29/10/2008 • 1:30 pm 0
Like Modernist furniture but want some warmth to it? Check out Grete Jalk, a Danish designer whose work has been in New York’s MoMA. Her mid-century Modernist wood furniture is sleek in design and tastefully aesthetic. 
Credit: Photo from RagoArts.com
Filed under: furniture, interior design, set design
27/10/2008 • 1:30 pm 0
Here is a guy who digs the architectural quality of films just as much as the writer(s) of SpaceDesignJournal. Ours is not to redundantly review the film he briefly discusses; rather it’s a nod toward the particular timing of a film coming out about corruption in banking.
See his blog post on The International in the Architects Newspaper.
Filed under: set design
20/10/2008 • 1:30 pm 0
Pink Floyd and 2001: Space Odyssey: A Marriage Made in Heaven
This week’s cinematic set design post will forgo the film review, opting instead for quotes gleaned from William J. Friederich & John H. Fraser’s book, Scenery Design for the Amateur Stage. If anything, this might be a good way to demonstrate the inherent relationship between space design and cinematography.
“Most amateurs can and do learn readily enough the techniques of building scenery, but … most of them do not as readily learn how to design what they must build.”
“Lighting … is controllable through color, amount and distribution.”
“(The spectator) looks for a definition of the outer and inner walls of the room: the logical placement of openings and beam supports and chimneys; reasonable provisions for sources of light, natural and artificial…; the realistic relationship between the room he sees with the rest of the house he does not see but is quick led to imagine through the lines and movements of the actors; the apparently rational shape and size of the room itself; the presence of little architectural features which his experience has led him to expect in a real room, such as door and window trim… hearths in front of fireplaces…realistic hardware like door knobs and light switches. The designer who buys realism must be prepared to pay a price for it.”
“Since the days when Adolph Appia focused attention on the elements of light as the bleeding agent which fuses together all elements of stage presentation, no designer has thought of his setting except as it will appear under lights.”
“No room should be designed unless it is made architecturally sound by designing the rest of the house around it.”
Filed under: set design
16/10/2008 • 1:16 pm 0
SpaceDesignJournal isn’t the only media outlet pondering paramount set design issues.
Remember when people debated whether it was the Wegner chair that sealed the deal in Kennedy’s debate with Nixon? Seems Phil Patton of The New York Times Week in Review agrees.
In an article Nichole L. Reber wrote two years ago for a Sarasota, Fla. edition of Housetrends, one Danish couple couldn’t see beyond Danish Modern.
Watch DK Vogue’s video all about that magnificently designed and constructed piece.
Filed under: ASID, set design
13/10/2008 • 1:43 pm 0
Personally I adored director Danny DeVito’s flick Death to Smoochy. It was fairly resolutely panned by film critics and it won’t likely become a classic study in film schools, but its use of saturated colors and lighting that gives almost palpable dimension is something to watch. Though the humor is the first element of enjoyment.
“The colors are really saturated and the blacks are very black,” says director of photography, Anastas Michos, talking about how the production designer and lighting designer worked together. For example, with the introduction of Catherine Keener as Nora Wells notice the candy-like colors of the childrens network office.
Also notice the contrast between the two sides of the black comedy: shades of grey, black and neutral to give visual dimension to Rainbow Randolph, Robin Williams, and his demise’ bubbly, overly optimistic colors ranging the spectrum to deepen the kiddie show side. The set designer and production designer, Howard Cummings, also used cold, steely interior architecture to demonstrate the corporate element and Irish mob sides of the story.
In the scene that introduces Spinner, Michael Rispoli, the production designers and costumer, Jane Ruhm, collaborated. Notice the lush greens and popping reds. They don’t need to pop for the use of metaphorical lighting like the hues of the kiddie production studio’s offices. Rather they breathe and flow. Doubtful the crew was trying to achieve this but look how the patch of wheat grass, obviously green, is also lush, and it’s the visual item that links the return of Spinner’s family, the Irish Mob. This delicious use of greens and reds continue when Nora visits Sheldon Mope’s (Edward Norton) corporate penthouse, which also happens to have plush, elegant, traditional decor.
One technique I love is the visual linking of scenes to scenes. Watch, now that your eyes are accustomed to the plump red and greens, how a series of scenes is chronologically linked beginning with the romantic interlude between Nora and Sheldon.
For those friends of yours who know nothing about layering their home’s lighting design, point out the work done in this film. It’s a fun and informative demonstration of the value of shadows and lights.
Filed under: set design
03/08/2008 • 3:46 pm 0
These photos of La Maison de Verre from http://hollisterhovey.blogspot.com/2008/02/dream-house-la-maison-de-verre.html, http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j52/erincro/verve.jpg, and http://hometown.aol.com/hazeej/maison1.jpg
In an omnipresent desire for variety, Space Design Journal will do stretch the content of this week’s filmic set design post. This weeks post will be a film recommendation. Sometimes we will recommend a film or documentary related directly to space design. Far more exist than one would imagine!
This five-disc series, created for European public television channel, features architecture from around the world. Each disc contains half dozen analyses of some 25 minutes apiece. The analyses differs slightly for each architecture project, of course, but generally covers the program, the construction process, its inhabitants, its materials and colors and more. They’ve also carefully considered the use of sound, demonstrating various projects sound characteristics. The producers enhance the two-dimensional projection by animating and coloring models, representing the building’s composition, massing and use thoroughly and usually graciously.
For instance, on disc four a pleasant if not slightly affected female narrator’s voice discusses La Maison de Verre, designed by Pierre Chareau in France in 1928-1932. One might liken this to a Picasso piece: See me incorporate some elements of Cubism, then see me implement some Futurism, not watch me do something entirely my own. That’s basically the designer’s cavalier premise (we see designer because furniture was his first love, as is evident in the furniture around the home). It contains elements of internationalism, some Art Deco and an irrefutable ingredient of sui generis. The house actually was deigned for a bifurcated purpose: house the family and provide commercial quarters for the husband’s medical practice. Chareau treated some architectural elements with a nautical theme. For instance, the ladder leading between the wife’s boudoir and the master chambers resembled a boat’s folding ladder. One writer at the time wrote,
“Chareau’s house is cinematographical.”
In it one delights in steel, glass, and wood, common more in a commercial space than residential one but refreshingly cool and awe-inspiring. Chareau was known more for his interiors, and that fact shows in the stellar treatment he gave here, exhibiting his ability to create warmth and his divine skills at space design. The home’s name translates to the Glass House, but the interiors are far denser and awesome than its American counterpart in New Caanan.
Some other projects discussed in the series include the usual suspects– Philip Johnson’s Glass House and the Georges Pompidou Center in France, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building and Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Theater in Chicago. It’s the surprises that will make viewing all five discs worthwhile.
Filed under: set design
29/07/2008 • 12:03 am 0
Photo of London’s National History Museum by www.milesfaster.co.uk/
Photo of London’s Gherkin building by Norman Foster from BusinessWeek
“No one man makes a film. No one man is responsible for the look.”
Basic Instinct II director Michael Caton-Jones
Yes, the film has been panned by virtually anyone, yet it does contain a great deal of fun architecture.
Consider the following backgrounds and sets if not for your own appreciation of architecture but also as a manifestation of visual psychology.
From YouTube.com
Basic Instinct II was directed by Michael Caton-Jones with director of photography Gyula Pados, and set in London. But according to the special features section of the DVD and the audio commentary by the director, he “wanted to show a side of London we don’t normally see.” Usually to obviate the fact we’re watching a film or scene in London filmmakers opt to show double decker buses, the House of Parliament, and little red phone booths. Instead this crew chose to juxtapose London’s contemporary and historic buildings.
Caton-Jones says the locations served as a metaphor for the psychological duplicity inherent in the film.
The set of the London cop shop was actually a set created in a Guiness factory.
Dr. Glass’ office is in a building known as the Gherkin, especially because of its shape. But looking at this Norman Foster building, we see what appears to be a glass bullet adorned with metal lace.
When Dr. Glass meets Catherine Tramell for the psychological evaluation, the brick barrel vault on the ceiling and rhythmic bricks on the wall behind them gives natural feel beautifully juxtaposed to the steely floor and bannister. Glass block windows on the wall give historic feel again in contrast to the circular lighting scheme.
Velvety red patterned walls against heavy stained wood trim demonstrates a definitive formality inherent of a court scene.
When Glass visits his ex-wife at work, the background is the Natural History Museum’s mineral room. Caton-Jones explains that he created visual depth by illuminating the desks with lamps.
The scene that introduces Milena Gardosh is a college in Kensington, another Foster design. It’s also another use of “new” pitted against the previous scene’s “old.” It features reflective walls, oceans of aqueous colored windows and glass, sleek metallic stairways, undulating walls and cantilevers.
Check out more of Basic Instinct II’s film architecture.
Filed under: set design
18/07/2008 • 9:12 pm 0
This blog will now contain a regular weekly feature blending archificionada and cinephilia. You can expect a brief discussion of a select motion picture’s set design or cinematography. Just as architecture, cinematic set design strives to create a sense of place. “Like modern architecture, film design (is) fundamentally a manipulation of the elements os space, light and movement,” David Albrecht wrote in Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies. Primarily the book discusses the burgeoning of film and of modernism in the 1920s and 30s, yet its message remains highly relevant today. “A number of key film producers, directors, stars and art directors who were aware of the influence that cinema had come to wield on its vast audience were, in fact, able to develop a film aesthetic that that fostered architectural experimentation.”
This department will span the range of filmic set design. Not only is set design physical structures such as rooms or buildings or even cities, but it’s a full range of landscapes, colors, infrastructure and even transportation. As such this department is an essayistic foray into the concept and material reality of set design in cinema. Discourse is very welcome.
The first film of discussion: No Country for Old Men. Writers/directors Ethen and Joel Coen chose Roger Deakins, director of photography, yet again with smashing results. He’s worked with them on four films, for all of which he’s received Oscar nominations. NCFOM takes place in West Texas in 1980 and Deakins created that ambiance supremely from beginning to end. He discusses the importance of location to helping achieve the look and feel of West Texas in an article on ign.com, explaining, “‘The direction came from Joel and Ethan; they wanted it to look a certain way. In terms of lighting and filming they wanted it to be very matter of fact.’”
While the DP (AKA cinematographer) usually receives all the credit for a film’s visual appearance he doesn’t do it without the assistance of builders, production designers, the directors and others. It’s tantamount to an architect working with contractors, subcontractors, and the client. The NCFOM group reached a visual splendor that caused one of its actors (possibly Tommy Lee Jones) to say, “In some ways it’s a Western because of the terrain and the setting.”
That alone demonstrates how set design creates a sense of place, to the point sometimes of defining the film’s very genre. Production designer Jack DeGovia put it this way in a Moviemaker article: “‘I’m responsible for the settings, characters, and look of all the physical properties that go into making a motion picture. That is, finding locations, constructing the sets, overseeing graphics and effects, designing vehicles of all kinds, and coordinating costuming for the overall look of the picture.’”
The 1980 Western released in 2007 manifests in myriad ways. Here are a few.
The film’s opening shows desert hues of the sky and the terrain– pinks, beiges, browns and sparse but poignant greens. The opening conveys the region’s desert desolation, its debilitating sun, its refreshing sunsets, its aridity.
Trailer from Spike.com.
Deakins shoots the scene in which an officer takes Anton Chigurh (played by Oscar-winner Javier Bardem) to jail like an architectural photographer. The camera sits just inside the other lane, letting the yellow road stripes lead the viewer’s eye along the narrow, ever so slightly winding highway and up into the hills. It’s like shooting a long corridor inside a home that finally explodes into a great room plan.
Deakins creates a visual metaphor in the scene in which Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) discovers a bag of millions. While not a direct link it evokes Mexican architect Luis Barragan‘s sensitivity to landscape or Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture. It is under an isolated tree, which reminds this Eastern philosophy-inspired viewer to think of Buddha and the Bodhi tree. It makes sense in at least the concept that the film’s underlying message is the contemplation of fate and it’s under the Bodhi tree that Prince Gautama Siddhartha became enlightened and thus Buddha himself.
Enter Moss’ trailer home and the cabinetry, furniture and even the bed linens bespeak the late 1970s, 1980.
In the interest of interaction, Space Design Journal solicits suggestions on films to consider for this new, weekly feature. Some flicks to be discussed include Death to Smoochey, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Metropolis, Blade Runner, Down with Love, and Basic Instinct II.
Send recommendations or comments to spacedesign232@gmail.com.
Filed under: set design
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