Sunday, February 3, 2008

Boys on Film

FAT's recent stint teaching at Yale (see this week's issue of the Architect's Journal) resulted in us having to flesh out some previously half formed ideas for our seminar class. Mine included something portentiously titled Representations of Architects in the Media (the sexism of the title of this post is deliberate btw. Honest.) which looked at various classic and not so classic representations of architects and artists in film as a way of looking at the professions self image. My favourite is this stirring address by Woody Harrellson (referred to elsewhere here and admittedly an ongoing obsession). Others that came up in the discussion included George Castanza' Architect alter ego Art Vandalay in Seinfield, and Daryl Hannah's appalling turn as a performance artist in Legal Eagles.

2 comments:

Norman Blogster said...

How strange you should post this on the very day the_moth and I were talking about the representation of architects in films. Can't quite believe it. If you go to Tesco's DVD rentals site and search for "architect" in the description, you get 98 films - some classics (including "Alan Titchmarsh's Super Gardening") and some not so cool (like the recent "Breaking and Entering").
That's our starting point anyway. Maybe some will appear on PartIV before long.

Charles Holland said...

sorry, missed this comment from a while back. Yes, breaking and entering is one of the worst films i have ever seen! inexplicably bad in fact. but anyway, i think papa brady is an architect in the brady bunch movie. he uses the same design - which is a kind of neo-modern-lite bungalow vernacular for every possible commission he is given!