zoologist answers with a combination of indulgence and
resignation, “Ah, those American movies.” Before we know what the creature is capable
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of, it has an encounter with a small lamb, which approaches it when the rest of its herd
runs away. When the monster moves gently away from the lamb, are we relieved or
disappointed? The fear and desperation of the alien are evident when it is finally wounded
badly enough that it falls from the Colosseum. By making the creature pathetic, the
filmmakers invite us to be something better than the Romans of old. Still, the true monster
in this movie is us. We are crushed by the weight of our history as we move with reckless
greed into the future. Making sure we do not miss the point, an onlooker asks at the close
of the film, “Why, why is it always so costly for man to move from the present to the
future?”
With this message, 20 Million Miles to Earth conforms perfectly to the theme of Cold
War science fiction in general, which Nora Sayre sums up this way: “The future—once an
exhilarating concept—grew more ominous: there was no longer any assurance that one
would have any place in it, that continuity could be counted on” (Sayre 1982: 58). The
gimmick in 20 Million Miles is to pit the visible reminders of our past achievements against
our ambitions for the future. Does the film do this in a heavy-handed way at times? Yes it
does. In fact it is able to by relying on the meanings and associations of Roman ruins
already circulating in popular media, from Hawthorne’s fiction, to tourist guidebooks, to
other cinematic Romes.
20 Million Miles to Earth presents both an American view on the crushing weight of
historical monuments but also a view onto America’s view. Nathan Juran, the director,
was from Gura Humora in what is now Romania. But when he was born in 1907 it was
part of Austria-Hungary. In his lifetime he had seen the fall of his native empire and the rise
of imperialism in the United States, his adopted country. It is no more than a coincidence,
but an interesting one, that Frederick Kohner, the author of the Gidget books, was also a
Hollywood émigré from Austria-Hungary. A German-speaking Jewish man from what is
now the Czech Republic created the quintessential female California teen voice of the
Gidget books and movies.

Gidget goes crazy

Frances Lawrence, a Malibu teen who goes by her surfer name “Gidget” (for girl midget)
has just graduated from high school and will be college bound in the fall. She and her
boyfriend, Jeff “Moondoggie” Matthews (James Darren) plan a summer trip to Rome with
four friends and a chaperone. Cindy Carol replaces Sandra Dee in this third Gidget
movie. Though Gidget’s father promises that she is “totally and completely on your own,”
he writes to an Italian war buddy, Paolo Cellini (Cesare Danova), and asks him to watch
over Gidget in secret. To do this, Paolo, a journalist for Roma magazine, pretends to
want to write a story about Gidget. Jeff falls for their Italian tour guide Daniela (Danielle De
Metz) and breaks it off with Gidget. Gidget in turn falls for Paolo—but he is a devoted
family man who has a beautiful wife, four children, and another on the way. By the end
Gidget and Jeff correct these romantic mistakes and are back together. Correcting their
romantic mistakes and getting back together is what Gidget and Moondoggie do in
each of their three movies. The twist this time is that Gidget’s romantic woes do not just

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make her susceptible to the charms of a married man, they make her more susceptible
to Rome.

“Fiddling with history”

This susceptibility manifests itself in a series of fantasies. The first two fantasies take place
when Gidget and the other “kids” visit the Colosseum and Forum with their Italian guide,
Daniela. Just after their visit to the Colosseum, Gidget overhears this exchange between
Jeff and Daniela:

JEFF: I know who you look like. Nero’s wife Poppea.

DANIELA: Oh, but she was such a wicked woman.
JEFF: But most beautiful. I’ve seen your profile stamped on some old Roman
coins.

Hurt by Jeff’s attentions to Daniela, but still trying to look on the bright side, Gidget takes
refuge in her imaginative reconstructions of ancient history. Rome 1963 fades out and the
Rome of Nero, circa A.D. 63 fades in. Sort of—the setting is the Colosseum, which was
not built until after Nero’s reign, beginning in A.D.70, on land reclaimed from his massive
palace complex. Nor do we see the Colosseum restored to its ancient appearance.
Rather, it remains in its ruined state. This is no set but the actual Colosseum, and it exerts
a strong power of place on Gidget. She forgets what time she belongs to and where she
is. “Gidget, where ya been?” asks Judge, the shutterbug of the group, after he snaps her
back into the present (see Figure 9.2, lower). “Oh, fiddling with history,” she responds. The
fantasy has clearly been a compelling and pleasurable one for Gidget, and she only leaves
it with reluctance. But in light of her later breakdown in the National Museum, we should
have seen the signs that there was already some mild menace in this encounter with the
Colosseum.
It is a little bit worrying that “some old ruins”—as Gidget later calls them dismissively—
can so completely invade her mind that she forgets who and where she is. And in the
fantasy itself, the Colosseum is a place of danger. Gidget casts herself as a Christian
martyr thrown to the lions. Daniela takes on the part Moondoggie has assigned her
already, Poppea, Nero’s wicked wife. Judge (Joby Baker) is Nero, complete with lyre, and
the rest of the gang appears as members of the court, watching from Nero’s box. “Nero,
baby, I’m so bored with those Christian martyrs,” complains Daniela/Poppea. She moves
behind Nero to try to feed Jeff, dressed as a Roman soldier, one of the grapes that she
has been sensuously eating throughout the sequence. Jeff brushes past her and jumps
into the arena to rescue Gidget. “She is mine,” he declares to the emperor (see Figure 9.2,
upper). The historical fantasy allows Gidget to turn Jeff’s admiring identification of Daniela
with Poppea into a demonstration of his loyalty to Gidget.
The details of the fantasy do not come exclusively from the evocative locale or Gidget’s
own fertile imagination. Gidget’s brush with martyrdom is a tongue-in-cheek quotation of
the arena scene in Quo Vadis. Gidget’s costume is based on that of Deborah Kerr’s
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Figure 9.2 A scene from Gidget Goes to Rome, Paul Wendkos, 1963, Columbia Pictures
Corporation.

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character Lygia, a Christian slave. Jeff’s costume closely matches that of Lygia’s love
interest, Marcus Vinicius. In Quo Vadis, Lygia and a fellow-Christian are brought into the
arena to be mauled by a bull. Marcus Vinicius is chained in the imperial box with Nero and
Poppea and made to watch. Though a victorious military commander, he has fallen into
disgrace with both of them, in the case of Poppea because he spurned her attempts to
seduce him. Marcus manages to free himself and joins Lygia in the arena. Gidget Goes to
Rome assumes that the twelve-year-old Quo Vadis is known both to its 1963 audience and
to Gidget; by now it has become one of the layers of meaning attached to the Colosseum.
Following the Colosseum fantasy, Gidget catches up with the rest of the group in the
Forum. Judge jumps up on the stump of a column to recite Marc Antony’s speech from
Act III of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. When he gets stuck after “I have come to bury
Caesar not to. . .” Gidget effortlessly supplies the next word. It may be one of the best-
known lines in Shakespeare, but the film seems to want to remind us that Gidget is “very
well read”—a compliment paid by the journalist Paolo when he meets her for the first time
that evening. For the other characters it is enough to enjoy matching their Shakespeare
and their history to specific sites in Rome. But Gidget again goes further and disappears
into her imagination. And again the theme is suggested by Daniela: “It must have been
about there that Cleopatra was brought to the Forum when she lived in Rome as Caesar’s
concubine.” This time Gidget sees herself as a lavishly made up Cleopatra, arriving by
litter to Caesar’s Forum. Her friends are awe-struck Romans who gawk at her admiringly
as she alights. Though this fantasy too centers on Jeff’s devotion, he is neither Caesar nor
Antony but a humble Roman who throws himself into a mud puddle so that Gidget’s
Cleopatra can walk over him without getting her white tennis shoe dirty. She leaves him
the shoe as a fetish. Like the Colosseum daydream, this one synthesizes romantic longing,
a good education, and pop-culture sources. Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra was released the
same year as Gidget. The film acknowledges their simultaneous filming in Rome when
Gidget enthuses to Paolo, “It must be fascinating to be a journalist in Rome. Just think of
interviewing great composers like Respighi, great philosophers like Santayana, and, um,
oh Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Wow!” Cleopatra was not yet a cinematic
experience but a current event. During Cleopatra’s filming, the real romance between
stars Taylor and Burton was all over the press (Bondanella 1987: 215).

“That old devil Italian moon”

Gidget’s imaginative reactions to ancient Roman architecture are romantic. They are also
Romantic. Gidget’s twentieth-century tourism has absorbed the rituals of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. We have already seen that eighteenth-century travel was
characterized by an increased attention to individual experiences and reactions to the
sights of the Grand Tour. In that era of sensibility, emotion and imagination were enlisted
in the study of historical monuments. The on-site encounter with ancient architecture
provided an occasion not just for improved historical understanding but for self discovery.
As Gidget hops out of an Alitalia van at her Roman hotel, she proves herself to be a tourist
of this sensitive stripe.
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GIDGET: Do you realize where we are?

LIBBY: Why sure, we’re in Rome, Italy.
GIDGET: We are not. We’re in the Eternal City. Romulus and Remus, the Appian
Way, Caesar and his legions, the Tiber—
LUCY: Rosano Brazzi. I wonder where he lives?
GIDGET: In Hollywood. And for heaven’s sake Lucy, don’t be provincial. Open your
eyes. Look at a new world. Broaden your horizons. That’s what I intend to
do, if I can.

Gidget is curious about history, open to experience, and eager for transformation in a way
that her friends are not.
By the nineteenth century, tourists were seeking ways to heighten their imaginative
response to works of art and architecture. In the era of Romantic tourism, the Colosseum
was thought to be most affecting by moonlight. Byron’s poem Manfred, published in
1817, includes an influential description of the moonlit Colosseum:

Ivy usurps the laurel’s place of growth; —

But the gladiators’ bloody Circus stands,
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection!
...
And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which soften’d down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and fill’d up
As ‘twere anew, the gaps of centuries. (Byron 1817: 68–9)

Such is the power of the “tender light” of the moon that it can reconcile the oxymoron in
“ruinous perfection” and fill in the “gaps of centuries” in the visitor’s imagination. Even
though the moon is available to travelers at home, there is something about seeing ruins by
moonlight, and seeing the moon framed by ruins, that transforms them both—and
that gives both architecture and nature the ability to transform the tourist. Byron’s poem was
so influential that the gaps in the moonlit Colosseum also came to be filled with tourists. In
their book on the Colosseum, Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard explain how tourists were told
“exactly how to react” to the Colosseum by guidebooks like Murray’s Handbook to Central
Italy, which reprinted excerpts from Byron’s poem (Hopkins and Beard 2005: 2–3).
The main characters of The Marble Faun take a “Moonlit Ramble” that brings them to
the Colosseum. Their experience testifies to the passage of Manfred into a tourist cliché,
and it also shows how easily the ruin moves from the sublime to the seductive or the
Romantic to the romantic:

Some youths and maidens were running merry races across the open space, and playing
at hide-and-seek a little way within the duskiness of the ground-tier of arches, whence
now and then you could hear the half-shriek, half-laugh of a frolicsome girl, whom the
shadow had betrayed into a young man’s arms. (Hawthorne 1876: vol. 1, 194)

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James’s Daisy Miller added a new layer to the tourist mythology of the moonlit Colosseum—
its special menace for young women. As a place of shadows where frolicsomeness is
possible, the Colosseum was dangerous to a young woman’s chastity and reputation.
Nineteenth-century visitors to the Colosseum also risked picking up malaria by moonlight:
“The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically
considered, was no better than a villainous miasma” (James 2007: 59). Visiting the
Colosseum by night with an Italian man, Daisy ruins her reputation and contracts a fatal
case of Roman fever.
Although Judge teases Gidget, when he finds her daydreaming, that the “ancient
Roman sun” is getting to her, it is really the moon of Romantic tourism that lights her
Roman fantasies; the film is peppered with references to the romantic power of the moon.
Standing in a phone booth on a Malibu beach, Gidget invites Jeff to, “Just picture us, you
and me, standing beneath a Roman moon.” Finally alone in Rome with Jeff, Gidget recites
Juliet’s lines to Romeo, “O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, That monthly
changes in her circled orb, Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.” The movie will
indeed prove his love variable, but this scene ends with Jeff singing a love song to Gidget
about the “Big Italian Moon,” accompanied by a group of strolling musicians. Though
Gidget’s gang never visits the Colosseum by moonlight, all of them except Gidget visit the
ruins of the Baths of Caracalla at night to dance the twist. This is a place where modern
Romans let themselves go. In this venue, Jeff now sees his relationship with Gidget as
something that happened when they were “just kids” and tells Daniela as much. By the
end of the trip Jeff is ready to propose to Daniela. When she gently turns him down, he
blames the whole thing wistfully on “that old devil Roman moon.”
The real Hotel Forum is used for the exterior shots of Gidget’s hotel. The famous
rooftop terrace of the hotel overlooks the Imperial Fora and Colosseum and is probably
the setting for Edith Wharton’s short story Roman Fever (1934). The title of the story
recalls the fate of Daisy Miller, and its climactic moment is the revelation of a sexual
encounter in the moonlit Colosseum twenty years before. The terrace is not used in
Gidget, and no one mentions Wharton, but I suspect the filmmakers knew what they were
doing. Even if many moviegoers who had not been to Rome would not catch it in a single
viewing, the Hotel Forum is a richly compact visual allusion that places Gidget among the
heroines of the James and Wharton stories. The allusion also points to the premarital sex
of Wharton’s story, something that will not happen in this “clean teenpic” (the term comes
from Doherty 1988), but that might be one of the dangerous outcomes of Rome’s
romantically historic ambience and “old devil Italian moon.” Why did Gidget’s father really
need Paolo to keep an eye on her while she visited Italy with her boyfriend? The defense
of Gidget’s virginity, and her parents’ willingness to doubt it, is a major plot point in the
earlier movie Gidget Goes Hawaiian.

Stendhal Syndrome and popular culture

Visiting the church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817, the French novelist Stendhal
experienced an ecstatic encounter with art that passed from the sublime to the scary.
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My soul, affected by the very notion of being in Florence, and by the proximity of
those great men whose tombs I had just beheld, was already in a state of trance. [. . .]
I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art
merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of
Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (that same symptom
which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of nerves); the well-spring of life was dried
up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground. (Stendhal 1959:
302; 1996: 480)

Stendhal has just described the psychological syndrome that now bears his name. By the
middle of Gidget Goes to Rome, Gidget is an imaginative, heart-broken, emotional teen
in a foreign environment crowded with evocative ancient monuments. The stage is set for
her breakdown in the National Museum.
Gidget makes a fool of herself when she tries to one up Daniela. Daniela has been
listing the admirable traits of the Discobolus. Gidget points out smugly that this cannot
actually be the Discobolus since that statue is in the Vatican. Daniela gently corrects her
with the reminder that there are several marble copies of the original Greek bronze. After
this, Gidget slips away from the others into a part of the museum that is marked as off-
limits. She is taken with the statue of a Roman woman, and at first identifies with her.
Gidget’s self-identification with a statue seems to be suggested by Jeff’s earlier flirtatious
identification of Daniela with a sculpture of Athena: “You know, you could have modeled
for her, the same classic features and the same, uh, heroic proportions.” Gidget adopts
the pose of the statue, draping her kerchief over her head to mimic the Roman matron’s
drapery (see Figure 9.3, upper). Though there is no indication that Gidget knows what this
statue is, it is sinister that she chooses to identify with what is probably a funerary
monument. This time her escape into fantasy fails to soothe her. Both the female statue
and a male companion begin to speak to Gidget tauntingly, refracting back her own voice
along with those of Jeff and Daniela. Horrified and frantic, she tries to block the sound,
first by covering her ears (see Figure 9.3, lower) and then by stuffing her kerchief into the
statue’s mouth. Her delusion is so complete that she fails to realize that she herself is the
source of the voices. Gidget’s psychological state and its connection to romance is a
recurring motif. Allison Whitney has argued that the original Gidget movie dabbles in pop
psychology. Gidget mentions “Oedipus and all that” and her repressed sexual feelings for
Moondoggie manifest themselves hysterically as “physical symptoms” such as a headache
or tonsillitis (Whitney 2002: 58).
Gidget’s temporary loss of identity is typical of the disoriented tourists whom psychiatrist
Graziella Magherini analyzed in Florence in the 1980s. In the clinical presentation of
Stendhal Syndrome, “One constant emerges: a crisis of identity, and therefore of the
cohesion of the Self, stemming from the concatenation of personal history, travel and the
impact of art” (Magherini 2007: 170). Though Stendhal’s experience seems to have been
joyful if also alarming, Magherini describes some patients experiencing, rather, “an intense
feeling of alienation and the extremely unpleasant sensation that the world around them
had now become threatening and even hostile” (Magherini 2007: 169). In Gidget’s Rome,
ruins and antiquities are the bearers of history that is so weighty and dangerous that it

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Figure 9.3 A scene from Gidget Goes to Rome, Paul Wendkos, 1963, Columbia Pictures
Corporation.
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finally sends her mad. Magherini noticed that locals do not fall victim to Stendhal
Syndrome. (This point is somewhat crassly made in Gidget; when we first see the two
museum guards who witness her panic attack, one is reading a comic book and one is
sleeping.) Magherini’s explanation—and the reason that she named the syndrome for
Stendhal—is that it is closely tied to the sentimental and Romantic understandings of
tourism that we have already been discussing. Stendhal Syndrome is a possible side
effect of an understanding of travel as necessary for the “formation and fulfillment of the
personality” and as a “roving laboratory of emotions and sentiments” (Magherini 1989: 11,
translation mine). Gidget tries on identities and personalities throughout the film: Juliet, a
Christian martyr, Cleopatra, a kook or two from the “international set” she meets at a
Roman party, home wrecker, adult.
It is not the raw aesthetic power of art or architecture that overwhelms a victim of
Stendhal Syndrome but the aura of objects already revered. The best known and most
widely admired architecture of Stendhal’s day was that of the Italian peninsula, made
known through mass-produced prints and other souvenir objects (Benson 2004).
Stendhal Syndrome, then, like admiration for classical culture generally, can be seen as
an effect of popular or mass culture. Gidget is a well informed traveler, of the Stendhal
stripe. She can quote Shakespeare and recall episodes from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
She knows the history of Caesar’s military exploits as well as those with Cleopatra. She
knows Michelangelo, of course. But she also knows the sixteenth-century sculptor
Benvenuto Cellini and his autobiography, and recalls the thrilling details of his escape
from the papal prison in the Castel Sant’Angelo when she sees that monument in
person.
Gidget is thus intellectually and imaginatively prepared to be bowled over by Roman
architecture. Early in her visit we are tipped off that she may be too imaginative when she
has this conversation with Jeff:

GIDGET: Oh Jeff, can you imagine Romeo and Juliet here?

JEFF: Romeo and Juliet were in Verona, Gidget.
GIDGET: Don’t be so literal. It’s still Italy. Listen, you can hear their voices: Leonardo,
Cellini, the Borgias, Caesar! Why, who knows, he might have crossed the
Tiber right at this very spot.
JEFF: It was the Rubicon he crossed, Midget.
GIDGET: Well he had to cross the Tiber too if he wanted to go to the beach with
Cleopatra. Imagine that, their going to the beach!

The dangers of over-imaginative bourgeois tourism are explored with more ominous
consequences in E. M. Forster’s 1903 story Albergo Empedocle. A young Englishman,
Harold, is on a “Continental scramble” with his fiancée Mildred and her family that brings
them to the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Akragas in Sicily. Harold is an unimaginative
type, but Mildred tries to cure him: “You must throw yourself into a past age if you want to
appreciate it thoroughly. Today you must imagine you are a Greek. [. . .] Harold
understands. He must forget all these modern horrors of railways and Cook’s tours, and
think that he is living over two thousand years ago, among palaces and temples” (Forster

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1971: 12). At first, Harold makes a poor student. So far from ruins being powerfully
evocative for him, “To the magnificence and pathos of the ruined temple of Zeus he was
quite dead. He valued it only as a chair” (Forster 1971: 17). But after a nap at Akragas he
takes on the identity of a citizen of the ancient city, forgetting his modern identity completely
and ending up in a mental institution.
Both Gidget and Albergo Empedocle are pop-culture representations of the inability of
a popular audience to cope with ancient architecture, that revered object of high culture.
Both appeared at times when travel by the very people the stories were about and were
read or seen by was increasing. Daisy Miller fits this pattern as well. She belongs to a
wave of increased travel by American women after the Civil War. Before the war women
travelers made up only ten to twenty percent of American overseas tourists; after the war
this figure rose to thirty or forty percent (Dupont et al. 2008: 10). Gidget belongs to a new
wave in American tourism about a century later. She is younger than the heroines of Three
Coins in a Fountain or Rome Adventure. The heroine of Rome Adventure (1962) goes to
Italy by steamer. A year later, Gidget flies Alitalia from Idlewild and arrives at the newly
opened Leonardo da Vinci Airport, the only modern architecture we see in Gidget’s Rome.
Airlines had introduced tourist-class fares for the first time in 1952 and both economy
fares and passenger jets in 1958 (Dupont et al. 2008: 16). The teenage movie audience
for Gidget might plausibly imagine a European vacation for themselves. Thomas Doherty
traces the targeting of movies to “the privileged American teenager” to the 1950s (Doherty
1988: 14). The release of Jeff’s song “Big Italian Moon” as a 45 was also a sign of the
power of the American teenage consumer. Soundtrack LPs were for their parents’
generation (Doherty 1988: 217). In form and content Gidget is all about pop culture and
teenaged Americans, and what Roman ruins might possibly mean to them.

Girls transfigured by Italy

In the Ismail Merchant-James Ivory 1985 film adaption of E. M. Forster’s novel A Room
with a View (1908), the novelist Eleanor Lavish confides in Charlotte Bartlett:

ELEANOR LAVISH: One has always to be open, wide open. I think Miss
Lucy is.
CHARLOTTE BARTLETT: Open to what, Miss Lavish?
ELEANOR: To physical sensation. [Charlotte gasps.] I will let you
into a secret, Miss Bartlett. I have my eye on your
cousin, Miss Lucy Honeychurch.
CHARLOTTE: Oh, for a character in your novel, Miss Lavish?
ELEANOR: The young English girl transfigured by Italy. And why
should she not be transfigured? It happened to the Goths.

This exchange is not in Forster’s novel. Its addition shows the screenwriter’s awareness of
the place of both the movie and Forster’s novel in a lineage of girls transfigured by Italy
that stretches from Daisy Miller to Gidget.
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Gidget was not alone as a girl transfigured by Italy in movies of the 1950s and
1960s. Others include Roman Holiday (1953), Three Coins in a Fountain (1954), Rome
Adventure (1962), and the thriller The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963). The genre
combined themes of female sexual independence and easier access to travel after
World War II. These themes were fresher fifty years ago, but the genre has not gone
away. The Olsen twins, those idols of TV-watching tweens in the 1990s, had a
transformative Rome experience in their straight-to-video When in Rome (2002). With the
decline of both the Grand Tour and the classical education, Rome has no longer been
the necessary destination for young people on gap year or junior year abroad. Yet the
movies suggest otherwise. As the Olsen twins negotiated their transition from child stars
to adult actresses and businesswomen, a cinematic summer in Rome signaled their
coming of age.
Interestingly, Elizabeth Gilbert undertook a real-life journey to Rome as though to live
out the plot of one of these films. She went to Rome at a time of personal crisis, when she
felt in need of transformation and a rediscovery of herself. The result was the “eat” section
of her hugely successful Eat, Pray, Love (2007). Ruins play a minor role in her story, but
her reading of them is optimistic and sympathetic, just the opposite of Hawthorne’s. As
someone looking for personal transformation, she is “reassured” by the many
transformations of the Mausoleum of Augustus, which she thinks in human terms have
been as wildly varied as “housewife,” fan dancer, “first female dentist in outer space”
(Gilbert 2007: 75). Her book might also be classed with a middle-aged-women-
transfigured-by-Italy genre: Enchanted April (1992), Tea with Mussolini (1999), My House
in Umbria (2003), Under The Tuscan Sun (2003). This genre is mostly British and mostly
set not among ruins but the countryside of Tuscany and Umbria. Perhaps this is because
for the middle aged, ruins are more personally dispiriting. As Aunt Albertina (Jessie Royce
Landis), the chaperone in Gidget, says “when it comes to catacombs, Colosseums,
Forums, and all that jazz, you’re on your own. I’m not interested in any old ruins but
my own.”
In a 2010 movie also titled When in Rome, Kristen Bell stars as a workaholic curator at
the Guggenheim Museum. The only novelty this movie brings to the genre is an invented
“fountain of love”—as though Rome had run out of real monuments that could serve as
romantic catalysts. Maybe Rome had. The pretense of the Kristin Bell movie, like Gidget,
Roman Holiday and the others, is that first-hand exposure to Roman monuments awakes
and affects the sensibilities of the heroine. The Rome that Bell’s character experiences,
however, is now a purely cinematic one that has taken on a life of its own as the setting of
the girl-transfigured-by-Italy genre.
A Roman fountain is ultimately responsible for healing the rift between Gidget and Jeff
and bringing the movie and the Roman vacation to a happy ending. After Gidget realizes
that Paolo has no romantic interest in her, she visits the Trevi Fountain to complete the
tourist ritual she refused to perform when Daniela brought the group to the fountain as the
first stop on their tourist itinerary: “I want my epitaph to read: here lies the only American
girl who ever came to Rome without tossing a coin in the fountain.” Now she duly throws
a coin over her shoulder with the wish, “Oh I wish, I wish it was the same between
Moondoggie and me.” The coin, unfortunately, is a keepsake that her mother gave her to

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commemorate her being away from home for the first time. Gidget leaps into the fountain
to retrieve it. Fresh from his rejection by Daniela, Jeff wanders by in time to see the police
fishing Gidget from the fountain. He vouches for her, while simultaneously claiming her, at
the American Embassy: “I’m Jefferson Matthews, sir, and she’s my girl.” The Colosseum
fantasy is now fulfilled thanks to the Trevi Fountain.
No macabre shambles of falling stone, the eighteenth-century Trevi Fountain is
practically brand new in Roman terms. For an American it is barely layered with historical
events except ones that were invented by cinema. How much more real is Gidget’s Trevi
than the “fountain of love”? The mythical power of the Trevi to grant wishes and its explicit
association with American women finding love come from Three Coins in a Fountain.
Gidget’s romp in the fountain is a playful nod to the famously sexy scene in La Dolce Vita
in which Anita Eckburg, in the role of an American starlet, wades through the fountain in
a strapless evening dress. The Trevi in Gidget is romantic but not erotic, without the sexual
possibilities of the moonlit Colosseum or the Caracalla turned disco. In one of the last
shots in the film, Jeff and Gidget visit the Trevi again. Jeff commits to the Trevi’s waters a
love token wasted on Daniela, and then gives Gidget a chaste peck on the cheek.
Because the erotic desires that ancient architecture and “that old devil Italian moon”
awoke in Gidget and Jeff were mistakenly directed at the Italians Daniela and Paolo,
Gidget and Jeff have been effectively prevented from consummating their love for each
other while in Rome and away from parental supervision. Though the film plays with the
intellectual and sensual experiences that travel to Rome offers Gidget, by the end her
transformation is in the direction of tame and conventional tourism.

Cinematic ruins
Over fettuccine, Gidget makes clear to Paolo that she is a serious student of human
nature, not just a tourist: “There are some Americans who don’t come to Rome for the
sole purpose of making wishes and tossing coins into fountains. [. . .] Oh, I want to see it
all, the poor and the rich, what interests them, what they want, what amuses them—how
they tick!” Paolo says he will oblige, but the movie offers no camera time to the poor of
Rome. The only place Gidget and Paolo visit that is off the beaten tourist path is a party
among the “international set” in a prince’s villa. The party is perplexingly bohemian to
Gidget and seems to be loosely based on the party scene in La Dolce Vita. She may have
gotten a taste of life in modern Rome, but it is not the life of ordinary Romans. Like her
own fantasies, it is mediated through other cinematic visions of the city.
The distance between Rome and its Hollywood incarnations is made beautifully clear
in an NBC television piece on the making of Ben Hur that aired in the summer of 1958.2
The featurette follows the story of Lorenzo Cattini, a Roman youth of twenty, who earns
2,000 lira a day (the equivalent, we are told, of three US dollars) performing grueling
manual labor at an ironworks. When work is available, that is. The television crew visits his
cramped family apartment, where he shares a cot with his thirteen-year-old brother. In the
next shot we see a new suburb of Rome. A trolley car runs down a wide boulevard,
flanked by identical apartment blocks as far as the eye can see. Lorenzo takes the trolley
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to Cinecittà, where he has heard “Americans are hiring the poor of Rome by the hundreds
and the thousands.” He lands a part as a bit player in Ben Hur’s iconic chariot-race scene
for 1,500 lira day, a sixth of what the Hollywood extras are paid. The piece is presented
as a whimsical story; Lorenzo and his friends play pranks on the other extras and steal a
chariot over the lunch break. The newscaster Chet Huntley then offers this summary:
“These ordinary people of the Italian films, these real people, these vital people—it takes
so little to transport them from despair to ecstasy, to change their precarious station from
hunger to wealth. In the case of one young man of Rome, it took only the presence of a
fourteen million dollar American movie.” As editorializing goes, this is pretty vague. Is big-
budget Hollywood exploiting the extras whom it paid so little? Does the Hollywood vision
of the glories of ancient Rome elevate modern Rome? In failing to visit the modern and
non-monumental Rome of characterless housing projects, is the Rome of the tourist,
Gidget, and American movies inevitably inauthentic?
Joy Gould Boyum and Adrienne Scott give us a more helpful way of considering how
Hollywood has built Rome in their book Film as Film: Critical Responses to Film Art. Their
book was published in 1971 when Hollywood films were beginning to be seriously
considered as an art form, thanks in large part to the reception of American cinematic pop
culture by French critics and the directors of the New Wave. Considering the question of
realism in film, Boyum and Scott offer this example:

. . .when we perceive Italian films as more realistic than American ones, it is very often
because the world of these foreign films—the total environment projected on the
screen before us—is un-idealized and thus totally recognizable to us as an image of
the world-out-there. The Rome, then, of The Nights of Cabiria is consistent with our
vision of reality, while the Rome, let’s say, of Three Coins in a Fountain is idealized,
romanticized, and finally false.

But, they argue:

. . .visual authenticity gives only the illusion of reality. It must not be confused with the
faithful representation of human experience, any more than it must be confused with
reality itself (Boyum and Scott 21).

A neo-realist film may offer one true picture of Rome. An alien on the Colosseum may be
a true picture too. It certainly offers us one true picture of ourselves.
Gidget’s fantasies demonstrate the power of popular culture to make its versions of
Roman architecture inhabitable. Gidget keeps getting pulled into a Rome built from the
layered history of pop-culture representations. These spaces are compelling enough to
be dangerous to her. It would be too easy to dismiss tourist experience as inauthentic just
because it is not the experience of a native. Gidget gives an authentic picture of what it
looks like to be a native of European and American tourist traditions themselves, a place
built out of the stuff of pop culture. Until very recently, a movie could not become part of
a traveler’s experience in the same way as Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, which was
purchased in Rome, portable, and consulted in situ at the Colosseum, at least in daylight.

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Now that digital movies can be in the pockets of tourists, their power to build and rebuild
our oldest monuments is really just getting started.

Notes
1 From the making-of feature on the DVD.
2 As of December 2013 available for online viewing at: http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/
nbcuni/home/featuredcontent_Ben_Hur.do
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PART FIVE

Road Space

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Chapter 10
The World’s Most Popular
Architecture: The Technology
and Interior of the Automobile
Iain Borden

No other architecture is as elaborately conceived, intensively designed and commonly

experienced as that of the automobile and its interior. Once we fully appreciate the
automobile’s sheer density, proliferation and sophistication of technology, as well its
incredible millimeter-by-millimeter concentration of design (and for automobiles today
“technology” and “design” are more or less indistinguishable, the older separate teams of
“engineers” and “stylists” having now merged into multi-disciplinary product development
teams), in addition to the varied mental and physical subtleties involved in the act of car
driving, we find that resting at home, being at work or even flying as a passenger in an
airplane are all by comparison as if dwelling in a stone-age cave. The car is also an
extremely everyday entity, with over 700 million in regular use worldwide, a figure expected
to reach 1 billion by 2030. Around the world, car travel—the number of journeys taken
and miles driven—is estimated to triple between 1990 and 2050 (Urry 2002; Brandon
2002: 385).
In short, the car is not only the most exhaustively-designed space with which we now
commonly engage as part of our normal lives, but also, through our interaction with it—
through the act of driving—creates a similarly intensive encounter with architecture as
designed space. Furthermore, it is also a highly mediated kind of architecture, particularly
through its depiction in movies, where the public in their billions see and experience
automobile interiors vicariously rather than directly. Here, in movies, present and future
drivers alike experience car design and technology in a particularly dynamic and seductive
form, encouraging their desire for new forms of automobile consumption. In exploring the
world’s most popular architecture here, then, I also look at the way this space has been
depicted in one of the world’s most popular representation, that of film.

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Automobile technology
What kind of technology are we talking about in the history of the car? In very general
terms, most car technology from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1960s was
predominantly a matter of mechanics and mobility, that is of making the car go and stop
as efficiently and as reliably as possible. Thus in the 1900s Rudyard Kipling was able to
see that his “agonies, shames, delays, rages, chills, parboilings, road-walkings, water-
drawings, burns and starvations” suffered in the early developments of the automobile at
the turn of the century soon gave way to the “safe and comfortable” car (Filson Young
1905: 249). Something of this hard-won triumph over tribulation can be seen in a film like
Genevieve (Henry Cornelius, 1953), where two 1904 automobiles, a Darracq 10/12 hp
Type O and Spyker 14/18 hp, for all their constant mechanical eccentricities and temporary
failings, manage to convey their occupants along the 100 mile journey from London to
Brighton and back again.
From the mid-1900s onwards, automobile innovation was primarily directed at
refinements in this area of mechanical function, performance and reliability. So even in the
most radical of inventions, such as the Dymaxion prototype car designed by architect
Buckminster Fuller in 1933, we find predominantly mechanical inventions, such as a
chrome-molybdenum chassis and a rear-wheel steering machine. The Dymaxion offered
air-conditioning and rear-view periscopes, but essentially these were trimmings added on
top of what was predominantly an exercise in mechanics and aerodynamics, seeking to
reduce unsprung weight, increase carrying capacity and exploit the potential of the 90 hp
Ford V8 engine (Brandon 2002: 266–73; Dron 2010; Silk 1984: 248–51).
In some of the most extreme concept cars of the 1950s and early 1960s, there was
the occasional interest in advanced technological control systems, such as the fingertip-
controlled steering dial and travel programming computer of the six-wheeled Ford Seattle-
ite XXI of 1963. Most notable of all here is General Motors’ earlier Firebird II concept car
of 1956, which—no doubt with one eye on the radio-controlled highway of General
Motors’ earlier “Futurama” exhibition (1939) and To New Horizons film (Jam Handy
Organization/General Motors, 1940)—was intended for the “Safety Autoway of Tomorrow”
where it would be automatically steered, accelerated and braked via signals emitted from
electronic control strips set in the road surface and picked up by two antenna mounted in
the car’s nose (General Motors 1956). The system also incorporated radio and television
communication with a nearby Control Tower. Presented at General Motors’ traveling
“Motorama” exhibition of 1956 and seen by over 2.2 million visitors, a Technicolor
documentary Design for Dreaming (MPO Productions/General Motors, 1956) promoted
the Firebird II to an even wider popular public, depicting a modern city of automated
highways, along which a young couple entirely relax under a starry night-time sky as they
speed along curving tracks and elevated roadways into a prosperous and care-free
technological future.
Yet despite this kind of occasional sci-fi fascination with automated control and
electronic technology, in the wider scheme of post-war car design, technology and
manufacture such things were marginal to a much more overt obsession with alternative
propulsion systems and surface styling. Thus in the 1950s some prototypes investigated

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jet engines, such as the gas turbines of the Firebird concepts and other vehicles from
manufacturers as diverse as Rover and Boeing, or atomic power, as with the outlandish
Ford Nucleon of 1958 (Francis 1950; Smith 1946; Marriage and Metcalf 2010). But most
important of all was extreme styling, and especially the highly aestheticized tail-fins,
cockpit-like canopies, air scoops, exhaust nozzles and other airplane-related features
seen on innumerable American cars of the 1950s, from the General Motors’ LeSabre and
Firebird conceptual prototypes to production vehicles such as the Cadillac Fleetwood 60
Special (1959), all of which symbolized a kind of miraculous speed, superior American
military power and consumer affluence in the emerging Cold War era. Together this
created what Chrysler called “the new shape of motion,” giving an overt aesthetic
expression to a confident and overtly technological present-future (Gartman 1994;
Gartman 2004b; Hine 1986; Baudrillard 1996).
It could be argued that this remains the situation today, where style and surfaces often
seem to be the pre-eminent features of automobile design and where the driver’s
interaction with technology plays second fiddle. There are of course some specialist cars
like the high-tech Japanese Nissan Skyline GT-R of the 1990s and later GTR series from
2007 onwards which offer all manner of information and controls for such things as turbo
boost, four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, pitch and yaw, G-Force, lap times, engine
temperatures, intake and exhaust gas temperatures, brake cooling, customizable displays
and so forth, but for most cars today the driving experience is largely devoid of direct
interface with engine and other mechanical technology. Thus manufacturers tend to focus
on automobiles like the Audi A2, where the oil, water and petrol reservoirs are all accessible
from the exterior and where the driver is consequently actively discouraged from engaging
with the rest of the car’s mechanical functions. But there are other areas of the car where
car technology, and in particular the driver’s interface with it, have grown with some
degree of complexity. Around 1965, this all begins to emerge in three areas of automobile
design and driving experience—safety control, communication, and interior interfaces. I
briefly explore each of these in turn, while also indicating some of the ways in which such
developments have appeared in film.

Controlling devices
In 1965, Ralph Nader, an activist lawyer and protector of consumer rights, published an
automotive bombshell. In Unsafe At Any Speed, Nader directly charged the executives
and stylists of the American automotive industry with not only willfully ignoring aspects of
safety in car design, but with actively developing and selling cars which they knew to be
dangerous. For example, Nader argued that the General Motors’ Chevrolet Corvair had a
swing-axle rear suspension system so atrociously designed that it had directly led to
numerous accidents and deaths, despite GM knowing they could have improved the
Corvair’s handling by fitting a simple fifteen dollar stabilizing bar (Nader 1965; Gartman
1994). The eventual result of these damning charges was a humiliation for the car industry,
forcing it to publicly admit much of what Nader had claimed, and to make immediate
changes to its operations. Many US bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency
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Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Consumer Product Safety
Commission were also either directly set up or greatly influenced by Nader’s work, while
overseas automobile manufacturers wishing to export their cars to the US had to quickly
change their own cars to suit the new regulations.
Much of what we see in cars today follows this post-Nader revolution, with entire
brands of car now being renowned for their safety, such as Volvo, a company which aims,
by 2020, for no one to be killed in one of their cars (Milne 2013). Nor is Volvo alone in such
aspirations, for nearly all automobile manufacturers today incorporate in their models a
whole raft of features specifically designed to increase the safety of the driver and other
occupants (Conley and McLaren 2009: 95–110). Such safety technologies include those
which intervene through prevention, such as traction control, active body control, active
suspension (which helps restrict skidding) and ESP (Electronic Stability Programme, which
keeps cars stable under load, and also warns of tire air pressure loss). Active speed and
cruise controls prevent the driver from hitting the car in front, such as Jaguar’s microwave
radar-based Adaptive Cruise Control system, while ALS (active light systems) deploy
headlights which turn in relation to steering movements, thus helping the driver to see
around corners. Other technologies are interactive, including head-up-displays of
dashboard information projected onto the windscreen (currently available on BMW, Citroën
and Chevrolet models, among many others), adaptive brake lights and reversing cameras.
More futuristically, in the case of Mercedes, an infra-red camera system called “Night View
Assist” helps drivers to see in night-time conditions. Additionally, there are control
technologies which are reactive, such as seat belts, four-channel ABS (automated braking
systems), airbags and window curtains, as well as technologies like Jaguar’s Pedestrian
Contact Sensing and Citroën’s Active Bonnet systems which, when detecting a collision
with a pedestrian, deploy a pyrotechnic actuator to instantaneously raise the car bonnet a
few millimeters, so preventing that pedestrian from striking hard points such as the top of
the engine. Many of these reactive technologies are largely hidden from the driver, such as
the “pre-safe” systems which anticipate or measure the first stages of an accident (through
proximity and impact sensors) and which instigate the initial stages of safety equipment,
such as tightening seat belts and beginning airbag deployment sequences. Manufacturers
like BMW are also beginning to incorporate technologies such as all-round laser sensors
and nose-mounted cameras to provide collision avoidance during sideways lane changes,
an AMULETT system to detect any nearby children wearing a special transponder, as well
as an “autopark” feature where the driver can place their car into a tight parking space by
standing outside and operating it remotely (Holloway 2010).
Although not all of these technologies make for exciting car sales features, still less
movie stories, the underlying notion of a car being modified by the addition of a particular
piece of control equipment or device has been one of the most prevalent features of car-
focused films, particularly from the 1960s onwards when such technology first made its
presence felt in the post-war consumerist car market. In Only Two Can Play (Sidney Gillat,
1962), for example, Liz and John try to make love in her large Oldsmobile convertible, but
are quickly thwarted when their panic-pushing of buttons sets off the electric seats, radio,
lights, horn and windscreen washers. In a even more comic commentary, Trafic (Jacques
Tati, 1971) makes perhaps the greatest parody of car gadgetry with its portrayal of the

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Figure 10.1 The Altra camping car, with built-in shower, table, chairs and other gadgets. Trafic
(Dir. Jacques Tati, 1971. Les Films Corona/Studio Canal).

Altra camping car, complete with ridiculous devices such as a table and chairs that fold
out from the car rear, a shower and shower curtain, a front grille which turns into a
barbecue, shaver mounted in the steering wheel and a television on an electric stand, as
well as an extendable body and pop-up roof.
But the most celebrated depictions of automobile devices are undoubtedly those of
the James Bond 007 films, most notably of all in the Aston Martin DB5 deployed in
Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964) and Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965). The Aston’s
functionality includes the ability to create smokescreens, oil slicks and a carpet of tire-
puncturing tacks, as well as Browning machine guns, water cannons, bulletproof glass,
audio-visual tracker for a homing device and a secret control panel. Most famously of all,
the silver birch DB5 equips Bond (Sean Connery) with an ejector seat, rear bulletproof
screen, extendable wheel spinner to slash other cars’ tires and rotating British, Swiss and
French number plates. Also fitted, but not explicitly shown in the movie, are a radar
scanner hidden in the wing mirror housing, telephone in the driver’s door, under-seat tray
for weaponry and golden jewelry, and extending overriders on the bumpers for ramming.
So popular were these devices with the public that the DB5 was shown at innumerable
premieres and promotional events during a two-year world tour, as well as being used in
advertisements from Burton slacks to Simoniz “Vista” car wax, and appearing as the pace
car at the US Laguna Seco race track. Children could also join in, with scale models on
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offer from Corgi to Scalextric, often including working versions of the ejector seat and
other componentry. All of this has made the James Bond DB5 what is often referred to as
the most famous car in the world, and in 2010 the sole remaining example of the two
originally produced for filming was sold for £2.6 million (Anon. 2006; Adams 2008). It was
also instantly recognized when it made a re-appearance in the most recent Bond film,
Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012).
Many later Bond films include similarly device-laden cars, notably the white 1976 Lotus
Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me (Lewis Gilbert, 1977), which not only boasts missiles, oil
slick emission and electronic controls but also the ability to transform into a submarine,
and the Aston Martin V8 Vantage Volante in The Living Daylights (John Glen, 1987),
equipped with side outriggers, spiked tires, missiles and lasers, rocket propulsion, signal-
intercepting radio, head-up display and self-destruction facility. Even more elaborate than
the DB5, the Aston Martin Vanquish in Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002), which boffin
Q describes as “the ultimate in British engineering,” offers “all the usual refinements” such
as ejector seat, spiked tires, remote control and thermal imaging system, as well as
weaponry incorporating torpedoes, missiles, lasers, grenades and target-seeking machine
guns. Most dramatically of all, this particular Aston can even become invisible via an
“adaptive camouflage” cloaking control system.
The popularity of the automobile gadgetry of the Bond cars is particularly evident from
the way it has been overtly parodied in several other films, such as the spoof Bond Casino
Royale (John Huston, 1967) where 007 is tracked by SMERSH using a remote controlled
milk float, and Cannonball Run (Hal Needham, 1981) where Bond actor Roger Moore
plays Seymour Goldfarb whose silver Aston Martin DB5 boasts Bond-style gadgets like
oil slicks, smokescreens and changeable number plates. In Cannonball Run 2 (Hal
Needham, 1984), a black Mitsubishi Starion (driven by actor Richard Kiel, who also plays
the famous assassin “Jaws” in The Spy Who Loved Me) directly mimics 007’s Lotus Esprit
when it turns into a submarine. Most explicitly of all, Austin Powers in Goldmember (Jay
Roach, 2002) includes a Union Jack-draped Jaguar XK8, referred to by Powers (Mike
Myers) as the “Shaguar,” equipped with a DB5-style Perspex bulletproof rear screen and
ejector seat.
The fantastic transformational capacity of 007’s cars is particularly reflected in Speed
Racer (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 2008), where the race cars come equipped with
everything from hydraulic vaulting pistons, crash-triggered safety bubbles, remote control
flying cameras and turbine drives to bulletproof cockpits, tire shredders, spear hooks,
spinning blades and even a wasp nest. This kind of technological variant, where the whole
car becomes in effect one giant gadget, reaches its zenithal form in the disassembling
and spinning low-rider truck of Rubén Ortiz Torres’ art installation/film projection Alien Toy
(1997), as re-used in Fatboy Slim’s “Rockafeller Skank” music video (1998) and reworked
by Citroën for a 2004 car advertisement where a seemingly conventional C4 coupé
becomes “alive with technology” and transforms into a dancing robot (Ondine Chavoya
2004). In mainstream movies, the mutating jet-powered Tumbler of Christopher Nolan’s
Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008), is a vehicle which can be operated by
remote control, jump over other cars, eject a Batpod motorcycle, assume a stealth mode
and even self-destruct when required.

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Communication networks
Besides the weaponry, defense systems and more fantastic control equipment fitted to
many of the Bond, Batman and other cars noted above, there is also another type of
technology which has been increasingly visible in automobiles and in films: radios,
telephones and other devices for information-exchange. As this suggests, the second
area of car technology of note concerns communication, where the car is part of a
networked environment in which all manner of data (audio, visual, directional, informational,
digital) can be transferred. Thus while many films—from The Physician of the Castle
(Pathé Frères, 1908) and La Glace à Trois Faces (Jean Epstein, 1927) right through the
1960s with Harper (Jack Smight, 1966) to the early 1990s with films like Thelma & Louise
(Ridley Scott, 1991) and The Living End—frequently show drivers stopping in order to
send telegrams and make calls from pay phones, as soon as possible movies went out of
their way to show cars equipped with the latest communication devices, and so plugged
into the most modern of technological networks.
The first offerings in this field were mostly aimed at information reception, most notably
through car radios, which by 1941 were already fitted to over 30 percent of US cars (Bull
2004: 245). In films we see this increasingly from the late 1940s onwards, as in film noirs
like They Live By Night (1948), Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949) and The Hitch-Hiker
(Ida Lupino, 1953) where updates on police activities are heard via radio broadcasts while
on the move. Later, many cars became equipped with compact cassette and 8-track
systems, with Ford being one of the first, in 1965, to offer 8-track players as an option in
its Mustang, Thunderbird and Lincoln cars. Along with the subsequent CD-players of the
1980s and 1990s and the most recent iPod systems for music, we also now have DVD
systems for television and video, many of which are fitted to cars either as factory-installed
or aftermarket devices.
Unlike radios, which usually can only receive information, other communications devices
can both import and export information, such as in-car telephones. These began with radio-
based systems, then VHF- and UHF-based networks like the MTS (Mobile Telephone Service)
and IMTS (Improved Mobile Telephone Service) systems in the USA, culminating with mobile
fax systems and integrated Bluetooth-enabled mobiles, as well as computer-like telephone,
text and email devices like the smartphone Blackberry and iPhone. Like radios, these
automobile-mounted telephones make an early appearance in movies, and, for example, are
fitted to James Bond’s 1935 Bentley 3½ Liter in From Russia With Love (Terence Young,
1963) and the Rolls-Royces of Thomas in Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) and
Charlie in Charlie Bubbles (Albert Finney, 1968). However, from the late 1980s onwards, early
technology adopters like yuppie Charlie in Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988) and gangsters
Eddie in Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992) and Vincent in Pulp Fiction (Quentin
Tarantino, 1994) are shown using mobile phones while driving, and from the early 1990s
onwards we tend to see drivers using these devices rather than car-related communications
equipment. Indeed, in Casino Royale (Martin Craig, 2006), even Bond uses a Sony-Erickson
mobile phone rather than Q-provided car-mounted technology to navigate his Ford Mondeo.
More recently, many cars today also offer integrated technology providing direct
network connection to email servers, with messages displayed on a screen, while voice
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synthesis and control allow the messages to be read out and responded to. For example,
the 2010 Mini Countryman was one of the first to use an iPhone-based application to
connect the driver to Internet services like Facebook, Twitter and Spotify, while BMW’s
“Online” facility and new app-based integrative software allows drivers to connect to wi-fi
hotspots, share locations in real time, view weather information, find a parking space or
doctor, peruse news items and stock market updates, and access mobile office features
such as the driver’s own address book and email account (Steel 2013). Porsche’s own
app for the E-Hybrid version of their Panamera model also lets drivers interface with their
car by remote, such as to set the timing of the electric charging systems or to pre-cool or
pre-heat the cabin environment.
Most commonplace of all, sat-nav systems provide networked map location and
guidance. In the mid 1990s solely the preserve of up-market BMWs and the like, by 2006
these sat-nav products from manufacturers such as Tom Tom and Garmin had become
readily affordable as aftermarket accessories, and now offer such facilities as digital data
streams with crowd-sourced traffic updates and warnings, 3-D and photo-realistic views,
alternative routes and the proximity of innumerable local services, from hotels to sites of
historic interest. Associated systems alert the police when a car has been stolen, (such as
the GPS-based “Tracker” system in the UK or the “IntelliTrac” in Australia), while other
GPS-based systems warn drivers about radar traps and speed cameras. Specialist
systems such as the data loggers by Race Technology and Racelogic give even more
detailed information about distance-timing, acceleration, drift angles, positioning on race
tracks and so forth. Other recent technologies include systems such as BMW’s
“Micropause Apps,” which communicates with traffic lights to let the driver know how
long the car will be stationary and provide news flashes on a screen, as well as ILENA
intelligent sat-nav, which calculates different routes according to preferences for economy
and speed and the driver’s known driving style.
Where fitted directly into the car by the manufacturer, all of this network-related
technology is now commonly gathered within a system like Mercedes’ COMAND (Cockpit
Management and Data System) environment, so that radio, CD-player, DVD, memory
cards and sat-nav are harmonized behind a single unified interface. Much of this
technology is thus not mono-functional but aimed at integrating information with other
aspects of the car’s operations, and particularly with its environmental impact. Indeed,
new developments in hybrid, electric, turbine and fuel-cell propulsion systems, which in
the 2010s have appeared in most manufacturers’ ranges of mass-produced cars, are
especially open to this kind of technology integration. For example, BMW is planning to
use pre-selected sat-nav routes and information about traffic and weather in order to
enhance the performance of its hybrid propulsion cars, such as setting the optimum
battery charge or pre-warming the engine (Holloway 2010). In a similar way, interactive
connectivity can also be used for such things as automatically informing dealers when
cars needs servicing, or providing drivers with live information on weather, restaurants,
petrol stations and so forth, and here, with these kinds of interactive technology, we begin
to approach the kinds of advanced automobile connectivity and automation which we see
in films like Tron, Demolition Man, Minority Report and I, Robot described below (McIlroy
2010).

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Distributed interiors
The third technology which changes the interface of the car has developed around the
automobile’s body type, interior space and cabin equipment. The kind of fascination
which this aspect of car technology can generate is seen in films like the Lift to the
Scaffold (Louis Malle, 1957) when, after seeing the motorized roof retract on an American
Chevrolet convertible, Véronique declares excitedly “Look, push of a button and it’s done!
That’s the kind of life I want.” Yet this is just the merest glimpse of the advances in
automobile configurability that begin to emerge a few years later. Thus from the 1960s
onwards, and particularly in the 1990s and 2000s, an ever-increasing proliferation of new
car types have emerged in the form of various hatchbacks, coupes, city cars, retro cars,
sports-utility vehicles, 4x4s, MPVs and hybrid propulsion cars, etc., as well as innumerable
crossover variations, each of which has been intended to appeal to a particular market
segment and a particular set of cultural identities which coalesce around such social
aspects as sports and leisure preferences, social life, sexual orientation, gender, business
and commerce status, arts and creative outlook, safety and risk, and so forth. This market
is not hierarchical or rigid but fractured and tolerant, with each brand and model signaling
a specific lifestyle niche, around which owners can switch at will. Thus automobile
identities are no longer stratified and ordered on a mass-scale across society, as they
were until around 1960, but are now increasingly diverse, fragmented, local and ephemeral
(Gartman 2004a).
Today, therefore, just as we have seen enormous increases in the technology of safety
and communication, we now find an incredibly intense focus upon how the car body
shape and interior are designed, constructed, specified, adjusted and modified. This is
readily evident, for example, from the current BMW range of cars which incorporates
everything from a small two-seater (Z4) to a family saloon (1 and 3 Series) to a large estate
(5 Series Touring) or a 4x4 SUV (X1, X3 and X5), as well as crossover body styles such as
the “Sports Activity Coupe” 4x4 (X6) and the “Progressive Activity Series” amalgam of a
saloon, 4x4 SUV and gran turismo (5 Series GT). Within this overall range of space- and
body-types, interiors cannot only be specified according to just about every conceivable
color, material or texture, but can be adjusted for precise variations in seating, dashboard
layout and instrumentation, four-zone climate control of temperature, air refresh rates and
humidity, visibility (through electrically operated and memory-setting retractable mirrors),
panoramic roofs, sunblinds, ambient lighting, active headrests and keyless entry systems
as well as the extensive range of communications and hi-fi equipment described above—
all of which can be altered through a highly complex set of controls, computers and
motors, including BMW’s iDrive interface (a rotary push-pull-and-twist dial giving access
to an Apple-style menu-driven hierarchy of driver options).
Nor is this intensity by any means confined to BMW, and most other manufacturers
now pursue similar strategies of exhaustive internal design and obsessive technological
refinement. For example, the Citroën C6 saloon first launched in 2006 boasts, in addition
to many of the BMW features described above, such technologies as a self-cleaning
concave rear window, speed-sensitive aerodynamic devices, individually-heated lounge-
style seats, voice-recognition control for its “NaviDrive” mapping and information system,
172 Archi.Pop

a driver-configurable head-up display and automatic and driver-adjustable Hydractive

suspension and ride settings, as well as a LDWS (Lane Departure Warning System) device
that uses infra-red sensors to detect if the car has drifted out of a freeway lane and then
alerts the driver via vibrating seat emitters. In short, the overall effect of this massively
concentrated application of design and technology is the production of a relatively small
space, barely large enough to hold five adults in very close proximity, in which every single
millimeter of space, surface and equipment has been microscopically designed, where
every material and texture has been equally carefully considered, and whose every
conceivable attribute, from color and pattern to temperature and brightness, can be
differently specified, adjusted and controlled by those who ride within it. Furthermore, in
the way this car interior is guided through space, the car’s technology allows the driver to
foresee, predict, manage, avoid and generally survive an enormous range of differing
road, traffic and journey conditions, and to do so in a way that alternatively involves,
integrates, questions, checks, ignores or absolves the driver in the process of moving the
car forward in a speedy, efficient and safe manner.
In all this technology, therefore, we see that commonly available auto-based equipment
has largely outstripped many of the depictions offered in film, excepting, of course, some
of the more fantastical weaponry and transformative capabilities of 007’s Aston Martin
and Lotus sports cars. Indeed, where cars in movies in the 1950s and 1960s helped to
prepare the public for the consumption of new automobiles technologies, educating them
in what would soon be available for purchase, the situation is now all but reversed, with
current cars being at the forefront of all electronic, digital and information technologies. As
a result, cars are now increasingly like hybrid entities where intelligence and intentionality
are distributed between humans and non-humans (Thrift 2004: 49). This is a trajectory
which, in terms of a human being becoming defined by their ability to control and drive a
car, has been tracked in film from La Glace à Trois Faces to the Fast and Furious series
(various directors, 2001 onward). Similar themes regarding the conflation of man and
machine range from film noir movies such as Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), where
the car is shown as an extension of the human body, right through to avant-garde art
movies such as Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 7 (1993) and Cremaster Cycle
(1994–2002), where body and machine mesh together within complex themes of creation,
biology, psycho-sexuality, myth and identity (Frankel 2001; Arthur 2001). As a truly
technological hybridity, we see this starkly in movies like Death Race 2000 (Paul Bartel,
1975) and its remake Death Race (Paul W. S. Anderson, 2008), and particularly in the
earlier film’s lead driver Frankenstein who survives through multiple bodily reconstructions.
An even more explicit conflation of driver and machine comes in Tron (Steven Lisberger,
1982) and Tron Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010) where the lead characters are sucked
into the inner digital workings of a computer, in which they have to compete in the Light
Cycle races and other arenas for their survival. Rendered as pure digital code, and no
longer physically human, yet still “driving” virtual vehicles, these driver-riders continue to
exist only to the degree that they can work both with and against the computer that forms
the world around them. “You are hard-wired into the car,” explained motor racing expert
Trevor Carlin about Tron-style driving, “and can almost make it do things by thought”
(Anderson 2010).

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This notion of driver and car forming a cyborgian entity, as given its most extreme
mainstream filmic representation in the two Tron films, marks a profound shift in the
relationship of the operator to the machine. For example, in the early days of motoring,
enthusiasts like Filson Young emphasize the need for drivers to understand how the car
worked. “The first duty of every motorist,” he asserted, “is to understand his car thoroughly
in every detail” (Filson Young 1905: 177). Here, the motorist (or perhaps, for Filson Young’s
wealthy associates, a private mechanic) is expected to know how the car might be
operated, maintained and repaired, such that the driver becomes a mirror of the car, able
to attend to any problems that may arise. The motorist should “not be content with a
merely superficial knowledge of ‘how the thing works,’” argued Filson Young, “but should
make himself thoroughly the master of the construction of his machine and the working
of all of its parts” (Filson Young 1905: 197). As a result of these duties which must have
seemed like a labor of love, early motorists frequently spoke of their vehicles in animalistic
terms, seeing them as breathing creatures with whom they maintained a living relationship.
One such motorist, for example, spoke of “the almost human consciousness of the
machine” and praised “the patient ready response which it makes to any call on its
powers” as well as “the snort with which it breasts the hill, and soft sob which dies away
when it has reached the summit.” All this made the automobile “as companionable as any
living being” (Filson Young 1905: 236).
In the immensely complicated world of contemporary car technology, all of this has
now completely changed, and no longer do drivers expect to maintain personal
relationships with their vehicles, or even to know how the car’s systems might work.
Today, a driver might know which tasks certain technologies might perform (illuminate,
communicate, accelerate, brake, heat/cool, etc.), yes, but how the various electronic and
mechanical systems actually function, almost certainly not. Hence the intelligence is no
longer mirrored between car and driver, still less conflated into a single cyborgian man-car
device, but distributed between them, with the intelligence to operate (the driver) being
quite separate from the technological function of actually working (the car). Furthermore,
certain aspects of operation which previously might have been given over to the driver are
now taken up by the car, such as ABS braking (which has replaced skillful cadence
braking to avoid skidding during an emergency stop), active cruise controls (which alter
the speed and even steering of the car in order to maintain a safe distance from other
vehicles), or, of course, sat-nav (which absolves the driver from map-reading and
navigation). Conversely, certain tasks which might previously have been assumed by or
limited by the car have now been taken up by the driver. For example, speed is now rarely
governed by the mechanical capabilities of the car and is now more usually controlled by
the driver’s sense of what of is a safe, legal and morally justifiable speed to attain. In a
similar way, the distance traveled is often no longer governed by a car’s reliability or fuel
range but by the driver’s own bodily and mental comfort.
The internal spatial interface of the car—the steering wheel, pedals, dashboard, central
console and myriad other buttons, dials and displays—is an integral part of this distribution
system, not so much passing control from human to non-human, or vice-versa, as
creating an extensive, dispersed intelligence, whereby “the automobile” is made up not
solely from the physical object of the car but also from the driver and their interaction
174 Archi.Pop

together (Dant 2004). In addition, all of this takes place not despite of but in integration
with the driver moving in their car, whether that be either across the country at relative
higher speeds, or in lower speeds among the hustle and bustle of city life.
As a result, we are now beginning to see the possibility of whole shifts in the driving
experience that result from the application of new technologies. In particular, car designers
are speculating about vehicles that are less about driving as an act and about reaching a
destination as a goal, and more about creating connections as an act, and making
associations and relationships as a goal. For example, where some drivers have seen
their car as “like a living room” where “people can get together and have a nice time”
(Benson, Macrury and Marsh 2007: 16), the Toyota Personal Mobility (PM) concept car of
2003 takes this sociability one step further, and is aimed at “meeting, linking and hanging
out together.” To do this it uses LED technology to change the color of the vehicle to
indicate “emotions” and situations, navigation technology so that multiple PMs can team
up, such that one PM can become the lead vehicle, while others follow on autopilot, and
where vehicles can simply join up with other PMs and their drivers. The aim here is not so
much the production or driving of individual vehicles, but the creation of “a mobile
community.” Toyota has further explored this concept through its more recent i-REAL,
i-Unit, i-Foot and i-Swing vehicles. The i-Unit and i-REAL devices, for example, have such
features as colors which change according to the emotion of the driver, plus “comprehensive
communication capabilities for gaining, knowledge, for contacting others, and for
communicating.” This includes exchanging information between cars as they pass each
other by, which thus become “part of the city,” integrating “private transportation and
personal mobility with the urban infrastructure” (Design Platform Japan 2008: 80–3). The
Mio concept of 2010 developed by the Brazil arm of Fiat has similar aims. This car was
designed by crowd-sourcing via the company’s website and social networking
technologies like Twitter, with around 17,000 collaborators contributing their thoughts
about the Mio’s size, materials, maintenance and propulsion system as well as integration
of infotainment systems, head-up displays and other controls, social networking capacity,
on-board biometry and traffic automation. The result is a two meters long city car,
equipped with mobile phone integration, multimedia player, GPS and touchscreen
controls, with Fiat hoping to further develop the car into the “steering wheel free era” with
“on-board intelligence that enables the vehicle to drive itself” (Fiat 2013).
Road technologies are also being developed along similar lines, such as the 2010
wireless charging systems for electric cars by Delphi Automotive, WiTricity Corp and
HaloIPT. For example, HaloIPT’s Induction Power Transfer (IPT) uses pads set into the
surface of the M25 and other freeway-type roads—an arrangement which recalls the
electronic control strips of Motorama and Design for Dreaming—supplying the driver with
not just power but traffic, news, entertainment and other digital data. “Your electric car
helps you with your journey,” boast the designers. “It interfaces with your entertainment
and plays your favorite playlists on the media player. It reminds you that you have an
important meeting tomorrow. It handles your email. It is your assistant while you travel.”
(Anon. 2013a, 2013b). In the kind of future world envisaged here by motoring technologists,
the driver is almost entirely removed from the physiological business of driving as an
activity that has a specific destination in mind or kinesthetic pleasure as a goal. The

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Figure 10.2 Semi-automated driving and head-up displays in the Fiat Mio concept. A Common
Day in Fiat Mio’s Future (Fiat Brazil, 2013).

driver’s senses are instead more attuned to the social connections made possible by this
community-oriented vehicle, allowing them to work, rest and play at will. This is what Paul
Virilio calls “accelerated temporality,” the ultimate cognitive mapping, a way of knowing
not only where one is physically, geographically, but also informationally, in the context of
work, pleasure and social life (Redhead 2004: 46). This is the mobile phone to the power
of ten, offering increasing mobility of communication and transportation.
All of this suggests that car driving is no longer about actually driving, that is in terms
of a driver personally controlling the car, and more about allowing the driver to get on with
other things. As Virilio puts it, the “driving by instinct” of pioneer motorists which first gave
way to “driving by instruments” has now been replaced by the “auto-pilot” (Virilio 1998:
21). As with the kind of concept vehicles produced by Toyota and other car manufacturers,
this is most readily seen in the kinds of near-future visions of what might be around the
corner. Demolition Man (Marco Brambilla, 1993), for example, set in 2032 “San Angeles,”
shows police officer Lenina Huxley making video calls from an automated version of the
General Motors’ Ultralite concept car on the San Angeles freeway, only turning on self-
drive when she arrives in the city center. With the added reassurance of safety features
like “Secure-Foam” crash-activated interior protection and tires which auto-inflate if
punctured, Huxley is able not only to converse with colleagues but voice-activate the
radio, access computer files and do other work while on the move. Similarly in Minority
Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) a driverless car allows John Anderton, chief of the
“Precrime” police force, to negotiate the vertical, horizontal and banked automated
“Maglev” (magnetic levitation) freeways of 2054 Washington, DC while making video calls
(Anon. 2004b). Later on, a Lexus 2054 EV concept car created especially for the movie
provides a greater freedom of transport, with both Anderton and nemesis Witwer using
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versions of this advanced electric two-seater to propel themselves around the city. Yet
another concept car was created for I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004), this time a spherically-
wheeled 2035 Audi RSQ equipped with automated control systems, mainframe computer
connection, audio-visual crash warnings and holographic head-up-display system. All of
this allows Chicago homicide detective Del Spooner to access computer files, review
digital paperwork and even sleep in a jet-fighter style cockpit while being ushered at high
speed along an underground freeway (Anon. 2004a).
Here, then, we return to the kinds of fantastical vision first promoted by Futurama, To
New Horizons, Motorama and Design for Dreaming—that is a world of transportation
wherein the “driver” is absolved of the need to actually drive, and instead can give
themselves over to the automatic control systems in order to do other things. Indeed, in
this kind of automotive world to drive is not the most important thing at all. Instead, the
intention is to distribute drivers out of their car interiors and into other worlds, so that they
can meet new people, have conversations and establish new relationships, have new
thoughts and ideas, and even perhaps—as the concluding shot of Design for Dreaming
and Toyota’s socially-oriented Toyota PM vehicle both show—fall in love.
This is not, however, quite the end of the story of the automobile interior, for, despite
the positivist technologically-driven modern dream promoted in many of these films, a
flip-side is also frequently on display. As Demolition Man, Minority Report and I, Robot all
show, whatever the advantages and attractions of automated vehicles with advanced
propulsion, safety and communication technologies, and even if these technologies do
free drivers to get on with their work, friendships and love-lives, then drivers will still relish
the option of being in control. In I, Robot, when robo-psychologist Susan Calvin asks
detective Del Spooner what he thinks he is doing when he turns off the automatic controls
at high speed along one of the Chicago freeways, Spooner replies simply “I’m driving.”
Ultimately, therefore, it is not an entirely driver-free form of driving which is being extolled,
rather a multi-faceted kind of automobile world in which automated driving is one of the
options, but not sole alternative, on offer. One might conclude, then, that, whatever the
technological possibilities of doing otherwise, people seem to still wish to actively
(physically and mentally) engage with the architecture and cities around them.

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Chapter 11
Ugly America and Architecture
on the Highway: A Time-Life
View of the 1950s and 1960s
Gabrielle Esperdy

For more than four decades in the middle of the twentieth century, Life served as a “show-
book of the world,” in the words of publisher Henry Luce, who launched the magazine in
1936 as a pictorial compliment to Time, the successful newsweekly he founded in 1923.
Luce’s stated goal for Life was ambitious: to present to a national audience a “complete
and reliable record” of all “seen events,” those that were conventionally newsworthy and
those that had not yet been published in visual, principally photographic, terms. These
ranged from politics to art and design, from industry to sport to religion, from celebrities
to unknowns. In recent years scholars have demonstrated the extent to which the
magazine fell short of this ambition: Luce’s own editorial mandates, informed by his
personal conservatism, limited which parts of the “dynamic social world” were actually
shown in the pictures that dominated Life’s pages; Life’s readership, though national in
the sense that its circulation extended coast-to-coast, remained largely white and middle
class throughout the magazine’s 34-year existence. Though Life may never have become
the “convincing reporter of contemporary life” that Luce proclaimed it would, today, four
decades after it ceased publication, the magazine stands as a compelling historical and
visual record of those dimensions of contemporary life it managed to report upon
convincingly (Luce and MacLeish 1936: 1, 3). In particular, in its frequent coverage of the
American scene, Life depicted the full extent of the rapid expansion of the consumer
culture of the United States at mid-century and the impact this had on the dramatic
transformation of the country’s built environment. Far from being objective reportage,
however, Life’s depiction of these emerging consumerist landscapes resolutely followed
Time’s editorial lead: “Time gives both sides [of a question],” Henry Luce declared in
the early years of that magazine, “but clearly indicates which side it believes to have
the stronger position” (Whitman 1967: 33). The same was true for Life, in commentary,
articles and photo-essays that sought to influence attitudes and shape perceptions of

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popular culture as manifest in built form in the US in 1950s and 1960s. If Life sometimes
demonstrated a profound ambivalence, and many outright contradictions, about the
changing landscape so frequently depicted in its pages, this was because its critical
attitudes were as fluid and fickle as popular culture itself. Nowhere is this clearer than
in Life’s coverage of the contemporary built environment: as the magazine documented
the emergence of new typologies and charted the evolution of new styles, it also
attempted to mediate conventional distinctions between the elite and the everyday, the
monumental and the quotidian as embodied, most especially, in architecture on the
highway.
These conventions, and their instability at mid-century, were fully on display in an
exhibition the American Institute of Architects organized to celebrate its centennial in
1957. Held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, this show was the first in the
museum’s history devoted to architecture, and was also the gallery’s first show to display
photography of any kind. Though the exhibition’s ostensible theme was “one hundred
years of architecture in America,” its real focus was contemporary US architecture as
manifest in “Ten Buildings in America’s Future” (National Gallery of Art, Past Exhibitions;
Deschin 1957: 136). These included such well-known modern structures of the 1950s as
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Matthew Nowicki’s North
Carolina State Fair Arena in Raleigh and Minoru Yamasaki’s St. Louis Airport Terminal in
Missouri. According to guest curator Frederick Gutheim, an urban planner and American
Studies professor at Barnard College, the buildings were selected to “embody trends and
characteristics considered to be significant of the future development of American
architecture” (Portner 1957: B1). For Gutheim, these had less to do with form, style, or
materials—though all his buildings exemplify the standards of mainstream modernism—
than with the way an emerging architecture reflected such supposedly “national
characteristics” as “the love of personal freedom, egalitarianism, mobility, [and] leisure,”
and that supported such socio-economic trends as the broadening scale of business,
commercial and civic enterprises and the increasing organization of urban life (Gutheim
1957: 13, 64). Essentially, Gutheim is describing what we now understand as the
extended, if not attenuated, urbanism of the post-war decades. Though he never explicitly
states it, Gutheim is implying that a shift in cultural and, hence, architectural focus is
underway, from center to periphery, from downtown to suburb, from skyscraper to
ground-scraper. His curatorial choices make this clear: he ignores post-war urban
landmarks, like the Equitable Building in Portland or Lever House in Manhattan, in favor of
SOM’s Connecticut General Headquarters, Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical
Center and Victor Gruen’s Northland Center—all located beyond the city limits, outside
Hartford and Detroit, respectively. For similar reasons, Gutheim includes two new,
suburban and low-rise residential subdivisions: Charles Goodman and Dan Kiley’s Hollin
Hills, outside the District of Columbia in Virginia, and Vernon DeMars, Donald Hardison
and Lawrence Halprin’s Easter Hill Village, outside San Francisco in the East Bay. Here
was the AIA tacitly endorsing a future for architecture not in the traditional city, but in the
highway metropolis, in the developing territories and emerging typologies of the automobile
whose proliferating presence was creating a new kind of metropolitan settlement and
shaping new popular attitudes towards the spaces it engendered.

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 Ugly America and Architecture on the Highway 179

As presented at the National Gallery, the new precincts of the car had an undeniably
seductive beauty (see Figure  11.1). They occupied the exhibition’s final (and largest)
gallery, a chronological and visual climax consisting of 21 backlit transparencies, with
wall-sized Kodak Colorama murals, some as large as 14 × 24 feet, depicting each of the
“ten buildings in America’s future” (Life, 3 June, 1957: 59). Photojournalist W. Eugene
Smith shot each one with great theatricality, in extreme close-ups or lit from within at
night, emphasizing the formal drama and glassy modernity we now readily associate with
mid-century architectural glamour, an effect enhanced by the fluorescent tubes that
illuminated them in the AIA show. Though far removed from the humanely sober black and
white pictures that established Smith’s reputation in photo-essays like “Country Doctor”
(1948) and “Spanish Village” (1951), these sleek and stunning color images also appeared
in the pages of Life magazine. In fact, though the AIA commissioned the photographs for
the centennial exhibition, Life covered their costs. This allowed the magazine to feature
Smith’s pictures in Life’s 3 June, 1957 issue and, presumably, to share them with the
other publications in Henry Luce’s media empire, including Fortune and Time, both of
which reproduced Smith’s photographs of Connecticut General’s suburban campus in
September of that year, in articles that not only celebrated the architecture, but, more
significantly, trumpeted the buildings’ assured impact on “the city of the future” (Time,
16 September, 1957: 88).
In Life, descriptive, even didactic, text accompanied Smith’s pictures: Nowicki’s State
Fair Pavilion, a structure notable for its boldly parabolic form, was not “a futuristic fantasy
in a world’s fair,” but a “solidly practical building.” Yamasaki’s St. Louis terminal created a
“spacious, dramatic effect” that was symbolically appropriate for the “air age,” even though
its “simple structure”—defined by the repetition of its peaked, glass-filled concrete vaults—
was designed specifically (and sensibly) to accommodate future expansion. By the time
Life showcased the “airport arcs” and “shining shops” of the AIA exhibit, many of these
“notable modern buildings” were already familiar to regular readers of the magazine (Life,
3 June, 1957: 59). When Gruen’s Northland opened in 1954, at a moment when shopping
centers were “springing up” across the country, its status as the largest in the nation
warranted the splashy coverage it received. Life dubbed it a “20th Century Bazaar” and
dutifully described every aspect of its design, from its circulation planning to its art works.

Figure 11.1 W. Eugene Smith, Northland Shopping Center (Victor Gruen, 1954) in Southfield,
Michigan, Life, 3 June, 1957: 60–1. Estate of W. Eugene Smith.
180 Archi.Pop

With its extended storefronts (1¼ miles long) and ample parking (spaces for 7,500 cars),
Northland was a “fantastic combination of modern efficiency. . .fine architecture and pure
gaiety” (Life, 30 August, 1954: 82). John Zimmerman’s photographs reflected this,
emphasizing the extent of Northland’s sculptural program, the modularity of its buildings
(especially Hudson’s, its anchoring department store), and the flow of its pedestrian and
motorized traffic, along with the fashionableness of its well-dressed clientele.
At the dedication of the GM Tech Center two years later, Life was even more effusive,
hailing the Saarinen-designed complex as “a Versailles of Industry” in a famous conflation
of palatial and manufacturing that was meant to emphasize both the scale and grandeur
of the new campus, even as it inadvertently lead readers into mistakenly thinking the Tech
Center was an actual site of production—reinforced by comparisons to Albert Kahn’s
factories (which established “the horizontal trend”) and references to William Blake’s
poetry (“a far cry from ‘the dark, Satanic mills’ of the 19th century”). For Life, this merger
of art, architecture and landscape was a remarkable display of corporate prestige; and it
dutifully ticked off the center’s impressive statistics: 25 buildings containing 56 miles of
fluorescent tubing and 378 miles of wiring, 13,000 trees, 11 miles of roads, 85 acres of
parking lots—all occupied by 4,000 GM designers, engineers and executives. At the
same time, Life stressed the Tech Center’s import for the world beyond its gates, predicting
that it would transform US building practice through its innovative deployment of new
materials and techniques, including glazed masonry, enameled steel spandrel panels and
neoprene window gaskets—all of which, in fact, the Tech Center did help popularize.
Andreas Feininger’s accompanying photographs clearly documented all these materials,
revealing the myriad ways the Center was “like the automobile itself”: mass-produced,
colorful, efficient, stylish and pleasing to the eye. They also portrayed the Center as a
coherent composition that possessed “unusual beauty,” best explained, the editors
seemed to believe, by reference to modernist abstraction, like “a complex creation of
painter Fernand Léger” (Life, 21 May, 1956: 102–7).
In their careful pairing of text and image, all of these photo-essays reveal a subtle, but
insistent and far-reaching agenda being promulgated by Life’s editors, one that sought to
teach the American public—or at least that percentage of the American public that
included Life’s six million largely white, middle class and urban/suburban readers in the
1950s (Baughman 2001)—how to comprehend the contemporary landscape that seemed
to be changing before their very eyes, everywhere they turned, spawning new typologies
and infrastructures and producing new forms and spaces. In Luce’s original prospectus
for Life, he argued that the magazine’s purpose was to give the US citizen the opportunity
“to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed” (Luce and MacLeish 1936: 1). In the
present context this meant instructing that citizen to appreciate modern architecture and
design, to value comprehensive and master planning in commercial and corporate
endeavors, to equate private development with the civic realm, and to discern quality and
not just quantity in the contemporary built environment of the United States. That this was
a fraught, if not quixotic pursuit in mid-century America did not go unnoticed by the
editors of yet another Henry Luce publication in 1957.
Architectural Forum was the magazine of building the way Fortune was the magazine
of business, with progressive content matching a progressive layout. Modern graphics

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 Ugly America and Architecture on the Highway 181

supported content that presented architecture, as well as real estate development and
construction, as a modern enterprise for which functionalism was an editorial credo as
much as an aesthetic position. Though its readership was limited to architecture and its
allied professions, Forum’s editors recognized that the audience for architecture was
broadening in the post-war period. To this end, the magazine occasionally addressed
what it saw as architecture’s new public. Douglas Haskell, Forum’s editor, was an early
defender of both “popular building” and “popular taste.” Unafraid of the answer when he
asked in 1958, “what do people really want?” Haskell argued that even “roadside honky-
tonk” had value and vitality because of the way it reflected the public’s desire for
decorativeness, drama and improvisation in the built environment (Haskell 1958). Despite
Haskell’s effusive populism, dismissiveness was far more typical in the pages of Forum,
as in February 1957, when contributing editor Mary Mix Foley dissected what she called
“The Debacle of Public Taste.” Foley, like Haskell, began with a simple question, though
her conclusions were diametrically opposed to his. “Why are there so many bad buildings
in America?” Foley asked. Though she takes architects to task for ignoring the “‘mass’
market,” she places the blame squarely on “public taste, or the lack of it.” From Foley’s
perspective, “the people who build, buy, sell, live, and work in the suburbias, the Main
Streets, and the roadtowns of America are eminently satisfied with the established
ugliness. They do not even know it is ugly.” This willful ignorance, born of too many hours
“watching I Love Lucy,” was difficult to overcome, and Foley’s analysis was as unrelenting
as it was condescending (providing some historical context for Robert Venturi’s better
known critique of TV-watching Americans in the following decade): “When they see the
magnificent and precisely machined General Motors Technical Center in Life magazine,
they are momentarily impressed. But the esthetic it embodies touches their daily life no
more closely than the unearthly beauty of a jet-propelled rocket. If they see a modern
house they call it a chicken coop” (Foley 1957; Venturi 1966).
Significantly, Life’s editors made exactly the opposite point about the buildings shown
at the National Gallery. Increasingly, they argued, modern architecture did touch America’s
daily life because it was spreading out from the central city to become “apparent
everywhere in the U.S. today,” not just in “skyscrapers and homes,” but in “factories,
airports, clinics [and] shopping centers” (Life, 3 June, 1957: 59). It is tempting to see the
contrary views expressed in Architectural Forum and Life as the manifestation of a dialectic
between the profession and the public, between elitism and populism, playing itself out
across the fourth estate, or at least within Time Inc., a media empire whose well-known
eschewing of journalistic objectivity in favor of Henry Luce’s Weltanschauung did not
guarantee a uniform or monolithic subjectivity (Brinkley 2011; Smith 1993 and 2001). Of
course, this opposition is part of a broader intellectual critique that emerged in architectural
and urban discourse during this period, in response to the increasing presence of the
automobile, the rapid development of suburbia, and the ubiquitous building and settlement
types that came with them both (Esperdy 2011). But even in Life itself, within the
covers of seemingly every issue in the 1950s and 1960s, one finds evidence of this
same tension—both accidental, caused by the exigencies of magazine publishing,
and intentional, caused by conscious editorial decisions—between celebration and
condemnation of the spaces and places of the middle landscapes of mid-century America.
182 Archi.Pop

In the 3 June, 1957 issue, while Eugene Smith’s photo essay heralds the brave new
world of exemplary modern buildings in the AIA show, an editorial titled “America—the
Beautiful?” offers a distinctly different perspective. It was most likely written by Chief
Editorial Writer John K. Jessup, whose two decades at Time Inc. meant he was well
versed in Henry Luce’s evangelizing views on the American Century, a socio-political
construct Luce promoted (and made famous) in a 1941 Life editorial. For Luce, the
twentieth century was inevitably the American Century because of the country’s
emergence as a world power. This, he believed, would compel it to leadership across a
wide spectrum of world affairs, be they intellectual, scientific or artistic. It was Luce’s
commitment to the American Century that led to the jingoism in which his publications
frequently indulged, particularly where matters of national life, self-perception and the
environment were concerned (Luce 1941; Cook 1979; White 1996). Such was the case
in “America—the Beautiful?” in which a prickly review of a litany of recent complaints
about all that is wrong with the US masks a deeper concern that the country is failing to
live up to its potential. Begrudgingly, the editors find much to agree with in assessments
both imported and home grown; and while they might have been willing to ignore the
observations of “sharp-tongued neighbors”—noting that the British have been appalled
by American vulgarity since Dickens first visited in the 1840s—they take seriously “the
bitter indictments” that Americans had been leveling at America, beginning with Mary Mix
Foley in Architectural Forum, whom they quote selectively at her most scabrous: “Probably
never in history. . .has a culture equaled ours in the dreariness and corrupted fantasy of a
major part of its building” (Life, 3 June, 1957: 34).
This is followed by lengthy quotes from, and sly references to, a veritable who’s who of
1950s social commentators on the physical and emotional wastelands of suburbia and its
culture: social critics John Keats and Vance Packard, authors, respectively, of the best-
sellers The Crack in the Picture Window, on the failure of subdivisions as cohesive
communities, and The Hidden Persuaders, on manipulative underpinnings of consumerism;
cultural critic Russell Lynes, who popularized the social strata of highbrow, middlebrow
and lowbrow; management psychologist Robert McMurry, who diagnosed the condition
of executive neurosis; sociologists David Riesman, analyst of the car as a social force, and
C. Wright Mills, who coined the term “the power elite”; and urbanist and Fortune
contributing editor William H. Whyte, who dissected the values of the Organization
Man. All this, in a one-page editorial! “Undoubtedly,” the editors concede, “a revolt is
needed”—something to jolt Americans into “developing higher standards of taste to make
them question the ‘jukebox baroque’ of their row-houses, the pistachio, puce and
anodized-gold color combos of their three-toned cars with nonfunctional airplane fins”
(Life, 3 June, 1957: 34). Such lapses of aesthetic judgment were, the editors concluded,
the inevitable result of the rapid growth of post-war prosperity and the rapid expansion of
materialism in a consumer society. Not surprisingly, they fail to acknowledge that their
own magazine might have been contributing to the “chaos, anxiety, and uncertainty”
that seemed to afflict present-day American culture; and one wonders how many of
Life’s readers noted the three-toned car with nonfunctional airplane fins (a 1957 Fairlane
500 Sunliner) that appeared in the Ford Motor Company advertisement on the double-
page spread immediately following the editorial—a juxtaposition undoubtedly beyond

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 Ugly America and Architecture on the Highway 183

the editors’ control but one that nonetheless underscores the Life’s myriad internal
paradoxes.
For the most part, though, it was not the cars that bothered Life’s editors; it was the
roads they drove on, the state of the American highway having been an editorial concern
since the magazine’s earliest issues. In June 1938, for example, Life observed that, “‘the
nation that lives on wheels’ still has the dubious honor of having created, along 3,000,000
miles of highway the Supreme Honky-Tonk of All Time.” Illustrating this faint praise were a
dozen Margaret Bourke-White photographs depicting an “unsightly” stretch of US
Highway 1 between New York City and Washington, DC with a range of “eyesores” in full
view: tourist cabins, colossal statues, billboards, and signage of all types. “Coca-Cola is
everywhere,” the editors noted with mild exasperation, but by 1938 such invasive
advertising was neither new nor notable (Life, 27 June, 1938: 5). Rather, it was ubiquitous,
as much on the nation’s highways as in the pages the nation’s magazines, including the
very same issue of Life, where a full-page, full-color ad appears on page 37. What seems
to have particularly perplexed the editors was that a country whose highway system was
“the finest in the world” had also produced such “endless mileage of hot-dog stands,
signs, shacks, dumps and shoddy gas stations.” Elsewhere in the same issue is a feature
photo essay promoting summer tourism in the US. Here, color photographs of man-
made and natural landmarks like the Taos Pueblo, Mount Rushmore, the Tetons and the
Grand Canyon accompany a series of regional maps suggesting “what to see in America.”
Conveniently, in an act of willful graphic denial, the maps depict the nation’s touristic
monuments as floating freely above invisible highways, disconnected from one another
and bounded only by state lines, while the editors cheerfully proclaim that, “with his roads
and automobiles the modern American is the world’s most mobile man” (Life, 27 June,
1938:24). From the vantage point of history, the editors’ perplexity about the state of the
American roadside comes perilously close to obtuseness, given their inability to
acknowledge causality between the proliferation of cars so essential to the identity of the
modern, mobile, American and the profusion of “roadside junk” that so “marred” the
country’s “scenic beauty.” On page 5, Dutchland Farms is an example of commercial
blight; on page 32, it is a seaboard attraction “offering 32 flavors of ice cream.”
A decade later, in 1948, the expansion of Howard Johnson’s, which purchased the
Dutchland’s franchise in 1940, merited a laudatory article about the arrival on the west
coast of those “orange-roofed units” that formed “the great network already familiar to
tourists from Maine to Florida.” In this context (and in photographs by Werner Wolff),
billboards, neon signs and roadside restaurants “visible for miles” were not eyesores, but,
especially after the company standardized and modernized its classic “colonial house”
cupola-topped, turquoise-trimmed prototype, were evidence of an entrepreneurial spirit
and business acumen that managed to sell 5 billion ice cream cones since 1929 (Life,
6 September, 1948: 71–4; Jakle and Sculle 1999; Sammarco 2013). Accompanying
Howard Johnson’s growing presence on US highways was an expanded advertising
campaign in Life. Promoting itself as a “landmark for hungry Americans,” HoJo’s offered
Life’s readers free roadmaps indicating the location of every shop and restaurant in the
franchise. Increasingly, by the mid-1950s, as the number of Howard Johnson’s units more
than doubled, these were located on what the company identified as “important highways”
184 Archi.Pop

(along with “main highways and shopping centers”). That all roads did, indeed, “lead to
Howard Johnson’s” was confirmed by November 1954, when HoJo’s marketed its
expanding presence along the routes of the new limited access toll roads that would
shortly become the connectors and foundation of the defense highway network, a.k.a.
the Eisenhower Interstate System (Life, 15 November, 1954: 197). In the accompanying
color rendering, cars wind their way through unspoiled countryside on a high-speed
roadway with a single tidy sign on the right-of-way announcing the Howard Johnson’s at
the service plaza ahead. One wonders what Life’s editors of the 1950s must have thought
of the motor age idyll depicted in this and so many other Howard Johnson’s advertisements
(Life, 26 June, 1950: 67; 17 July, 1950: 111; 21 May, 1956: 10).
They were all for celebrating as abstract art the “uncoiling clover leaves of our highway
intersections” (à la Sigfried Giedion), but were increasingly emphatic about the need to
preserve limited access against the US tradition of unlimited roadway access, “i.e. anyone
owning property along a highway has the right to cut as many entrances into it as he
wishes anywhere on his land.” It was against the incursion of hotdogs and ice cream that
Life published “Dead End for the U.S. Highway,” a lengthy article that is ostensibly a
history of efforts to reduce traffic congestion and fatalities on US 1, but is, in fact, an
explicit endorsement of the Eisenhower Interstate program then being debated in
Congress in the middle of 1955 (Weingroff 2013). It is, of course, an unintentional irony
that as Life was decrying the American propensity for unregulated roadsides, which it
derisively labeled as “making way for a custard,” the magazine was being underwritten by
companies, from Howard Johnson’s to Tastee-Freez, that profited by that same lack of
regulation—and, thus, contributed to the roadside sprawl that Life regularly denounced
(Brean 1955). Indeed, Tastee-Freez ads not only promoted the frozen confections available
at 1,700 locations coast-to-coast, they also recruited store owners and building
developers, with some success, since the company added 100 new units in less than
three months (Life, 25 June, 1956: 120; 17 September, 1956: 81).
The month after “Dead End” appeared, Life published a lengthy story about the resort-
building boom underway in Las Vegas, occasioned by the opening of the original Dunes
and the short-lived Moulin Rouge, both of which were featured in Loomis Dean’s
accompanying color photographs. Amid the glitzy images of signs and showgirls,
“Gambling Town Pushes its Luck” did not shy away from social and economic realities
(Life, 20 June, 1955: 20). At the Dunes we see the last-minute installation of slot machines
and the 35-foot tall Desert Sheik, a fiberglass sculpture designed by Kermit Hawkins for
YESCO. The Sheik dominated the otherwise low-slung resort, itself designed by Robert
Door and John Repogle with sloping walls meant to evoke Bedouin tents. The towering
figure, complete with an auto headlight doubling as a gem in the Sheik’s turban, was
considered a functional necessity because of the Dunes’ location at what was then the
south end of Las Vegas Boulevard, whose moniker—the Strip—was sufficiently novel as
to require explanation in the text. The novelty—and financial riskiness—of this site is made
evident in photographs depicting nearly empty gaming tables.
At the Moulin Rouge, it was the crowded gaming tables that were notable because they
featured gamblers who were both white and black: the Moulin Rouge was the first integrated
resort casino in all of Las Vegas. Significantly, the location of this casino resort was also

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unusual, not because it was pushing the boundaries of the gaming district but because it
was located in the only place possible in a functionally segregated city, away from
downtown, across the railroad tracks, in the predominantly African American neighborhood
of Westside. If this location went unmentioned in the text and unnoticed in the photographs
(there were no exteriors of the Zick and Sharp building or of Betty Willis’ well-known YESCO
sign), it is unavoidable in what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the article, a two-
page cartoon by New Yorker illustrator Tom Funk contrasting the older casinos of Glitter
Gulch on Fremont Street downtown with the new development of the Strip, to the south
along US 91 (Life, 20 June, 1955: 26–7). Though the text acknowledges that the Strip’s
phenomenal growth was stimulated by its location across the city line—thus placing its
resorts beyond the reach of tax collectors and zoning regulations—out here in the desert
unrestrained commercial development is never called into question. Whether these
apparent double standards resulted from a lack of communication between Life’s marketing
and editorial departments or from contradictory interpretations of the contemporary built
environment, their significance lies in their revelation of an ideological gap, or at the very
least what Henry Luce’s vision of corporate liberalism would have viewed as a delicate
balance, between a desire for comprehensive planning and an acceptance of the economic
realities of the free market—especially as this played itself out on the nation’s highways.
Bridging this great divide was precisely what Victor Gruen was attempting to do at that
same moment in 1955. In June of that year, Gruen delivered a now famous address to the
International Conference on Design in Aspen in which he proclaimed an urgent need to
eliminate what he called the “subcityscape” of “commercial slums” that “cling like leeches”
to the American roadside. If Gruen had his way, this “wild sea of anarchy” would be
replaced by “the planned, integrated shopping center.” Given the coverage this new
building type received in the pages of their magazine, Life’s editors obviously shared
Gruen’s view that “the importance of this event for twentieth-century architecture [could]
hardly be exaggerated” (Gruen 1955). While Gruen’s Northland Center had received
plenty of accolades from the magazine, Life’s praise for Southdale, the first fully enclosed,
climate controlled shopping mall in the world, was even more enthusiastic, and
unapologetically promotional in its superlatives. Southdale was “the splashiest shopping
center in the U.S.” in which “birds, art and 10 acres of stores all fit under one Minnesota
roof.” Customers put their coats in lockers and, “heedless of Minnesota’s icy winters,
wander[ed] in air-conditioned comfort.” Bruce and Donald Dayton, the mall’s developers
and owners of its anchoring department store, along with Victor Gruen and his associates,
were depicted as proud and smiling parents, showing off a healthy and beautiful
newborn—one big enough to accommodate 20,000 shoppers and 5,200 cars each and
every day. A fair number of the latter appeared in Grey Villet’s bird’s-eye photograph, set
in parking areas that pin-wheeled around the mall building to cover 45 acres. In the
distance are existing subdivisions and open land awaiting “development [that] will
eventually cover 500 acres.” In this context, Life’s description of Southdale as a “sprawling
center”—it was located nine miles southwest of Minneapolis—is clearly not meant as a
pejorative (Life, 10 December, 1956: 61–2).
Life, predictably, stressed those features that made Southdale “fancier” than most
other shopping centers at the time, including its three-story Garden Court of Perpetual
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Spring, its 21-foot tall bird cage, and its 50-foot high Harry Bertoia sculptures, all of which
were prominent in the article. Time, by contrast, focused on its economic implications. It
featured Southdale alongside Mondawmin Center, the first retail complex developed by
famed mall-maker James Rouse, designed by Pietro Belluschi, and built on 46 acres
three miles northwest of downtown Baltimore. Calling them the “most advanced shopping
centers in the U.S.” from a retail planning perspective, Time emphasized their size and
diversification and argued that these “pleasure domes with parking lots” were not only
able to “vie on their own terms with city retail districts,” but were poised to “siphon
shoppers from an entire region.” In terms of design, their advantages were obvious: they
saved drivers “the fender-bending frustration” of downtown and, because they were
“insulated” from suburban sprawl, they offered a respite from “the sight, sound and smell
of traffic.” To drive home the superiority of the “decentralized centers,” Time gave Rouse
the last word: “The well-planned, well-managed shopping center is more than simply a
new plan for retail expansion. It represents a massive reorganization of the urban
community” (Time, 15 October 1956: 98–9).
Throughout the 1950s, Life would continue to cast the impact of that reorganization in
a generally optimistic light, whether touting the first of Victor Gruen’s downtown
pedestrianization schemes (in Kalamazoo, Michigan) or gushing about his participation
(along with Lewis Mumford, Ed Bacon and others) in a symposium examining “The New
Highways: Challenge to the Metropolitan Area” (Life, 26 October, 1959: 115–17). The
New York Times reported that this conference was an effort to consider how federal
highway and housing programs might work in tandem to produce “a Renaissance of
American’s cities” (Parke 1957). The Times also reported that the conference took place
in Hartford, Connecticut. Life, by contrast, underscored its location outside Hartford, in
the “symbolic setting” of Connecticut General’s suburban headquarters near Bloomfield.
Describing the campus as “an answer to the crowded quarters, congestion and
inadequate facilities of downtown Hartford,” Life emphasized the modern design of its
buildings and the bucolic quality of its landscapes. In Nina Leen’s accompanying
photographs these provide an artful backdrop for 400 designers, developers and
economists to contemplate the “tangled problems of metropolitan growth” with nary a car
in sight (Life, 21 October, 1959: 49–50).
As editorial positions, these two extremes—celebrating ways of accommodating the
car or ignoring the car entirely—became increasingly unsustainable. By the end of the
1950s, with the interstate system expanding and the highway beautification movement
intensifying, Life’s attitude toward the American roadside and the growing territories of the
automobile became decidedly unambiguous. An editorial in the spring of 1957
contemplated the relative merits of “the green tunnel vs. the billboard jungle,” quoting
Philip Johnson archly bemoaning the monotony of natural scenery on Connecticut’s
Merritt Parkway when compared to the distractions of roadside advertising on US 1 (the
two options he confronted when driving to the Glass House in New Canaan), but this was
a last gasp of internal conflict (Life, 11 March, 1957: 44). By the summer the editors were
proclaiming that roadside regulations then being debated would “set our esthetic tone for
a generation” (Life, 5 August, 1957: 26). This position was articulated even more
convincingly two years later when William H. Whyte introduced the “disease of urban

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 Ugly America and Architecture on the Highway 187

sprawl”—and the term itself—to Life’s readership. A version of Whyte’s “Plan to Save
Vanishing U.S. Countryside” had already appeared in Fortune (in 1957) and in The
Exploding Metropolis, a collection of essays Whyte edited in 1958, but on the pages of
Life, its manifesto-like tone and policy-oriented content were most decidedly a novelty.
He began by condemning the usual suspects, among them “billboards, neon signs,
[and] frozen custard spas,” but he also focused blame: the expansion of the “American
standard of living,” rampant development as a synonym for progress, the “speculative
land rush” set off by the federal highway program. After articulating the causes of sprawl
and its effect on landscapes both natural and built, Whyte proposed a program of
conservation easements and land trusts, carefully explaining their implications for taxes
and development. Whyte ends by exhorting Life’s readers to look again at the American
roadside: “Your instincts will tell you that anything that looks this terrible cannot be good
economics, that it is not progress, that it is not inevitable” (Whyte 1959). Uncharacteristically
for Life, however, there was little visual evidence of terribilità in the mostly small-scale,
black and white illustrations that accompanied Whyte’s lengthy article—as if images of the
nation’s sprawling roadsides might have distracted readers from the author’s seriousness
of purpose. I use that phrase intentionally, because at that moment in 1959, the nation’s
seriousness of purpose was being intensely discussed in realms both rarified and popular.
President Eisenhower had recently organized a Commission on National Goals to establish
consensus on US social and economic priorities in the 1960s (Belair 1960; Miller 1960).
In response, Life launched an eight-part series dedicated to “the National Purpose”
(Jessup 1960; Stevenson 1960). In both cases, urban sprawl was identified as a pressing
national problem.
For Life it remained a problem throughout the 1960s, and while this coverage was
sporadic it was infused with a new urgency. In December 1965, in a double issue on the
city published just two months after Lyndon Johnson signed the Highway Beautification
Act into law, a guest column by Peter Blake, then editor of Architectural Forum, was
unequivocal in its position. Blake had long been a critic of “ugly America,” most recently
in the “muckraking” book God’s Own Junkyard, published in 1964 (Blake 1961 and
1964). In his Life column, “Astride the Open Road,” he challenged architects “to come to
terms with the automobile and the highway, to create an entirely new kind of city.” This
new urban form was already in formation, he argued, in buildings that “straddle the
highway” and “in our most modern shopping centers.” At the same time, Blake also
challenged Life’s readers to think about the ethics and aesthetics of the “throwaway
architecture” of “a permanently ‘Unfinished Country.” This situation was engendered by
what Blake saw as the coercive influence of the country’s social, economic, and political
systems and producing what he described as “the most exciting and terrifying challenge
of our time” (Blake 1965). Both characteristics of the built landscape were evident to Paul
Ylvisaker, a planner and policy expert with the Ford Foundation, when he took aim at the
sprawling landscapes of the attenuated American metropolis elsewhere in the December
double issue. While he argued that, “sometimes even the gargantuan whole of urban
America can be a thing of beauty,” especially by air at night, Ylvisaker acknowledged that
most Americans had “to contend with grubbier realities below.” For this reason, he refused
to pull any punches when identifying what—and who—was responsible for all those miles
188 Archi.Pop

of grubby “slurbs and junk,” illustrated by the “corroding artery” of Alt-US 90 through
Houston: “the villains are greed, indifference—and you” (Ylvisaker 1965).
Five years later Life sent a team on the road to see what, if anything, the beautification
act had wrought. On 12,000 miles of American highways they observed how Ylvisaker’s
indifference had atrophied into resignation and oblivion: “nobody we met seemed to
care much about the problem. They didn’t even seem to notice” (Graves 1970). But
Life magazine still cared, and it devoted eight full-color pages—uninterrupted by
advertisements—to what its correspondent, Richard Woodbury, and its photographer,
Michael Rougier, had discovered on the nation’s roads. Rougier’s pictures captured a
spectacular panorama of excess: the physical congestion of cars, the visual congestion
of signage, the stark contrast between the expanding commercial domain and the
shrinking natural realm (see Figure 11.2 below). As poetically interpreted by staff writer
Loudon Wainwright, everywhere they turned were “idiot marks of man’s passing” and “the
plastic homogeneity of trash and hucksterism” (Wainwright 1970). In 1970, it may have
still been true, as Wainwright asserted, that “Blight Blossoms on the American Highway,”
but by then it was also possible to discern in that same blossoming blight something not
so easily dismissed.
For by 1970, a new generation looked at landscapes of the automobile in an entirely
new light: when painters and photographers like Ed Ruscha, Allan D’Arcangelo and
Stephen Shore, and architects and planners like Charles Moore, Robert Venturi, Denise
Scott Brown, and Stephen Izenour gazed at the nation’s expansive roadsides they saw,
for better or worse, the genius loci of America. When Life reviewed Learning from Las

Figure 11.2 Michael Rougier, Speedway Boulevard in Tucson, Arizona, Life, 24 July, 1970: 26–7.
Time Life Pictures and Getty Images.

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Vegas in 1972, it was clear that the social mainstream the magazine represented did not
yet comprehend this new point of view. Writing in the April issue, Walter McQuade, a critic
well known for his fulminations against popular culture, received the book somewhat
skeptically, and when he stated, by way of a compliment, that “anyone who sets out to
beautify banality is an interesting type,” he revealed the degree to which he utterly
misunderstood Venturi et al.’s polemic (McQuade 1972). By the time the broader culture
grasped what it meant to learn from Las Vegas, and to accept the ugly and ordinary on
their own terms, Life had already published its final issue.
At the height of its popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, Life magazine not only reflected
cultural attitudes toward the burgeoning territories of the automobile, it actively shaped
them, at least as they were comprehended by the magazine’s largely white and middle-
class readership. In its articles, photo-essays, and advertisements, Life showcased the
good and the bad of architecture on the highway: it heralded shopping malls and corporate
campuses while decrying the sprawling roadsides connecting them; it celebrated an
expanding consumerist landscape, while ignoring causality between car-oriented
typologies and expanding environmental blight. That this occurred both intentionally and
inadvertently was as symptomatic of the complexities and ambiguities of the everyday
built landscape as it was of the competing editorial and marketing agendas of a popular
magazine. As a result, unapologetically and utterly without irony, virtually every issue of
Life published in this period embraced the nation’s drive-in culture while condemning Ugly
America.
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PART SIX

Urban Critiques

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Chapter 12
“Life in Marvelous Times”:
Hip-hop, Housing, and Utopia1
Lawrence Chua

“Boom, boom, boom.”

CHARLES JENCKS

With these words, the architectural historian Charles Jencks declared “the death of
modernism” by dynamite on 15 July, 1972 (Jencks 1977: 9). Although the demolition
would go on for another four years, the “vandalized, mutilated, and defaced” Pruitt-Igoe
housing project (Minoru Yamasaki, St. Louis, 1952–5) represented, for Jencks, the ways
modernism’s utopian vision had gone astray and become paradigmatic of techno-
bureaucratic corporate authority. A little over a year later, in the community room of 1520
Sedgwick Avenue, a high-rise apartment building in the West Bronx, DJ Kool Herc (né
Clive Campbell) innovated a new approach to music that would have no less an impact
on urban culture than dynamite had on the Pruitt-Igoe projects (Batey 2011). A Jamaican
émigré, Kool Herc translated the West Indian style of “toasting” over dance music into the
Latin-tinged funk that was popular at Bronx house parties during this time. At the same
time, he began to assemble a new soundtrack for “rapping” by cutting together the
instrumental breaks of songs, or “break-beats” (Hebidge 2004: 224).
This essay examines the ways that “vandalization, mutilation, and defacement” were
deployed as montage by artists in the production of hip-hop’s visual, musical, and physical
culture to reimagine modernism’s utopian dream within the image of inner-city decay
produced through corporate media. It argues that, far from being dead, the struggle
between utopianism and the market was reimagined by the inhabitants of American urban
housing in the 1970s. By looking at the ways hip-hop drew on and re-framed early
twentieth-century modernist concerns, I show how two kinds of utopian ideologies came
to be expressed through architecture as part of a new global consciousness at the turn of
the millennium. The architects of hip-hop culture not only took up the surface symbolism
of the modernist housing project, they shared a formal, ideological, and technical kinship

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with the architects of the modern movement who had produced some of the culture’s
incubatory environments. While the utopian forms of Die Neue Sachlichkeit and Le
Corbusier’s Plan Voisin were taken up by New York City public housing authorities as a
“style” that was stripped of its utopian political objectives, hip-hop later appropriated the
modernist technique of montage to formulate complex utopian images of New York City’s
housing projects as both an incubator for success in American capitalism as well as a
place to imagine new social possibilities.
Housing figures prominently in the history of both hip-hop and the modern movement
in architecture. In hip-hop, the housing project is celebrated as both the birthplace of the
genre and the continuing fount of its authenticity. A diverse range of artists have identified
New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments as the sites of romanticized
conflict and exploitation as well as the locus of more complex global political and emotional
communities that transgressed the specificities of the local. Some of the earliest innovations
in the development of modernist architectural form were undertaken in the siedlungen of
central Europe by early twentieth-century architects like Ernst May and Walter Gropius. For
example, a propaganda leaflet announcing the publication of Le Corbusier’s provocative
article, “Architecture or Revolution” in L’Esprit Nouveau warned, “the housing shortage will
bring about revolution. Be alert to housing” (Le Corbusier 2008: 67, fn. 102).
The ideology of utopia is also intertwined with both modernist architecture and hip-hop.
As hip-hop culture, and its range of influence, expanded well beyond the urban centers of
the United States at the turn of the millennium, images of a free-market utopianism have
circulated alongside of a revolutionary utopian imaginary. In “Every Ghetto, Every City”
(1998, RuffHouse/Columbia), the rapper Lauryn Hill reflected on the historical importance
of utopia to hip-hop. Singing, “Every ghetto, every city/And suburban place I been/Make
me recall my days, in the New Jerusalem,” Hill pointed to the continued importance of
classical utopian imagery, even if the commercial marketplace for hip-hop culture had long
ago exceeded the specificity of the inner-city housing project. In the nearly half century
since its inception, hip-hop’s formative spaces have been both valorized and romanticized.
On the one hand, this has created misperceptions that position hip-hop as the organic
product of a particular socio-spatial milieu (Forman 2002: xx) and served to validate the
political economy that produced urban housing. On the other hand, this valorization has
opened up the possibility of reimagining modernism’s promise of a viable social utopia.
Utopian ideologies have worked powerfully but ambiguously to intervene in the creation
and understanding of the modern urban environment. Visions of an ideal high-tech world
and its appropriate inhabitants informed the aesthetic and functional development of
modern architecture as well as its popular reception, from the Oneida Community to
Pruitt-Igoe, from the Plan Voisin to Levittown. Defying tidy explanations, it has often been
a catalyst of social unrest without fully articulated political agency or direction,
accommodating a wide variety of sometimes complimentary, sometimes contradictory
urges and inclinations. The architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri traced the rise of a
“utopia of forms” that came out of the decline of social utopia and the rise of “the politics
of things” brought about by the development of industrial capitalism (Tafuri 1976: 47–8).
Ernst Bloch noted two early approaches to utopia in both Thomas More’s liberal social
utopia and the authoritarian utopia of Tomasso Campanella. Campanella’s geometrically-

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disposed utopia became the ideal bourgeois urban plan from the Baroque period
throughout the twentieth century. Bloch believed that this “utopia of form” came to replace
or remodel the social attachments that were no longer provided by an industrialized,
capitalist society (Bloch 1986: 740–1). David Harvey has similarly observed that “utopias
of spatial form” are co-opted from their noble objectives by having to compromise with
the social processes they are meant to control (Harvey 2000: 179).

“A beautiful turbine running in the midst

of human conversations”: Hip-hop and the
International Style
Although it would be difficult to assign a birthplace to a culture with “many, consecutive
births,” 1520 Sedgwick Avenue has been acknowledged as the site of one of hip-hop’s
pivotal early moments (Lee 2007; Kugelberg 2006: 5). At a party organized by his sister in
the basement community center of this 102-unit building, the young DJ debuted his
pioneering approach to music. Herc noticed the crowd dance most intensely during
instrumental breaks in the song. Rather than play the whole record straight through, he
would use two turntables and copies of the same song to extend the break as he talked
over the microphone (Hebidge 2004: 224). This radical approach to sound came to be
copied by other DJs who added their own refinements. In the Morris Heights neighborhood
of the West Bronx, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue lies close to the intersection of the Major
Deegan and the Cross Bronx Expressways. These two thoroughfares, developed under
the auspices of Robert Moses, carved up the Bronx, destroying the community fabric in
particular of the neighborhoods along the Grand Concourse. The housing projects that
emerged in the shadows of these two highways, like 1520 or the more high-profile
superproject Co-Op City (Herman J. Jessor, the Bronx, 1968–70), were initially populated
by refugees who could not afford to escape to suburbia (Plunz 1990: 287).
1520 is an unremarkable high-rise, of the type that has been celebrated in the lyrics,
narratives, and imagery of hip-hop. Built by private contractors in 1967 (New York City
Department of Finance 1967a), 1520 has its roots in the Limited Profit Housing Companies
Law (the Mitchell-Lama program) that was passed in 1955 to develop middle-income
housing like Co-Op City. Under this program, private developers could receive mortgages
from the state or the city for 90 percent of project costs at lower interest rates than on the
private market and would receive property tax exemptions. In return, limits were placed
on the profits they could realize. Although Plunz noted that the Mitchell-Lama legislation
loosened the “tower in the park” design orthodoxy that had permeated low-cost housing
production in the post-World War II era, the high-rise tower remained the dominant plan
for public housing in New York City (Plunz 1990: 281–2).
The earliest use of high-rise towers in New York City public housing was the East River
Houses (Perry Coke Smith, Harlem, 1941). It was built on a slum-clearance area in East
Harlem that absorbed two streets into one large superblock. Plunz noted that two plans
were proposed for the project: one used six-story elevator buildings, while the other mixed
196 Archi.Pop

six-, ten-, and eleven-story buildings. Up until the proposal was tendered, the prevalent
view in American housing design was that poor people should not live in towers. Because
the high-rise proposal proved to be slightly cheaper but offered the same number of
apartments, East River Houses reversed this prejudice and set the precedent for the high-
rise “tower in the park” projects that came to define the landscape of public housing in
New York City (Plunz 1990: 245).
New York City’s “tower in the park” form owes much, albeit indirectly, to the ideas of Le
Corbusier, who first published his tenets for the concept in L’Esprit Nouveau in 1922,
based on the theories of Auguste Perret, who envisioned an urbanism of high towers
within a park. The traditional urban elements of street and building gave way to monumental
skyscrapers placed at wide intervals in unbounded park space, threaded by continuous
lower redent or setback buildings. Residents of the “city in the park” would have equal
access to “sun, space, and green.” German architects like Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius,
and Ludwig Hilbersheimer expanded on the concept by developing the zeilenbau or “slab
block” as a form for low-cost housing as early as 1924 (Plunz 1990: 186). These blocks
were high-rise elevator buildings that were rectangular in form and dispersed in green
settings. Le Corbusier was in the United States to promote his idea of the Ville Radieuse
or the Radiant City and toured slum-clearance sections of Brooklyn and Manhattan with
Langdon W. Post, Chairman of the NYCHA in 1935 (Bacon 2001: 160). He toured the site
of the Harlem River Houses, four-story buildings built on Beaux-Arts principles to house
exclusively black residents, but made no mention of them in his travelogue. Instead, he
noted the ways that the musical innovations of the district’s residents had outstripped
attempts to reconstruct the city:

In Harlem as on Broadway, the Negro orchestra is impeccable, flawless, regular, playing

ceaselessly in an ascending rhythm: the trumpet is piercing, strident, screaming over
the stamping of feet. It is the equivalent of a beautiful turbine running in the midst of
human conversations. Hot jazz. . .The jazz is more advanced than the architecture.
If architecture were at the point reached by jazz, it would be an incredible spectacle.
I repeat: Manhattan is hot jazz in stone and steel. The contemporary renewal has to
attach itself to some point. The Negroes have fixed that point through their music. (Le
Corbusier 1947: 161–2)

For Le Corbusier, jazz was “the melody of the soul joined with the rhythm of the machine”
and captured the utopian aspirations of urban architecture. The NYCHA’s attempts to
address the problems of the city, to replace its slums with Beaux-Arts- and garden city-
inspired planning was dogmatic and out of date (Le Corbusier 1947: 159, 181). Although
he rued that government officials like Post did not engage him because they were “not
well informed,” Mardges Bacon points out that many of the housing typologies of the
Radiant City had been employed by American housing specialists and architects
promoting their own urban visions: the block à redents, slab block, high-rise slab, and
skyscraper (Bacon 2001: 169). These shared elements point to the ways some of
modernism’s utopian forms could be appropriated by American architects in the twentieth
century without engaging their social ambitions. Many of these ideas would have been

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introduced to American architects in the housing section of the international exhibition of

modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Although European architects
had highlighted housing as an architectural problem and expanded its definition to include
the utilitarian uses of architecture for the enrichment of daily life, most of the examples of
housing were presented in a separate section of the exhibition, organized by Catherine
Bauer, Clarence Stein, and Henry Wright, with a separate introduction in the exhibition
catalogue by Lewis Mumford (Plunz 1990: 182).
This separation between “modern architecture” and “housing” reflected the tendency
to denigrate urban moderate-cost housing as a challenge worthy of the attention of
professional architects. It has been noted that it reinforced the “aesthetic” side of
architectural practice in the face of the world economic crisis in the 1930s and undermined
the growing political radicalism of a profession racked with unemployment and uncertainty,
promoting “a moralism grounded in aesthetics rather than political action” (Plunz 1990:
184). Hitchcock and Johnson framed the innovations of modernism as a style that held to
a set of principles that were utopian, if only in form: architecture as volume; regularity over
axial symmetry; and the avoidance of applied decoration. These forms were readily
appropriated by the New York City housing market and by planners like Robert Moses
after World War II because of a confluence of forces with diverse prerequisites, including
political containment, low construction cost, high development profits, and an architectural
imagery associated with social reform (Plunz 1990: 280). In spite of the separation that
Hitchcock and Johnson saw between architecture and social engineering, the principles
of the International Style were implemented throughout the twentieth century in ways that
laid the foundations for economic and racial segregation and environmental racism. The
radically altered social fabric of these new urban communities came to shape the
experiences of hip-hop’s early pioneers.
International tendencies also played an important part in hip-hop’s early formation.
Tricia Rose has pointed out that hip-hop extended and revised an Afrodisasporic tradition
in the urban terrain of New York in the 1970s (Rose 1994: 26). Jamaican sound system
culture and the presence of Caribbean émigrés in the Bronx had as crucial an influence
on the new approach to sound as the staccato rhythm of the city’s mixed high-rise slab
block and low-rise brick tenement housing. Grandmaster Caz, for instance, recognized
the importance of this global inheritance in his observation of early DJs like Grandmaster
Flash. “Flash was born in the Bronx but I think his heritage is Bahamas. But you know: It’s
not like they’re walking around eating cow peas and stuff in the house. They New York!”
(Kugelberg 2006: 25) Yet, the local environment was of equal importance. “That’s also
something that a lot of us overlooked, being we’re from one place,” said Caz. “I’m from
the Bronx. I’ve got people who live in Queens, but basically, I’m from the Bronx. Everything
I’m trying to do is right here in the Bronx. So we’re not looking at what’s happening in
Brooklyn. No one was making that kind of noise in another borough, as far as hip-hop
was concerned . . .” (Kugelberg 2006: 27).
While the Cross Bronx Expressway is largely credited with producing the conditions of
urban blight that created the image of the “South Bronx” as a war zone, Morris Heights,
where 1520 Sedgwick Avenue is located, saw relatively less crime. It was not only a more
attractive area for a Jamaican émigré family to settle in the 1970s, but could host the kind
198 Archi.Pop

of house parties where he could experiment with form in a public setting. Herc fused the
instrumental breaks of various funk records using two turntables while gauging the effect
on a live audience. Herc’s “break-beats” drew on modernism’s affinities for repetition,
regularity, and the use of standardized parts. In his history of the genre, David Toop
compares the effect of dismembering familiar hits like James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turn
It Loose” and the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache” to hearing Charlie Parker carve up
standards like “I Got Rhythm” and “How High the Moon” in the 1940s. Herc’s rapping
drew on a similar trajectory that Toop traced back to West African griots through bebop,
acapella, doo-wop, prison and army songs, jumping rope rhymes, and signifying (Toop
1984: 18). A variation of the music Le Corbusier had heard in Harlem, this was the sound
of human conversation intruding on “the music of the beautiful turbines.” The new sound
produced in the basement recreation room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue sought to create a
new order and harmony from New York City and refuted the concept of the city as an
architectural disaster (Forman 2002: 40).

From the Ecstasy Garage to Fort Apache:

Montage and the image of the city
The affinity for hip-hop’s utopian tendencies can be glimpsed in some of its earliest imagery.
Flyers promoting hip-hop events were handed out in schoolyards, lunch rooms, delis,
Laundromats, and on subway trains. They could run anywhere from a couple of hundred
to ten thousand or more for some of the bigger events (Kugelberg 2006: 3). On a flyer for
the Funky 4 Plus 1 at the Ecstasy Garage in 1980 by Buddy Esquire (“the Flyer King”) and
Martin Williams, the street of a future city is depicted in strong, economical lines (see
Figure  12.1). It is night. Two lone figures can be seen on the sidewalk, dwarfed by the
unadorned curtain walls of three industrial-looking buildings. As three aircraft cut across the
sky, other vehicles hover in the garage of one of the buildings. This flyer circulated in 1980,
during a period in which the image of the city, and of the Bronx in particular, was contested
by community activists and corporate media. Esquire and Williams’ image is radically
different from the image of the city in contemporaneous films like Fort Apache, the Bronx
(Daniel Petrie, 1981) and Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974). Both films depicted the city
as an urban jungle in which black and Latino residents preyed upon their weaker neighbors.
In Death Wish, Charles Bronson played a New York City architect who resorted to vigilantism
to avenge the murder of his wife and the sexual assault of his daughter. Fort Apache, the
Bronx opens with a scene of a prostitute (played by actress Pam Grier), high on drugs, who
shoots two policemen in their squad car. The bodies of the policemen are then robbed by
young men from the South Bronx neighborhood.
The reality on the streets of New York City during this period, however, was quite
different. In the nine months preceding the filming of Fort Apache, the Bronx, twelve
unarmed African American and Puerto Ricans were shot or beaten to death by police
across New York City. Building on a history of radical community organization in the
1960s, activists who had organized in the South Bronx against police brutality called for
the formation of a Committee Against Fort Apache (CAFA) to protest the making of the

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Figure 12.1 “Ecstasy Garage Disco,” designed by Buddy Esquire and Martin Williams,
14 November, 1980. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University.

film after reading the book on which the film was to be based (see Figure 12.2). In an
analysis of the film’s screenplay obtained before the film was shot, CAFA observed that
the film romanticized the police at the expense of the community that they patrolled. “Fort
Apache is shown, not as a police station, but as a fort in hostile territory. . .[where] the
police can do what they want because they’re dealing with savages. It excuses their
brutality while at the same time denying our humanity” (CAFA 1980). The film was
condemned by more than forty representatives of community planning boards and
educational, media, religious, and civil rights groups and its opening was picketed across
the United States. Activists sought to create a critical discourse around the ways
corporations (rather than simply individual white filmmakers and actors) produced an
image of the inner city that was at odds with the city that communities of color experienced.
One of the stated aims of CAFA was to develop the communities’ ability to use media to
represent itself (Perez 1985: 183–5).
In making Fort Apache, the Bronx, Time-Life Films (a division of the multinational
corporation Time Inc.) created an image of the South Bronx that could stand in for any
declining American urban center of the period: Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Lower East Side,
Chicago’s South Side, Watts, St. Louis, Detroit. Between 1969 and 1979, 10 percent of
200 Archi.Pop

Figure 12.2 “Protest of the film, Fort Apache, the Bronx, 1980,” Joe Conzo, 1980. Courtesy of
Joe Conzo.

the South Bronx’s housing was destroyed or abandoned, with some neighborhoods
losing as much as 27 percent of their housing stock. Disinvestment by banks, the flight of
industries and middle-income families, arson-for-profit schemes, and the “planned
shrinkage” of essential government services led to a 42 percent drop in population and a
40 percent drop in manufacturing jobs (Perez 1985: 182). In 1978, the American Friends
Service Committee reported that conditions in the South Bronx were similar to those in
Third World nations: “Thirty percent of the eligible work force is unemployed. The infant
mortality rate is higher than that of Hong Kong. Average life expectancy is lower than that
of Panama. The average per capita income in 1974, according to HUD, was $2430, or
forty percent of the national average.” (American Friends Service Committee 1978). The
historical conditions that produced poverty in South Bronx neighborhoods—high
unemployment, police indifference, the influx of heroin, overcrowded and understaffed
hospitals and schools—was erased by a narrative in which the actions of the police were
romanticized and the 41st precinct was depicted as a fortress in hostile territory,
surrounded by people who had lost any sense of their value as human beings.
The film uses modernist techniques of montage to reinforce the indifference to values
and the alienation of life in the late-capitalist inner city. In one scene, two police officers on
the rooftop of a tenement building witness a heterosexual couple making “jungle love” on
the roof of the building opposite them while a riot engulfs the streets below. One of them,
the main character of the film, observes, “It’s a cheap date. Instead of going to the movies

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 “Life in Marvelous Times” 201

they just walk up on the roof and watch the buildings burn.” Moments later, two other
policemen hurl the man off the roof. The man’s death is captured in the film as a montage
that cuts back and forth between the shocked faces of the two police witnesses, the
woman hiding in terror in a corner of the roof, and the man in free fall against the vertical
windows and brick façade of the tenement. “Did you see that?” the main character asks
his partner. The partner, still in shock at what they have both witnessed, flatly responds, “I
didn’t see nothing.” The scene then cuts to the streets below, where the police are
containing the riot and restoring order to the burning streets.
The policeman’s double negative response suggests the ways in which the technique
of montage produces two mutually sustaining but dialectically opposed images of the
city: one of shock and one of order; one of the city’s destructive energies and the other of
its organized, rational forms. The principle of montage is that it combines different
elements—theoretically of equal value—that are drawn from different contexts and related
to each other in a nonhierarchical way in the same space. Tafuri has pointed out that this
process was analogous in structure to the principle that operates in the money economy
and quoted Georg Simmel: “All things lie on the same level and differ from one another
only in the size of the area which they cover” (Tafuri 1976: 86). The early twentieth-century
avant-garde used techniques like montage to absorb the shock produced by the new
metropolis and transform the fragmentary, alienated quality of life in the rapidly growing
metropolis into a new principle of dynamic development (Tafuri 1976: 89). The working
class siedlungen housing produced by Ernst May and the central European Neue
Sachlichkeit architects gave concrete form to this principle by programming and planning
the chaotic city into a productive organism (Tafuri 1976: 100). Architects like Ludwig
Hilberseimer started out from the individual zeilenbau as the first element in an uninterrupted
chain of production that ended with the city itself. His vision of the city consisted of a
sequence of elements that no longer took the form of separate, individual “objects.”
Rather, these buildings were endlessly reproduced in an abstract, elementary montage,
which can be seen in any of the NYCHA “tower in the park” projects that dot the urban
landscape (Tafuri 1976: 107; Heynen 1999: 135).
While protests against the filming of Fort Apache did not prevent it from being made,
activists created a critical consensus about corporate media racism that was taken up
across the United States and even internationally. The opening of the film was picketed in
major American cities, prompting some theaters to even cancel showing it. The Greek
director, Constantin Costa-Gavras, even remarked in an interview that the film was anti-
black and anti-Puerto Rican (Greenberg 1982: 15). The more enduring legacy of the film,
and the organized resistance against it, was that it created both an image of the South
Bronx, and public housing, that extended far beyond the boundaries of the borough as
well as a global community that sought to shift the terms of that image. This image was
produced through modernist avant-garde techniques of montage. Montage reconciled
the shock experience of life in the city with a new principle of dynamic evolution. Architects
used montage to design housing that gave a productive form to the chaos of the city.
Esquire and Williams’ 1980 image of a utopian streetscape can be understood in this dual
context as a response to both Hiberseimer’s images of orderly grossstadtarchitektur and
the chaotic ghetto of Fort Apache (Hilberseimer 1927). Hip-hop artists could draw on the
202 Archi.Pop

principles of montage to create a different utopian image, one that could critique the
corporate image of the city through music.

Flipping the script: Utopian critiques

of housing
The fact that the “South Bronx” has no official cartographic designations indicates that the
“South Bronx” itself developed first and foremost as an image of urban decay. This image
has proven indispensable to the creation of hip-hop, both as a shorthand for the kind of
unequal power relations that have shadowed the utopian promise of modernism and as
a stage for triumphal narratives of American capitalism. As hip-hop has fed the coffers of
multinational corporations and extended its reach far beyond the urban environments of
first the Bronx, and then New York City and the industrialized American northeast, it has
drawn itself more closely to its site of origin—the public housing project—as an abstract
ideal, regardless of the borough or city it is located.
Jay-Z (né Shawn Carter) often cites his childhood in the Marcy Houses of Brooklyn’s
Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in his self-referential rags to riches mythography. A
NYCHA housing project, Marcy Houses is comprised of twenty-seven low-rise, six-story
cruciform brick buildings. Completed in 1949, it owes more to garden apartment planning
than it does to the “towers in the park” scheme. Named after a nineteenth-century New
York State comptroller, William Learned Marcy, its cruciform buildings were already
deemed obsolete by an article in the Architectural Forum the same year that the projects
opened (Architectural Forum 1949: 87–9). In Jay-Z’s lyrics, however, the projects take on
a sinister patina, as in “Where I’m From” (1997, Roc-A-Fella). Jay-Z uses a brief sample
from Yvonne Fair’s funk song, “Let Your Hair Down” (1975, Motown) and creates a
repetitive montage that calls to mind the industrial rhythms of an assembly line. Over this,
he raps in a modulated tone that moves between story-telling and statement:

I’m from where they ball and breed rhyme stars

I’m from Marcy son, just thought I’d remind y’all. . .
I’m from where they cross-over and clap boards
Lost Jehovah in place of rap lords, listen
I’m up the block, around the corner and down the street
From where the pimps, prostitutes and the drug lords meet
We make a million off of beats, cause our stories is deep

Jay-Z’s lyrics expand the image of the housing projects as a site of criminal activity to now
include other forms of commercial activity. Basketball and rapping are juxtaposed against
drug dealing and prostitution as avenues of escape from the poverty of the city. In “Where
I’m From,” the projects provide authenticity to the stories that are told through hip-hop’s
platinum-selling hits. In the music video of the song, images of the Marcy projects are
juxtaposed against the glitter of the iconic New York City skyline at night. The image of the
’hood sustains the image of the global city of dreams.

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Jay-Z’s entrepreneurial vision of the ’hood is consistent with the utopianism of Marcus
Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association of 1920s Harlem. Marcus Garvey
preached a form of capitalism that merged personal success with racial uplift (Hill and Bair
1987: xxvi). Fashioning himself as a black version of Horatio Alger, Garvey preached
keeping wealth in the black community and advocated racial independence through
competitive economic development. He rejected modern systems of government and
fashioned his vision of the ideal state on an archaic state ruled over by an “absolute
authority.” Jay-Z fails to locate his image of the projects in a historical context, preferring
to capitalize on a mythic image of the housing project as an incubator for success in the
neo-liberal economy. Other New York City hip-hop artists of his generation place their
memories of the built environment within a more critical historical trajectory.
Mos Def (né Dante Terrell Smith, now Yasiin Bey) has a more complex approach to the
image of the city that can be seen in “Life in Marvelous Times” (2008, Downtown). Mos
Def has performed this song against different breaks, including a classical interpretation
by the Brooklyn Philharmonic. However, the version on the 2009 album the Ecstatic,
features a synthesizer- and brass-heavy anthem-like sample that was originally recorded
by its producer, Mr. Flash (né Gilles Bousquet) as a French rap song, “Champion” (2006,
Ed Banger). Against this futurist soundtrack, Mos Def moves between wistful singing and
rapping in a passionate, declarative register, depicting the Eleanor Roosevelt Houses in
the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn with great historical and political clarity.

The fifth grade was epic city-wide test pressure

The pre-crack era
Mr. Schumer, what a prick
Attitude match his wardrobe, uglier than sin
This is Bed-Stuy eighty-two
Ninth floor, three tiny rooms, one view
Bucktown, Roosevelt House
Their green grass is green; our green grass is brown. . .
Great heavens, good grief
Hungry bellies, bright gold on their teeth
The windows on the Ave look like sad eyes
They fix their sharp gaze on you when you pass by
And if you dare to stand, you can see ’em cry
You can watch ’em scowl, feel ’em prowl
While they’re steady sizing every inch about you
Fast math measuring what you amount to

Mos Def places his individual memory of the Roosevelt Houses in 1982 within the larger
historical events of white flight, the influx of crack into inner-city urban communities, and
the neglect of congressman Chuck Schumer’s administration of the city’s 16th district
which, at that time, included Bedford-Stuyvesant. The Roosevelt Houses, completed in
1964, followed the trend after World War II for high-rise public housing. Its six 14-, 15-,
and 16-story tall slab-block buildings are sited on a northeast-southwest axis and loom
204 Archi.Pop

above the older fabric of the neighborhood. They are an example of the hybrid high-rise
urbanism that developed in the 1960s against criticism of the “tower in the park.” Robert
Moses initially championed the “tower in the park” as a more economical and socially
benevolent form of housing that could accommodate more people by building on less
land. “Instead of building four or five stories, covering 80 or 85 percent of the land, you go
up four or five times as high on 20 percent coverage,” he said. “This will leave plenty of
open space, playgrounds for the kids, and better views.” (Plunz 1990: 281). As we have
seen with the case of the East River Houses, the cost-effectiveness of initial construction
justified the high-rise tower. In Mos Def’s song, these towers become the anthropomorphic
sites where the “fast math” values of the money economy are inculcated: the montage of
slab-blocks sizing the money value of its inhabitants up.
But Mos Def rescues this depressed landscape from the cynical and bitter landscape
of the past, reminding the listener that the utopian future is inherent in the “marvelous
times” of the present.

Wherever you ride, whatever your lane

This road called life is a beautiful thing
And we are alive in amazing times
Delicate hearts, diabolical minds
Revelations, hatred, love and war
And more and more and more and more
And more of less than ever before
It’s just too much more for your mind to absorb
It’s scary like hell, but there’s no doubt
We can’t be alive in no time but NOW

Mos Def’s lyrics remind us that the “towers in the park” were as often spaces of imagining
a better world as they were sites of alienation and exploitation. In spite of the modernist
belief that “towers in the park” would create open public spaces that would produce
healthy, stable communities, this ideal has been overwritten by communities of capital.
The Long Island-formed group De La Soul observed this tendency in their 1996 release,
“Stakes is High” (1996, Tommy Boy).

Neighborhoods are now hoods cause nobody’s neighbors

Just animals surviving with that animal behavior
Under I who be rhyming from dark to light sky
Experiments when needles and skin connect
No wonder where we live is called the projects

Hip-hop discourses since the end of the 1980s have increasingly focused on the ’hood
as the locus of authentic culture. The ’hood has stood in contrast to the more exportable
notion of the “ghetto,” which has its own intercultural history (Gilroy 1992, 308). While the
“South Bronx” of the early days of hip-hop was an image that could connect and
synchronize experiences and histories in global urban communities, the construct of the

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’hood speaks in a far more exclusive way about the mapping of urban space through the
rhetoric of gang culture and turf affiliation. Like Mos Def, De La Soul suggest an international
consciousness that transgresses the limitations of the image of the ’hood by sampling
beats from Ahmad Jamal’s intricate “Swahililand” (1974, 20th Century) as well as James
Brown’s “Mind Power” (1973, Polydor).
De La Soul’s use of montage brings together the critical historical moment of the early
1970s that is addressed in Brown’s “Mind Power” (“If you don’t work/you can’t eat/You’ve
got to have mindpower/to deal with starvation”) with a contemporary consciousness of
economic exploitation (“When them stakes is high you damn sure try to do/Anything to
get the piece of the pie”). Just as Brown reminds his audience that poverty exists not only
in Harlem, but in ghettoes everywhere, De La Soul suggests that exploitation exists not
only in the past but continues to operate in the housing projects of the inner city in spite
of, or because of, hip-hop’s commercial success. The orderly image of the neo-liberal
utopia, the seamless, ahistorical façades of its urban plan, and the “towers in the park”
reveal a more critical history of modernism upon closer inspection by Mos Def in “A
Soldier’s Dream” (2006, Sattan Records).

You’re staring and looking too closely

There’s so much about me that I hide
That careful eyes will recognize
If you look closely you’ll notice
That the pattern on this soft broadcloth shirt
Is made of
Working men’s sweat
And praying folk’s tears
If you look closer, you’ll notice that
This pattern resembles
Tenement row houses, project highrises
Cell block tiers
Discontinued stretches of elevated train tracks
Slave ship gullies, acres of tombstones
If you look closer, you’ll notice
That this fabric has been carefully blended
With an advanced new age polymer (oh man, that’s nice)
To make the fabric lightweight
Weatherproof, and durable
All this
To give some sort of posture and dignity
To a broken body that is a host for scars
I am the new landmark
I am the museum of injury

From the moment that DJ Kool Herc observed audiences moving to the instrumental
break in a song and began using two turntables to assemble these beats into a new form,
206 Archi.Pop

hip-hop has used montage to isolate the standardized part of a larger composition and
create new aesthetic experiences of sound, image, and feeling. The architects of hip-hop
have, in many respects, used the techniques of montage in a more critical way than the
Neue Sachlichkeit and International Style architects who gave birth to the modern housing
in which so many of them were nurtured. Writing in the 1930s, Ernst Bloch considered the
ways that Expressionist architects like Bruno Taut used montage to isolate the best
fragments of the existing order and deploy them in a new pattern to establish a new,
utopian way of living.

In technical and cultural montage the coherence of the old surfaces is broken up
and a new one is constructed. A new coherence can emerge then, because the old
order is more and more unmasked as a hollow sham, one of surfaces that is in fact
fissured. While functionalism distracts one with its glittering appearance, montage
often exposes the chaos under this surface as an attractive or daringly interwoven
fabric. (Bloch 1991: 228)

Hip-hop’s most incisive artists continue to articulate the utopian dream of modernism
while exposing the exploitation that has fueled the creation of capitalist utopias of
consumption. The architects of public housing sought to create an architecture that was
appropriate for the machine-age and that cut through the revivalist styles of the past. They
wound up producing a style of rationalism even as modern society continued to develop
according to old models of exploitation. The architects of hip-hop took up their techniques,
but used them to strip away the veneer of the slab block, the “tower in the park,” and the
fortress in enemy territory. In doing so, they reveal more of the background of the age than
the functionalist façades of modernist housing.

Note
1 Research for this chapter was supported by the Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor
Visiting Scholar Fellowship.

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http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/originalintent.cfm
Weisberg, G. (1967), “Frank Lloyd Wright and Pre-Columbian Art—The Background for his
Architecture,” Art Quarterly, 30: 41–51.
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White, D. (1996), The American Century: The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World
Power. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Whiteley, N. (2002), Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press.
Whitman, A. “Created the News Magazine,” New York Times, 1 March, 1967, 33.
Whitney, A. (2002), “Gidget Goes Hysterical,” in F. K. Gateward, and M. Pomerance, Sugar, Spice,
and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Whyte, W. (1959), “A Plan to Save Vanishing U.S. Countryside,” Life, 17 August 1959: 88–90, 92,
94, 96, 99–100, 102.
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226

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Index

1520 Sedgwick Avenue, 194, 195, 197 Bachelard, Gaston, 35, 133
20 Million Miles to Earth (film), 139, 140, 141, Bacon, Mardges, 196
142, 144, 145, 146 Baker, Joby, 147
45 Park Lane, 111, 112, 113, 118, 119 Banham, Reyner, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110,
112, 118, 119
A Room with a View (novel), 155 Banks, George Stanley, 21
Aarino, Eero, 35 Barbie, 32
ABC, 19, 25 Barnard, John, 35
Adam, Ken, 51, 55 Barney, Matthew, 172
Adler, Judith, 144 Bartlett School of Architecture, 112
Affron, Charles and Mirella, 124 Bartlett, Charlotte, 155
African-American, 22, 24, 25 Batman Begins (film), 168
AIA (American Institute of Architects), 178, Bauer, Catherine, 197
179, 182 Beard, Mary, 150
Albrecht, Donald, 50 Beaumont, Hugh, 20
Alger, Horatio, 203 Beck, Hans, 65, 69
Alice in Wonderland (novel), 70 Bell, Kristen, 156
Allen, Edward, 35 Belluschi, Pietro, 186
Alloway, Lawrence, 107 Ben Hur (film), 140, 157, 158
Altra, 167 Bennett, Joan, 21
America, 16, 17 Benshoff, Harry M., 132
American Colonial Revival, 20, 27, 31 Bentham, Jeremy, 55
American romanticism, 18 Bentley, 169
American Viscose, 31 Berger, John, 52
Americanization, 113 Berkeley, Busby, 129
Andersen, Thom, 49, 50,123 Bertoia, Harry, 186
Andress, Ursula, 37 Betting and Gaming Act (Vicars Charter),
Apple, 67, 68, 169, 171 115
Archigram, 105, 111 Beulich, Tadek, 36
Architectural Digest (magazine), 40, 45 Big Business Girl (film), 128
Architectural Forum (magazine), 180, 181, Billingsley, Barbara, 20, 21
182, 187, 202 Bishop Conkin, 115
Architectural Record (magazine), 127 Black Rob, 25
Art Deco, 30, 62, 125 Blade Runner (film), 124, 134
Arts & Architecture (magazine), 33 Blake, Peter, 16, 187
Aston Martin, 167, 168, 172 Blake, William, 180
Audi, 165, 176 Bloch, Ernst, 194, 195, 206
Austin Powers in Goldmember (film), Blow-Up (film), 169
168 BMW, 166, 170, 171

227
228 Index

Boeing, 165 Citroën, 166, 168, 171

Bogart, Humphrey, 20, 21 Classical style, 140
Bolling, Ruben, 17 Cleopatra (film), 140
Bondanella, Peter, 145 Co-Op City, 195
Bourke-White, Margaret, 183 Coedès, George, 81
Boynum, Joy Gould, 158 Coen brothers, 54
Bradbury Building, 134 Cohen, Bette, 46
Brandsttätter, 65 Colonial Revival, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 24, 26,
Braverman, Bart, 141 124
Brent, George, 129 Colosseum, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149,
Breuer, Marcel, 196 150, 151, 157
British Empire Exhibition, 61 Constantin, James, 101
Bronfen, Elisabeth, 124 Cook, Elisha, 131
Bronson, Charles, 198 Costa-Gavras, Constantin, 201
Brontë siblings 71 Cotton, Jack, 111
Brothers Grimm, 70 Craig, Carol, 131
Brown, James, 198, 205 Cremaster Cycle (film), 172
Brunelleschi, Filippo, 95 Crowther, Bosley, 20
Bruno, Giuliana, 134, 136 Curtis, Barry, 133
Buddy Esquire, 198, 201
Burian, Robert, 17 D’Arcangela, Allan, 188
Burkle, Ron, 137 Daily Kos, 17
Burnett, Reginald, 41 Danova, Cesare, 146
Burton, 167 Darren, James, 146
Burum, Stephen, 46, 47 Davidson, Julius Ralph, 33
Buttertons, The, 23, 24 Davies, Richard Llewelyn, 112
Dayton, Bruce and Donald, 185
Cadillac, 165 de Certeau, Michel, 50
Cagney, James, 91 De La Soul, 204
California, 18 De Metz, Danielle, 146
Campanella, Tomasso, 194 Death Race (film), 172
Campbell, Clive (DJ Kool Herc), 193, 195, Death Race 2000 (film), 172
198, 205 Death Wish (film), 198
Cannonball Run (film), 168 Debord, Guy, 50
Cape Cod, 19 Deleuze, Gilles, 47
Carlin, Trevor, 172 Delphi Automotive, 174
Case Study house program, 33, 37, DeMars, Vernon, 178
49 Demolition Man (film), 170, 175,
Casino Royale (film), 168, 169 176
Cassiodorus, 142 Descartes, 78
Castelluccio, Frederico, 95 design by choice, 109, 110
Cavalcanti, Giovanni, 96 Design for Dreaming (film), 175, 176
CBS, 23 di Bartolomeo, Michelozzo, 95
Chang and Eng, 80 Dietzmann, Julius, 128
Chard, Chloe, 144 Disney, 70, 75
Charlie Bubbles (film), 169 Doheny, Edward, 129
Chase, David, 91 Doherty, Thomas, 155
Chatterton, Ruth, 123 Door, Robert, 184
Chevrolet, 166, 171 Douglas-Home, Robin, 115
Chicago, 23 Dow, Tony, 20
Chrysler, 83, 165 Drawing Restraint 7 (film), 172
Chuck (tv show), 27 Du Pont, 31

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Duptay, Charles, 144 General Motors, 164, 165, 175, 180, 181
Dymaxion prototype car, 164 Genevieve (film), 164
Gidget Goes to Rome (film), 139, 141, 147,
Eames, Charles, 37 149
Eat, Pray, Love (film), 156 Giedion, Sigfried, 184
eBay, 69 Gilbert, Elizabeth, 156
Edersheim, Maurits, 40 Girard, Alexander, 37, 62
Ellwood, Craig, 33 Gladiator (film), 140
Elsner, John, 70 Goldberg, Bernie, 17
Ennis-Brown House, ch. 8 Goldblatt, Stephen, 46
Ennis, Charles and Mabel, 125 Goldfinger (film), 167
Entenza, John, 37 Golf, Bruce, 35
Esquire (magazine), 39 Goodman, Charles, 178
Evans Price, Margaret, 62, 63, 68, 69 GPS (Global Positioning System), 170
Grand Central Station, 111
Facebook, 170 Grandmaster Caz, 197
Fair, Yvonne, 202 Grandmaster Flash, 197
Fairbanks, Douglas, 129 Great White Deco style, 129
Fast and Furious (film series), 172 Greene, Herb, 35
Fatboy Slim, 168 Grey, Sasha, 53
Father Knows Best (tv show), 17 Gropius, Walter, 106, 111, 118, 194, 196
Feininger, Andeas, 180 Grot, Anton, 129
Female (film), 123, 124, 128, 130, 132 Gruen, Victor, 178, 179, 185
Ferenczi, Sandor, 71 Grumbine, Anthony, 18
FHA, 19 Gun Crazy (film), 169
Fiat, 174 Gutheim, Frederick, 178
Fifth National Industrial Exposition, 80
Filman, Charlotte Perkins, 133 HaloIPT, 174
Fisher-Price Toy Company, ch. 4 Halprin, Lawrence, 178
Fisher, Herman, 62, 69 Hamilton, Richard, 107
Floating Market, 81 Hanks, Tom, 18
Foley, Mary Mix, 181, 182 Haralovich, Mary Beth, 20
Fonda, Jane, 37 Hardison, Donald, 178
Ford Foundation, 187 Harper (film), 169
Ford Motor Company, 164, 165, 169, 182 Harryhausen, Ray, 141, 142, 145
Forster, E. M., 141, 154 Harvey, David, 195
Fort Apache, the Bronx (film), 198, 199, Haskell, Douglas, 181
201 Hauer, Rutger, 135
Fortune (magazine), 17, 180 Haven, Annette, 53
Foucault, Michel, 50, 54 Hawkins, Kermit, 184
FOX News, 16 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 141, 144, 156
France Miniature, 75 Hayden, Dolores, 17, 94
Frank, Scott, 136 Hayman, Richard, 37
Freeman house, 126 HBO, 91
Frey, Albert, 33 Hefner, Hugh, 110, 113, 116, 119
From Russia With Love (film), 169 Heinz, Thomas A., 128
Fuller, Buckminster, 164 Hess, Alan, 45
Funk, Tom, 185 Hicks, Sheila, 36
Hilberseimer, Ludwig, 196, 201
Gandolfini, James, 91 Hine, Thomas, 42
Garnett, William, 16 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 125, 197
Garvey, Marcus, 203 Hoggart, Richard, 107
230 Index

Hokusai, 126 Koenig, Pierre, 49, 50

Hollywood, 18, 20, 22, 31, 123, 126, 139, Kohan, Jenji, 15
140, 146, 158 Kohner, Frederick, 146
Hopkins, Keith, 150 Kubrick, Stanley, 51
Hopper, William, 141 Kutcher, Ashton, 22
House of Lords, 115
House on the Haunted Hill (film), 124, 131, La Dolce Vita (film), 157
133 La Glace à Trois Faces (film), 169, 172
Howard Johnson’s, 183, 184 La-Z-Boy, 32
Hunter, Robert, 80 Labelle, Patti, 26
Huntley, Chet, 158 Lachman, Edward, 47, 55
Hurn, David, 37 Lakewood, CA, 16, 17
Huxtable, Ada Louise, 98 Lang, Derrik, 23
Huyssen, Andreas, 125 Lang, Fritz, 129
Lapidus, Morris, 51
I Love Lucy (tv show), 15 Larsen, Thor, 35
I, Robot (film), 170, 176 Lassels, Richard, 144
International Style, 128, 132, 195, 197, 206 Laurana, Luciano, 95
Italia in miniature, 75 Lautner, John, 31, ch. 3
Italian Renaissance, 133 Lavish, Eleanor, 155
Ivory, Ismail Merchant-James, 155 Le Corbusier, 52, 155, 194, 196, 198
Izenour, Stephen, 110, 117, 188 Leave It to Beaver (tv show), ch. 1
Leavis, F. R., 107
Jacobsen, Arne, 35 Leen, Nina, 186
Jaguar, 166, 168 Lefebvre, Henri, 50
James, Henry, 141, 151 LEGO, 66, 73
Jameson, Frederick, 50, 54, 134 Lessard, Suzannah, 94, 100
Jay-Z (Shawn Carter), 202, 203 Levine, Elana, 40
Jencks, Charles, 110, 193 Levine, Neil, 125
Jessup, John K., 182 Levittown, NY, 17, 194
Johnson, Lyndon, 187 Levy, Eugene, 21
Johnson, Philip, 186, 197 Lewis, Wyndham, 107
Jupena, Urban, 36, 37 Lexus, 175
Juran, Nathan, 141, 142, 145, 146 Life (magazine), ch. 11
Lift to the Scaffold (film), 170
Kahn, Albert, 180 Lightman, Herb A., 134
Kahn, Lloyd, 35 Lileks, James, 42
Keaton, Diane, 21 Lodoli, Carlo, 100
Keats, John, 182 Long, Richard, 133
Keenan, Thomas, 49 Loos, Adolf, 49
Kenyon, 144, 145 Lord Byron, 150
Kerr, Deborah, 147 Loren, Effete Frederick, 132
Keynes, Milton, 112 Lotus, 168, 171
Kiel, Richard, 168 Lownes, Victor, 113, 117
Kiley, Dan, 178 Luce, Henry, 177, 179, 182, 185
King Louis XVI, 79 Lutyens, (Sir) Edwin, 61, 62, 68
King Rama IV, 86, 87 Lynes, Russell, 182
King Rama VI, 79
King Rama IX, 83 Mac, Bernie, 22
Kipling, Rudyard, 164 Magherini, Graziella, 139, 152, 154
Kneece, Dan, 46 Mansfield, Jayne, 37, 38
Kodak, 179 March, Fredric, 20, 21

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 Index 231

Marcy, William Learned, 202 New Deal, 17

Mark Curry, 25 New Wave, 158
Marriott, Oliver, 111, 112 Newton, Jean, 41
Martin, Steve, 21 Nissan, 165
Mathers, Jerry, 20 Nochimson, Martha, 100
Mattel, 69 Nolan, Christopher, 168
May, Ernst, 194, 201 Norfleet, Barbara, 17
Mayfield, 18 Nowicki, Matthew, 178, 179
McClure, Troy, 48
McDonald’s, 69, 73 O’Neal, Shaquille, 25
McG, 24, 48, 50 O’Reilly, Bill, 16
McKim, Mead, and White, 94 Obama, Barack, 16, 17
McLuhan, Marshall, 39, 107, 117 Ohlmart, Carol, 131
McMansions, 16 Okey, Jack, 128
McMurry, Robert, 182 Olsen, Mary Kate and Ashley, 156
McQuade, Walter, 189 Only Two Can Play (film), 166
Mead, Syd, 136 Ozzie and Harriet (tv show), 17
Medici, 95, 96, 97
Mercedes, 166, 170 P. Diddy, 25
Mercedes Benz, 83 Packard, Vance, 182
Metropolis (film), 129 Pan Am Building, 111
MGM, 129 Pantheon, 142
Mills, C. Wright, 182 Paolozzi, Edoardo, 107
Milton, David, 132, 133, 134 Park, Jane Chi Hyun, 126
Miniatürk, 75 Parker, Charlie, 198
Minority Report (film), 170, 175, 176 Patterson, Richard, 134
Mitsubishi, 168 Paulin, Pierre, 36
Modernism, 194, 206 Paull, Lawrence, 136
Moebius, 136 Penner, Barbara, 39
Monsanto, 31 Perret, Auguste, 196
Moore, Roger, 168 Peter Pan (novel), 70
More, Thomas, 194 Phillips, Richard, 53
Morris, William, 133 Piccadilly, 111
Mos Def (Dante Terrell Smith, now Yasiin Bey), Pickford, Mary, 129
203, 204, 205 Piero della Francesca, 95
Moses, Robert, 195, 197 Playboy (magazine), 106, 109, 110, 111, 113,
Motorama, 174, 176 115, 116, 117, 118
Moulin Rouge (Las Vegas), 184 Playmobil, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73,
Mr. Flash (Gilles Bousquet), 203 74
Muang Boran, ch. 5 Plunz, R., 195
Mumford, Lewis, 197 Poconos, 38, 39
Mussolini, 82 Porsche, 170
Myers, Mike, 168 Postmodern, 134
Prasat Preah Vihear (Khan Phra Viharn),
Nader, Ralph, 165 85, 87
NBC, 27 Preciado, Beatriz, 110, 116, 118
Neiman, LeRoy, 119 Presley, Elvis, 34, 37
Nelly, 25, 26 Price, Irving, 62, 69
Nelson, Harriet, 20 Price, Vincent, 131, 132
Nesbitt, John, 129 Prince Damrong, 81
Neumann, Dietrich, 135 Pruitt-Igoe, 193, 194
Neutra, Richard, 49 Puglia, Frank, 142
232 Index

Quaker Oats, 69 Simmel, Georg, 201

Quo Vadis (film), 140, 145, 147, 149 Singer, Linda, 50
Skyfall (film), 168
Rain Man (film), 169 Skyscraper Souls (film), 128
Random, Ida, 48, 53, 55 Smith, Kathryn, 126
Realism (in film), 158 Smith, W. Eugene, 179, 182
Reed, Donna, 20 Smith, Will, 22
Remnick, David, 93, 101 Soane, (Sir) John, 70
Renault, 83 SOM, 178
Rense, Paige, 40 Spartacus (film), 140
Repogle, John, 184 Spaulding, Sumner, 33
Reservoir Dogs (film), 169 Speed Racer (film), 168
RetroWeb, 18 Splendid China, 75
Rex, John, 33 Spotify, 170
Reynolds, Burt, 40 Star Wars (film), 32
Rhodes, Dusty, 41 Stein, Clarence, 197
Richards, Mary, 36 Stendhal Syndrome, 151, 152, 154
Riesman, David, 182, 184 Sterling Homes, 19
Ritt, Martin, 16 Stewart, Jon, 16
Riva, J. Michael, 48 Stewart, Martha, 26
Rolls-Royces, 169 Stewart, Susan, 70, 78
Roman Holiday (film), 156 Stiller, Ben, 25
Romanticism, 18, 150, 151 Storer house, 126
Rome Adventure (film), 155, 156 Sullivan, Louis, 133
Root-Bernstein, Michelle, 72 Swartz, Edward M., 68
Rosa, Joseph, 49, 123 Sweeney, Robert L., 127
Rougier, Michael, 188 Swift, Jonathan, 70
Rouse, James, 186
Rover, 165 Tafel, Edgar, 127
Rowland, Kelly, 25 Tafuri, Manfredo, 194
Rudofsky, Bernard, 35 Taliesin East, 125
Rudolph, Paul, 40 Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, 75
Ruscha, Ed, 188 Tauchnitz, 141
Taut, Bruno, 206
Saarinen, Eero, 37, 178 Taylor, Elizabeth, 21, 149
Saarinen, Loja and Eliel, 30 Taylor, Joan, 142
Said, Edward, 126 The Architects’ Collaborative, 112
Saldana, Zoe, 22 The Brady Bunch (tv show), 24
Samut Prakan, 87 The Daily Show (tv show) 16
Santa Barbara, CA, 18 The Dark Knight (film), 168
Sayre, Nora, 146 The Forum, 143, 147
Schaper, 69 The Girl Who Knew Too Much (film), 156
Schelle, Helen, 62 The Hitch-Hiker (film), 169
Schumer, Chuck, 203 The Incredible Bongo Band, 198
Scott, Adrienne, 158 The Independent Group, 107
Scott, Ridley, 134, 136 The Living End (film), 169
Scott Brown, Denise, 45, 110, 117, 188 The Marble Faun (film), 141, 144, 158
Sears, 19, 32 The Offspring, 24
Serling, Rod, 18 The Physician of the Castle (film), 169
Sheats, Helen, 47, 52 The Robe (film), 140
Shore, Stephen, 188 The Simpsons (tv show), 48
Silverman, Kaja, 135 The Sopranos (tv show), 91

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 Index 233

The Spy Who Loved Me (film), 168 Wainwright, Loudon, 188

The Wizard of Oz (film) 70 Warner Brothers, 129, 136
Thelma & Louise (film), 169 Washington Post (newspaper) 34
They Live By Night (film), 169 Weeds (tv show), 15
Thorne, Jim, 130 Weeks, John, 112
Three Coins in a Foundatin (film), 155, 156, Welby (M.D.), Marcus, 18
157 Wharton, Edith, 151
Thunderball (film), 167 When in Rome (film), 156
Time (magazine), 186 White, William H., 17
To New Horizons (film), 164 Whitener, Catherine Evans, 30
Toop, David, 198 Whitney, Allison, 152
Torres, Rubén Ortiz, 168 Whyte, William H., 182, 186, 187
Touch of Evil (film), 172 Williams, Eureka, 33
Toyota, 174, 176 Williams, Martin, 198, 201
Tracy, Spencer, 21 Williams, Raymond, 107
Trafic (film), 166 Williamson, John, 39
Treehorn, Jackie, 54 Wirayaphant, Lek, 77, 82
Tron (films), 170, 172, 173 WiTricity Corp, 174
Trumbull, Doug, 134 Wojcik, Pam Roberson, 135
Tudor, 19 Wolfe, Tom, 40, 51, 108
Twitter, 170 Wolff, Werner, 183
Twombly, Robert, 125 Wolfson, Erwin S., 111
Tyson, Mike, 25 Woodbury, Richard, 188
World Against Toys That Harm, 68
Under Eighteen (film), 128 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 46, 47, 49, 51, ch. 8,
Universal City, 18 178
Universal Studios, 18, 19 Wright, Gwendolyn, 18
Usonian style, 127, 137 Wright, Henry, 197
Wright, Lloyd, 137
Van Nest Polglase, 129 Wyker, William, 20
Vasari, Giorgio, 96 Wyman, George, 134
Venturi, Robert, 45, 93, 110, 117, 181, 188,
189 Yamasaki, Minoru, 178, 179
Victorian style, 18, 62, 132, 133 Ylvisaker, Paul, 187
Villet, Grey, 185 Young, Filson, 173
Virilio, Paul, 50, 175 Yuricich, Matthew, 134
Vitra, 62
Vitruvius, 100 Zanotta, 35
Volvo, 166 Zimmerman, John, 180