notes on an imaginary science fiction film called "Das Andere"
Could Adolf Loos constitute the hero of a movie? Is there enough conflict in a style-wars idea to propel the story? Or is design kind of irrelevant w/r/t Big Ideas? What movies about design to people go to see? Can it be set in a technological time and place unlike our own and still have people connect to it?
A great big baroque spaceship. Advantage here is that we can shoot in historical spots? Dressing the set? See Brazil – reusing existing spaces. Blade Runner had that hotel. Also Amadeus interiors, – the Emperor and Salieri’s habitats.
Inside the baroque room. Maybe like a fresco come to life? The Devil’s Advocate. The Greenaway movie about “The Night Watch.”
Is positioning the characters in their own environments enough? Can you write decent dialogue about a design conflict? A rise and fall story modeled on the life of Adolf Loos.
Is the foil character someone like Robert A.M. Stern? In the Loos view, is it worse to say you’re a modern person but have (in his terms) no moral compass than it is to be unapologetically baroque because it comforts you?
Loos / Schindler – regress v. progress, old world v. new, dark v. light? A story about the two of them somehow?
Diagnosed with cancer in 1918, his stomach, appendix and part of his intestine were removed. For the rest of his life he could only digest ham and cream. He had several unhappy marriages. By the time he was fifty he was almost completely deaf; in 1928 he was disgraced by a paedophilia scandal and at his death in 1933 at 62 he was penniless.1
Long hallways, tunnels. Raumplan spacecraft. The houses they built were arbitrary. Not a machine for living, but an interior for living – a rich environment in which to withdraw from the criticism of the outside.
Tunnels connecting experimental design environments – a zero-G architecture school.
Architecture schools I have visited always felt like big spaceships to me – Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley, UVa – I imagine them taking flight and traveling the cosmos in search of design emergencies like the Starship Enterprise did for Captain Kirk's girlfriends.
Mega structures, utopian structures. Paolo Soleri, Biodome, Silent Running. Emptiness on a long-haul voyage – great interior expanses with just one guy in them – Moon, 2001.
An empty room filled with one monumental paper model of an insane Loosian city – his final moment of madness – he torches the model, consuming the remaining oxygen on the vessel, condemning himself to death by suffocation. Tell the story in a way that grants him a Pyrrhic victory rather than a defeat.
What do you call it when the designer thinks he is doing the most important work ever but in reality nobody cares for it or wants it – when he says “they don’t understand me?” It’s like denial, but that’s not the right word. Self-involved? Vain? Quixotic? "Creative Class?" Howard Roark?
The story I heard once about a Survival Research Laboratories party – enormous warehouse with a trailer on stilts inside – sand all over the floor like a beach – fire dancing and more space than you know what to do with. I may be remembering this inaccurately, but that's how I like to write.
Act One – the Academy (grand monumental institution – statues)
Act Two – the mission aboard Das Andere (social, raw, camaraderie, collective purpose)
Act Three – in orbit above the city (breakdown, conflicts, irrevocable choices)
Act Four – on Fire (solitude)
Act Five – beneath the Sea
A short film – a temporary building
Collecting bits of cardboard boxes from the trash at night with a flashlight. Wheeling them into the building where we find a large, dimly-lit baroque chamber, thick with carved floral reliefs, Boucher/Fragonard paintings on the ceiling, and elaborate gilt mouldings of every sort.
Inside the baroque room – a house of cardboard built within. Visualize this. Collage, photomontage. What is he doing? He’s up inside the fort, the others are pleading with him to come down but he is deaf to their calls. They see him but he doesn’t see them. The villagers with torches. He is a threat because they cannot understand his message – away with ornament and the trappings of an unclean mind.
But we like the suppression! We understand fear. We don’t want to be free from moral slavery. We like these distractions. We love our families! We love our TV shows!
Inside the paper fortress – ham and cream to eat, a record player playing. Technology is inverted, no longer a spearhead of progress, but a rear-guard implement - another link in the anchor-chain that keeps them participating in the economy at the maximum level possible.
We see him working with his hands, raising more walls, building staircases. He’s consulting drawings, measuring, scaling things up. The villagers begin to throw things at his building.
The fire belowdecks. As the building burns, his ghost returns.
Building-in-a-building = the impotence of a visionary architect, since it is housed in the old-guard structure.
“Bridges: — build — burn”
Bridge Over The River Kwai
