The Big Picture MagazineChris Rogers writes on architecture and visual culture, including film, television and design. His first book, The Power of Process – the architecture of Michael Pearson, was published in 2010 and he recently wrote the information pack for a new school under construction in the London 2012 Olympic Park for its architects. Chris has contributed to The Architects' Journal and files reviews for Art of England magazine. Chris is trying to find time to start his second book so in the meantime his work, including pieces on John McTiernan, Michael Mann and Joe Ahearne, can be found on his website.
Having their best-known building appear in film after film is an honour that has fallen to several architects, from William F. Lamb and the Empire State Building (King Kong, Sleepless in Seattle) to Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim Museum (Men in Black, Manhattan), but only John Lautner has had half a dozen of his […]
Beyond its utility in replicating the interior of a building convincingly, the architectural set attracted film-makers who held that cinema allowed an entirely new kind of story-telling. In Weimar Berlin, Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer each drew on disturbing personal incidents to write The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and believed that a fully visual filmic experience was necessary […]
Much of the architecture on show in films doesn’t actually exist, as a location or even a set. Instead, buildings are conjured through the alchemy of models, matte paintings, photographs or computer-generated imagery. Miniatures have been used to represent the unbuilt or unbuildable for many decades, either on their own or in combination with live […]
In the 1966 thriller The Quiller Memorandum, George Segal is sent to West Berlin to dismantle a neo-Nazi cell. Filming in a city where buildings hold particularly powerful associations, director Michael Anderson employs architecture as a metaphor for its past and its present. Segal meets his controller in the stadium built by the Third Reich […]
Catching up via the iPlayer whilst taking the train to work or tearing the plastic from the latest box set at home, it’s easy to forget a time just thirty years ago when the television landscape was radically different. There was no internet and the hard drive recorder and DVD had yet to be invented. […]
In the opening scenes of Patriot Games Jack Ryan foils an IRA plot to kill the Queen Mother’s cousin outside Buckingham Palace, preventing a car bomb from exploding and engaging in a lethal shoot-out with the terrorists. It is an exciting and involving moment, and sets up the revenge motive that drives the remainder of […]
“You know, we need a set for that”. This reminder from director Terence Young to production designer Ken Adam during the making of Dr No not only resulted in a hastily-conceived yet brilliant solution from Adam for the ‘spider room’ – a small space dominated by a disquietingly sloping, forced-perspective roof whose circular grille casts […]
Architecture, like film, acts at many scales. Suspense cinema in particular exploits this superbly, beginning with the smallest – the room. The four walls which surround us for most of the day are our world for those hours. But as much as they are just walls, they are also screens on which we project our […]
In our new feature, Chris Rogers explores the relationship between the built and filmed environments. #1 Defining the Frame Before visual effects, there was reality. The earliest films were shot on location, in and around the buildings that filmmakers were familiar with. Houses, factories, stations; all were used to tell stories. And by using everyday […]