Concrete on film
Exploring brutalist architecture on screen from Columbus to A Clockwork Orange
Writer: Pete Collard
North Christian Church by Eero Saarinen in Columbus. Director: Kogonada (Superlative Films, Depth of Field, 2017)
The town of Columbus lies in rural countryside 40 miles south of Indianapolis in the USA, a somewhat unremarkable location for a series of remarkable buildings. Home to just under 50,000 inhabitants, the town now known as the ‘Athens of the Prairie’ was to become the setting for a collection of architectural projects designed by some of the 20th-century’s finest practitioners, built thanks to the generosity of a local philanthropist, the diesel-engine magnate J Irwin Miller.
Beginning in 1954, Miller’s Cummins Foundation hired Eliel Saarinen, his son Eero Saarinen, IM Pei and Kevin Roche, among others, to work on the design and construction of more than 50 public buildings, including elementary and middle schools, post offices and retirement centres. Today, the quality of the architecture that was built is demonstrated by the fact that seven Columbus buildings are listed as National Historic Landmarks in America.
Mental Health Center by James Stewart Polshek in Columbus. Director: Kogonada (Superlative Films, Depth of Field, 2017)
The town and its architecture are the inspiration, and now the setting and key narrative device, of Columbus, the debut cinematic production of Korean film artist and video essayist Kogonada. Visitors to the 2016 Barbican exhibition ‘Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945’ will remember the artist’s installation, a homage to filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu that projected a triptych of scenes taken from across the director’s acclaimed career, subtly documenting the furnishings and domestic habits of Japanese interiors in the 1950s and 60s. For Columbus, Kogonada has followed Ozu’s directorial style, offering a series of carefully framed compositions through which the protagonists walk and talk.
With shades of the complex relationship between real architect father and son Louis and Nathaniel Kahn, seen in the latter’s autobiographical 2003 film My Architect: A Son’s Journey, Columbus follows Jin (played by John Cho) as he flies in from Seoul to be with his ailing but estranged father, a prominent architect who has suffered a stroke while giving a lecture in the town. While there, he encounters local librarian and self-confessed ‘architecture nerd’ Casey (played by Haley Lu Richardson), struggling with a difficult parental relationship of her own, who gives him a personal tour of her favourite buildings in the town.
J Irwin Miller House by Eero Saarinen in Columbus. Director: Kogonada (Superlative Films, Depth of Field, 2017)
As their friendship slowly blossoms, the riches of the urban landscape reveal themselves to Jin, allowing him to realign his architectural compass, having previously considered the subject solely through the lens of his academic father. Casey’s tour takes them through several of the towns midcentury delights, including J Irwin Miller’s own house and garden, a 1957 collaboration between Eero Saarinen, Alexander Girard and landscape architect Dan Kiley, and today preserved as a museum. Despite the architectural beauty on screen, notable Columbus absentees from the film include Robert Venturi’s fire station and a school designed by Richard Meier.
Yet as Jin’s architectural reawakening grows, it is perhaps some of the town’s civic architecture built during the later years of the 1960s and early 70s that provides a more surprising narrative device. Eschewing the soft, elegant tones, colours and materials of the previous midcentury design palette, the sparse concrete of James Stewart Polshek’s Mental Health Center, built as a bridge across the local river, and Eliot Noyes’ fortress-like Southside Junior High both demonstrate Kogonada’s boldness in choosing monumental and austere architectural scenery that never overwhelms or dominates the subtleties of the slow-paced narrative taking place underneath.
Trinity Square car park by Owen Luder in Get Carter. Director: Mike Hodges (MGM-EMI, 1971)
Kogonada’s nuanced approach to brutalism is perhaps a direct contrast to its more traditional status as a cinematic visual trope. Built around the same time as Polshek and Noyes’ Columbus projects, the ill-fated St Cuthbert’s Village housing estate (demolished after 25 years) and Owen Luder’s Trinity Square multi-storey car park, were key locations in Mike Hodges’ 1971 film Get Carter, starring Michael Caine as a gangster hell-bent on gaining violent revenge for the death of his brother in Gateshead, England.
Trinity Square car park by Owen Luder in Get Carter. Director: Mike Hodges (MGM-EMI, 1971)
Trinity Square car park by Owen Luder in Get Carter. Director: Mike Hodges (MGM-EMI, 1971)
Get Carter was one of the first films to offer the nascent brutalist architectural style as a signifier of social disorder and the premise of violence. The following year the theme was demonstrated even more readily by one of the 20th century’s most controversial films, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Based on Anthony Burgess’ book of the same name, filming took place on location at the Thamesmead Estate near Greenwich in South London, with the estate becoming the home of Alex and his gang of ultra-violent ‘droogs’. The film helped to cement the estate’s growing reputation as dangerous and plagued with crime, although mismanagement and an ongoing lack of investment are perhaps more accurate reasons for any problems residents faced.
Thamesmead Estate by Robert Rigg (GLC) in A Clockwork Orange. Director: Stanley Kubrick (Columbia Pictures, 1971)
Brunel University lecture theatre by Richard Sheppard and John Stallman in A Clockwork Orange. Director: Stanley Kubrick (Columbia Pictures, 1971)
War Room designed by Ken Adam for Dr. Strangelove. Director: Stanley Kubrick (Columbia Pictures, 1964)
An earlier work of Kubrick’s, the 1964 classic Dr. Strangelove, featured the work of legendary set designer Ken Adam. Built on a stage set at the Shepperton Studios in London, the film’s cavernous Pentagon War Room, a 40m long bunker-like structure designed by Adam to create a vast weight above the gathering generals and their discussions of nuclear war. Adam later worked on several James Bond films, including the hollowed-out volcano of You Only Live Twice, part of a pioneering career that has influenced cinematic design ever since.
A more recent literary adaption saw director Ben Wheatley tackle dystopian novelist JG Ballard’s seminal High Rise, with the director creating his own cluster of concrete tower blocks, ‘designed’ by the fictional architect Anthony Royal. While the CGI exterior recalls the aesthetic of London’s Barbican Estate, several of the interior scenes were actually filmed on location at a disused sports centre in Bangor. Initially so appealing in the early morning light, the concrete landings and stairwells take on a more sinister tone as the social order housed within them slowly breaks down.
Irwin Union Bank by Eero Saarinen in Columbus. Director: Kogonada (Superlative Films, Depth of Field, 2017)<
In contrast, back in Columbus, many of the town’s inhabitants seem to have almost a complete disinterest for their surroundings, as Casey comments, ‘You’d be surprised how little people know or care about architecture here.’ She is of course passionate, but when challenged by Jin to explain her feelings about a particular favourite, the Irwin Union Bank by Eero Saarinen, the film allows us to only see her response, without any dialogue. Yet even in the absence of words, her animated gesticulations present a far more powerful demonstration of the power of architecture to move us emotionally. §