Building an audience for architecture | The Guardian

From The Fountainhead to Blade Runner, the way films portray buildings and architects has nothing to do with reality, right? You'd be surprised | Deyan Sudjic

Space invaders ... Blade Runner influenced design. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext

Howard Roark is, up to a point, a plausible name for an architect, but I am less convinced by Stourley Kracklite. Roark, played by Gary Cooper in King Vidor's schlockfest The Fountainhead is a picture of toned muscle and angst, handy with a rock drill and brutal in his wooing. In contrast Kracklite, played by Brian Dennehy in Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect, has a waistline that authentically overwhelms his belt in the manner pioneered by the 20-stone James Stirling.

Both films have always fascinated me. In the case of The Fountainhead, it's not so much Roark – a tortured genius somewhere between Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright – who's the special attraction, although it's hard not to warm to an architect who, rather than see his work compromised, breaks into a building site and lays the dynamite charges to blow it up. Even if you might not want to actually hire him, he gets your attention. But what is really seductive is the idea that The Fountainhead's villain-in-chief is an architecture critic. The silkily evil Elsworth Toohey is portrayed filing copy from his bathtub and inciting the masses against Roark. If only.

Kracklite, even without the same mercurial menace as Gary Cooper, was equally fascinating as a kind of awful warning of the worst things that can happen to a curator. I saw The Belly of an Architect when, not unlike Kracklite, I was curating an architectural exhibition in Italy. In his case, it was on Étienne-Louis Boullée in Rome; in mine, the Venice Architecture Biennale, although I am happy to say I managed to get through the experience without being poisoned, which was more than Kracklite achieved.

Cinema and architecture have a relationship that goes back a long way, and is both superficial and profound. Half a century before Brad Pitt began hanging around Frank Gehry's studio and working on sustainable low-cost houses for New Orleans, Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed by architecture. He filmed it, he designed it, he evoked it. North By Northwest is full of architecture, starting with Saul Bass's titles, which begin as an abstract grid that is gradually revealed as the glazed facade of the UN building in Manhattan. Later in the film, you see a lot of the UN's interiors, which through the lens look much like the kind of buildings Zaha Hadid is designing today (North By Northwest is one of her favourite films). Later in the narrative, there is the Vandamm house in North Dakota that looks more like Frank Lloyd Wright than Frank Lloyd Wright, but which was actually a set built by Hitchcock.

Camille Paglia pointed out Hitchcock's continuing architectural obsessions years ago. The architecture critic Steven Jacobs has documented them in detail. Jacobs has examined, shot by shot, Hitchcock's key scenes, used them to draw floorplans and published the results in a book entitled Hitchcock and the Wrong House. It's a remarkable exercise that demonstrates the unpredictable interaction between spaces that can only exist in the film world and those that are more physical and can be realised in the architectural world.

We know what the flat in the Maida Vale terrace that is the setting for Dial M for Murder ought to look like on the basis of the exterior shots. Jacobs's drawings show that the simple orthogonal plan, implied by how the spaces looked through a camera lens, would actually have been overlaid by wedge-shaped projections to achieve the shots that Hitchcock wanted.

What makes it so fascinating as a study is that it shows the precise point at which physical reality overlaps with dreamlike images. There are other connections between film and architecture worth pursuing, too. They are both activities that require introversion and extroversion of their practitioners. To make a film, just as to design a building, takes a creative impulse, as well as the business acumen to assemble the finance, and the personality to impose one's will on construction workers, actors and crew.

What is not always clear is the precise nature of the comparison. Is the architect playing the part of director, or the star; the headline name that can get a development funded, in the same way that signing up Colin Firth or George Clooney can greenlight a film? It does happen occasionally when a developer looking for visibility or an easy planning consent, commissions Norman Foster or Frank Gehry, and bankers come up with the mezzanine finance to build a business park or a block of flats or a skyscraper on the strength of their involvement.

A more plausible analogy for the architect is with the screenwriter, whose work is rewritten until everything that made it distinctive has dissolved under layer upon layer of mush.

But just because a film has an architectural theme does not necessarily tell us much about architecture. Watching a lifesize replica of the spiral of the Guggenheim museum being obliterated in a storm of automatic gunfire in The International is more architectural product placement than spatial insight. Michael Caine's walk-on performance as an architecture professor in Inception is no more helpful as an insight into the mother of the arts than the random fact of Woody Harrelson's character in Indecent Proposal being an architect.

It's not simply a question of the distinction between arthouse and blockbuster. While a documentary such as My Architect may tell you a lot about the inner life of the son of an architect, it does not reveal much about architecture, perhaps because it was architecture that ultimately deprived Nathaniel Kahn of his father, Louis. In the Die Hard films, on the other hand, Joel Silver (who collects Frank Lloyd Wright houses) took audiences deep into the entrails of skyscrapers and airports, to demonstrate how buildings and complex spaces work, drawing a much less two-dimensional portrait of them than he achieved of his human characters.

In Heatwave, director Phillip Noyce provides another take on The Fountainhead. Richard Moir plays Steve West, an ambitious architect on the verge of his breakthrough project, a housing complex called Eden, in a rundown part of Sydney. "Why are you doing this?" asks Judy Davis, playing the community activist trying to stop the project from demolishing her neighbourhood. "Because if I didn't, somebody with half my ability would." Later, when West sees what the work has become in the hands of his ruthless property developer client, he echoes Roark: "It's not what I designed."

Some films can capture an architectural mood even before architects are aware of it. Blade Runner really did trigger an interest in dystopia, an exploration of the city of the future as messy and dark. It's not a film's namechecks or plotlines that can really tell us something new about architecture. Of course there is a certain narcissistic flutter when Maria Schneider, playing an architecture student, appears in The Passenger: would anybody else be discovered lurking in quick succession outside both the brutalist concrete of the Brunswick Centre in London and on the roof of Gaudí's La Pedrera in Barcelona?

But there is more to it than that. The real architectural quality of the film is in the climactic, uninterrupted, seven-minute continuous take that begins inside Jack Nicholson's hotel room in southern Spain, moves round the room and out through the window, to make a circuit of the square outside. It's the same sort of crystallization of space that the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro achieved in The Conformist, when Jean-Louis Trintignant is lost in the endless spaces of a fascist minister's office, and the screen is suddenly filled by a vast bust of Mussolini's head that is carried across the screen from left to right.

This is the kind of magic that architects always wish that they could work, but their buildings are static, and they can't impose their viewpoints on the people who experience their buildings. It doesn't stop them from trying.

Deyan Sudjic is an architecture critic. He narrates the film How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?, released on 28 January.

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