UTSOA

Course Description

This course will be about the architecture of the villains' lairs in the movies of James Bond.

We all have the desire for an architecture that is fleeting, that is not fixed, hard to capture, even impossible to master. But we also have the desire and impulse to surpass that impossibility, to dwell in our imagination. To accomplish this translation from the animate to the concrete is not an easy task but there is a design exercise that we all have done with ease - when reading fiction, to construct in our imagination the space of action. Influenced by Eco's words that every text is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work, film can be seen as a method and place where you can get to do architecture in a way that you cannot do elsewhere - asking the viewer to construct the space of the narrative.

Architecture can be depicted in much the same way we view a familiar literary character: the villain in Ian Fleming novels and subsequent films. Le Chiffre, Drax, Dr. No, or Blofeld provide us with perfect models upon which a convenient social construction of the villain's architecture can be erected. After all, and like most of Fleming's villains, the spaces they occupy are also strange looking and their origins complex. When repeated often enough, a myth acquires a structure that is simple and can then be, and often is, easily introduced as villainous in the architectural discourse.

By looking at the entire 007 collection, Fleming's villains and sets, their architectural dependencies, we will investigate issues of ARCHITECTURE and CINEMA. We will draw on the assumption that scenarios (cinematic scripts) are implicit in every piece of architecture. At the same time all narratives are architecturally dependent; that in order to understand stories we need to construct their architecture and at the same time, in order to understand architecture we need to place a story in it. Thus reaffirming the belief that program (script) is an important determinant of architectural form.