In thinking about set designs which have become iconic in and of themselves and whose images remain with us today, one of the first designs I thought of was the war room from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
What I love about the design of the war room is that it has both the power to inspire awe as well as set the stage for visual puns and hilarious interaction between the characters. When I did a little investigating, I found a great story about the set designer for this film. Ken Adam was a Jewish boy born as Klaus Adam in 1921 and grew up in Berlin alongside the Bauhaus movement. When his family immigrated to England at the beginning of World War II, he enrolled in the military and became a Typhoon pilot, conducting daring missions in what was very modern technology at the time. When the war was over, he studied architecture at the Bartlett and eventually began producing the set designs on very high profile films including many from the James Bond empire such as Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, and Moonraker. His early childhood Nazi (and Bauhaus) exposure, military experience with cutting edge defense technology, and architectural education at the Bartlett probably made Ken Adam the best possible person in the world to design the sets for this film, which is why they are still so relevant and fantastic almost 50 years later. Much more information and photos of Ken Adam and his sets from Dr. Strangelove can be found here.
This week we also read a 1992 interview by Vincent Lobrutto from his book By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers" with the set designer Norman Garwood who has a notable body of work including Brazil, The Princess Bride, Glory, and Hook. The key element I pulled out of this interview was the concept of letting the style evolve, letting it undergo the actual benefits of an extended creative process. In Brazil, Garwood started out with some sketching but let the style evolve as the set crew collected props and clothing that Garwood would either approve or disapprove and hone their sensitibilities about what he was looking for. In the end the evolution of his orignal idea was much greater than what he started out. But this only worked becuase his internal sense about what was correct for the film made him very definitive in what he wanted. The set designer has to be a decisive leader in knowing the look that he wants. Garwood said "I tend not to dither around. I tend to know what I want aqnd that's not being conceited. It's best to always be institinctive when it gets into the question time about the size, the feel, the look, and you deal with it there and then." (Lobrutto, 212) Understanding the balance of knowing exactly what you want but still allowing a certain amount of variables to guide the direction of your vision is an important balance to strive for.
Compared to the traditional practice of Architecture, designing sets for films can be considered a lesser form of the practice, in that it is it ulitizing architectural skills to produce space that will not be inhabited in a meaningful way. But in many ways, at least in the few examples I am aware of, it seems that set designers actually have more freedom to explore true artistic instinct. Oftentimes in Architecture, the limits of your imagination are kept in check by the whims of your client. The impermanence of film enables creativity to dominate the process.
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