Towards Affective Architecture by Lindsey Miller

TOWA R DS A FFE C TI V E A RC H IT E C TU R E

L I G H TS — C A M E R A—AC T I O N E D I T E D BY L I N D S E Y M I L L E R 1

5 0 0 WO R DS This book takes you on a journey through filmmakers emulating reality and designers generating fantasy. The art of storytelling comes in various mediums. Whether on a screen, a stage, in a book or in a room, the audience embarks on a sensational journey to a simulated world. However, only the sensory conditions experienced with live-action film and highly invasive interior environments have the power to truly transport perception to illusion and reality to fantasy. Ironically, in all mediums the play on scale is the most powerful strategy artists use to communicate changes in perception. Dedicated filmmakers along with talented architects attempt to bring fantasy, dreams, desires and memories into being, which at the same time remain open to the viewers or users own experiences and imaginations. It is a shared, creative process. Architects measure their success by the degree in which the design consciously perceived space versus unconsciously experienced environments. Architecture, like a stage or a set, is designed as an adventure for the senses. The design methodology between the mediums is inherently similar in deriving these adventures. Film and theater set the stage by incorporating strategies of light and shadow, composition, atmosphere, contrast, visual pattern, repetition etc… These are the same spatial strategies architects apply to buildings. Great architecture, like great film or theater, captures the user or ‘audience’ and takes them on a journey that is a fantasy, dream or desire. This journey becomes the plot, or the function of the space. The architect acts as director. Every element in the space

must support the experience. The backdrop is the site and the signature environment is the program. Unlike live-action film, architecture exists in reality. In building design, the spectator becomes part of a larger, carefully articulated spatial configuration. Architecture has the capacity to completely captivate their audience on entirely new level – a full body sensory experience of their own in an unquestionable tangible environment. Therefore, architecture has more control over the audience and the experience than any other medium. Architecture is the most powerful medium because it eliminates all disconnect – audience and character become one. However, architecture is only successful if it generates interior landscapes that blur the boundaries between image and space, between theater and life. The focus is no longer on the static innovation of image and space. The creative interest is now focused on giving a dynamic momentum to interior design, adding an emotional dimension. Therefore, architects take reality and simulate a fantastical environment in order to grab the attention of the user and transport them to a new world. Intentional internal dramatic tension and deliberate dissolution forces one to question your perception of reality. Spatial designers create highly invasive environments that heighten sensory experience. By implementing these strategies and recalibrating reality designers acquire an opportunity to regain the user’s trust. The spatial configuration stages the user experience by generating clearly articulated gestures that guide the user through the space communicating the message set by fantastical reality.

SENSORY RELATIONS

F O R WA R D

ANIMATION

This book takes you on a journey through filmmakers emulating reality and designers generating fantasy. The art of storytelling comes in various mediums. Whether on a screen, a stage, in a book or in a room, the audience embarks on a sensational journey to a simulated world.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERCEPTION SIGHT SOUND

However, only the sensory conditions experienced with live-action film and highly invasive interior environments have the power to truly transport perception to illusion and reality to fantasy.

THEATRE

ARCHITECTURE

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERCEPTION SIGHT SOUND SMELL

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERCEPTION SIGHT SOUND TOUCH SMELL TASTE

FILM PSYCHOLOGICAL PERCEPTION SIGHT SOUND

While reading a book your imagination relies solely on your sense of sight and ability to visualize the narrative in order to ‘get lost in a book.’ By providing the reader with an image the author illustrates context and like they say, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ However, the reader has to switch back and forth between text and image distracting the reader, thus compromising attention to detail and ultimately, imagination. What if you could look at the image while hearing someone read you the text? Even better, what if the character from the image could tell you the story? Alas, animation combines text with image by engaging your sense of sound while shifting your eyes away from the page to the screen. Animation brings the ultimate fantasy to life. To one extent, illustrations no longer give you the freedom to let your imagination run wild. On the other hand, animation takes the audience into a world beyond their wildest dreams. It is a world that they have never dreamed of. Animation is the marriage between storytelling

and composition. Not only can the audience now visually comprehend the character, they can see form, attitude, and the contextual ‘style’ that the story takes place. Everything in the scene, the background, the props, every little detail supports the acting – in one single frame animation communicates to the audience and allows them to form a relationship and understanding that could have never come out of words. When it comes to animated films, the audience readily surrenders all inhibitions at the door because it is a guaranteed magical escape from the ‘real world.’ Animation leaves you with just enough to relate to the scene without drawing human recognition.

You are captivated in the character, yet consciously aware that you are not the character, and will never be the character. It is the ultimate escape - out of mind, body and humanity. However, therein lies the disconnect. You do not say that you know what it feels like to be ‘Bugs Bunny’ after Saturday morning cartoons. Cartoons can get boulders dropped on their heads and still pop right back up. And furthermore, unlike Roger Rabbit and the Toons, we are not apprehensive when it comes to the Dip.

We do not share the same fears or dreams. Yet, we do share emotions. We are empathetic to the

character, however, never sympathetic. Animation is merely a fantastical means of escape from the ‘real world’ that we long for. Animation continues to evolve trying to become more and more lifelike with ‘tradigital animation’ and computer technology. However, it is quite possible that we will never be able to bridge the gap between animation and humanity.

No matter how ‘real’ it may seem, there is still the absence of relation and memory. There is no evidence that allows us to resonate with the character on a humanistic scale.

Who Frammed Roger Rabbit? First live-action feature film with integrated animation in every scene 1988

We don’t know what it’s like to have magic powers, or the same perfect hair every day, or invincible to the things that kill us.

It’s humanity’s imperfections and inevitable inconsistencies that make us feel real. You can’t fake that. Now let’s bring the story out of the fantasy and back to the real world. Theater uses similar strategies that layout designers and animation artists implement when framing a scene – instead they are setting the stage. Now theater obviously came before animation, but it was not until Adolphe Appia, a Swiss architect, insisted on building the scene in three dimensions in order to create shade and shadows from the light to bring the stage to life.

This shift in methodology was similar to the shift from text to sound (reading to hearing) seen in animation. Although this shift does not engage another one of our primary senses, it gave theater an inherent

humanistic quality that appealed to our instincts. 3-Dimensional sets allowed the audience to understand, believe and trust the story engaging our perception of depth. The audience co-exists with the set. You are no longer holding a book and reading the story, or watching a screen, there is a power of physical presence. However, ironically enough, this medium is too real. No matter how well stage designers render sets and flawlessly conceal transitions, the reality is the audience is fifteen rows away from the action. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible to become captivated in the character. It is the opposite predicament the audience encounters dealing with animation.

Instead of the failed connection between cartoon and human, it is between human and human.

perspective never truly allowing themselves to be ‘tricked’ into envisioning themselves as the character. Now, when you combine fantastical animation with the overly humanistic characteristics of theater, you get something truly magical -

ing association or connection to the character. Alas, sparking the sympathetic nature of the audience-character connection.

Film makes our fantasies, dreams, desires and memories come to life in realistic and relatable means, yet ever so slightly pushing our boundaries of the ‘unknown’.

Hairspray on Broadway

Hairspray Film

2002

2007

You know you will never be that character. Again, you don’t watch Hairspray and try to figure out what it’s like to walk in Tracy Turnblad’s shoes. You walk out for intermission and say you can’t believe how well she played Tracy! The character to audience relationship isn’t with the ‘character’ it is with the actor. Why do you think people go crazy over seeing the Original Broadway cast? It’s about the performance! You are going to the theater to see a spectacle. You are going to the theater to see the show. You know it’s not real because the character has been displaced from story to actor and you are there to see it. There is a tangible nature about theater that allows the audience to wrap their heads around it so much that they keep an accurate

live-action film. It is the perfect distance to engage imagination and escape.

It is safe to get completely wrapped up in the film because it’s real, we

The audience fully relates to the character on a humanistic scale.

recognize the context, we trust the actors and we are free to explore. We suddenly have the urge to feel what it’s like to walk in their shoes. Film gives us a temporary perception of reality where we are convinced we can comprehend what it’s like to be them just as if we were there. We are temporarily living the dream because we recognize the context and our memories resonate in the scene. The audience is

The actor demonstrates humanistic qualities that the audience immediately can relate to and therefore develops an underly-

Water Cube Hook Movie set of Neverland 1991

Film and theater engage the audience by shifting their perception away from real time and psychologically transport them to a temporary simulated reality. 8

Beijing PTW Architects 2010

While architecture manipulates reality to generate consciously perceived space in order to elicit an emotional response from the user. 9

mentally transported to the set, and in good films, we forget it is a set. Filmmakers measure their success by the degree in which they can simulate reality. Ironically, in all mediums the play on scale is the most powerful strategy artists use to communicate changes in perception.

PLOT

FUNCTION

DIRECTOR

ARCHITECT

BACKDROP SIGNATURE ENVIRONMENT PROSCENIUM ARCH STAGE AUDIENCE CHARACTERS

SITE PROGRAMMING BUILDING ENVELOPE SPACE PASSIVE USER ACTIVE USER

Dedicated filmmakers along with talented architects attempt to bring fantasy, dreams, desires and memories into being, which at the same time remain open to the viewers or users own experiences and imaginations. It is a shared, creative process. Architects measure their success by the degree in which the design consciously perceived space versus unconsciously experienced environments. Architecture, like a stage or a set, is designed as an adventure for the senses. The design methodology between the mediums is inherently similar in deriving these adventures. Film and theater set the stage by incorporating strategies of light and shadow, composition, atmosphere, contrast, visual pattern, repetition etc… These are the same spatial strategies architects apply to buildings. Great architecture, like great film or theater, captures the user or ‘audience’ and tells a story – a story that takes them on a journey that is a fantasy, dream or desire of the designer. This journey becomes the plot, or the function of the space. The architect acts as director. Every element in the space must support the experience. The backdrop is the site and the signature environment is the program. Unlike live-action film, architecture exists in reality.

In building design, the spectator becomes part of a larger, carefully articulated spatial configuration.

Architecture has the capacity to completely captivate their audience on entirely new level – a full body sensory experience of their own in an unquestionable tangible environment. Therefore, architecture has more control over the audience and the experience than any other medium.

Architecture is the most powerful medium because it eliminates all disconnect – audience and character become one. However, architecture is only successful if it generates interior landscapes that blur the boundaries between image and space, between theater and life. The focus is no longer on the static innovation of image and space. The creative interest is now focused on giving a dynamic momentum to interior design, adding an emotional dimension to the experience of space - generated by images borrowed from fantasy, dreams, desires and memories. Therefore, architects take reality and simulate a fantastical environment in order to grab the attention of the user and transport them to a new world. Intentional internal dramatic tension and deliberate dissolution forces one to question your perception of reality. Spatial designers create highly invasive environments that heighten sensory experience. By implementing these strategies and recalibrating reality designers acquire an opportunity to regain the user’s trust. The spatial configuration stages the user experience by generating clearly articulated gestures that guide the user through the space communicating the message set by fantastical reality.

CONTENTS 18 Animation: Disney 28 Theatre: Adolphe Appia 32 Film: Federico Fellini 48 Interior Reality 58 Morris Lapidus 66 Philippe Starck 92 David Rockwell 100 Real Fantasy & Fantastic Reality The Standard Los Angeles Shawn Hausman 2002

A N I M AT I O N : D I S N E Y BRINGS THE ULTIMATE FANTASY TO LIFE BEYOND THE AUDIENCE’S WILDEST DREAMS SETTING THE SCENE Throughout the history of cinema, there have been directors, from Georges Melies to Terry Gilliam, for whom animation tools and processes have simply formed part of the wider palette of moviemaking possibilities. As digital modeling and character animation techniques have become ever more sophisticated, it has even been possible for digital mannequins to perform the kind of life-threatening stunt work that would previously have added to the worries of a crew and the insurance costs of a production. One particular preproduction process known as previz (pre-visualization) has come to the fore as the common technical and artistic ground between live-action visual effects and “pure” animation has grown ever broader. Low-polygon versions of characters, individual sets, and entire environments can now be built quickly and inexpensively, allowing the director, layout artists, and animators to visualize more clearly how the finished movie will look. Time can then be taken to modify and improve the designs before work begins on constructing - the final high-resolution geometry.

A Bug’s Life Disney 1998

Techniques such as mo-cap (motion capture, in which performers’ movements are tracked and recorded in a live studio environment that has been mapped in advance to the x,y, and z

coordinates of the computer), have replaced the labor intensive and increasingly unsatisfactory process of rotoscoping (projecting and tracing) live performances a frame at a time by hand. This has, of course, meant that filmmakers and studios who once sat apart from the animation community per se have found themselves face to face with the possibilities and procedures of the animation layout process. James Williams recalls how Sony Pictures Animation gradually began to emerge alongside Sony Imageworks. In visional effects, the only type of Layout Department that you have is a department that prepares animation. They take the live-action plates, pull them into the digital environment, pull them into the shot, bring in characters, and put the scene together. Because the composition and the cameras are already preplanned, Layout essentially didn’t exist here at Sony, so the concept of somebody having to go through that process was not something that the company had ever been used to before. On Polar Express the Layout Department worked under the artistic supervision of the director of photography, Robert Presley, and since it was the first of the motion capture movies, Robert Zemeckis was direction actors on the set with an idea of where he wanted to shoot the scene

from, but with no specific camera placement in mind. The motion of the characters they recorded on the set would then be brought into the computer and a basic camera position would be determined in previz. But that camera was not the final camera - it was simply put there to determine whether they had the coverage that they needed. So the scene was then brought into the Layout Department at Sony and that was the point at which we added the environments and started to add nuance to the camera. The Layout Department put he set into the sequence, determined how big it should be, and populated it. All those infinite vistas of trees that you see in the movie were actually done by the Layout Department because, of course, the sets themselves were cameradependent. I was constantly explaining to my colleagues at Sony that “This isn’t what layout usually is” because, of course, we wouldn’t normally start with an animated character and then try and record it. The blocking of the character is part of the basic job that they layout artist would normally do. The layout crew at Disneytoons has also demonstrated how previz can support the work of the story crew, as John Bermudes explained:

We’re always looking for places to get the director and the ‘board artists to “think cinematography.” How can you think dimensionally, think how the camera’s going to move? That helps us tremendously and I think it helps the director as well. They storyboard crew is often cranking through sequences just as we are, and their number one task is really getting the emotional tenor of the story, the rough staging and the emotion of it. So they don’t have time to do any rotations or perspective changes or any sophisticated camera moves. But we can give them screen grabs off of a schematic set that they can start ‘boarding and start getting excited about the possibilities. Lee Unkrich confirmed how effective the previz process has become over the years at Pixar. With the exception of rough concept sketches, it was more common in traditional animation for the Layout and Background Departments to draw (or paint) only those parts of a set or environment that would be visible to the audience in the final film. Similarly, previz artists can construct simple models of large areas of a landscape or city neighborhood, secure in the knowledge that only selected areas will ever need to be fully rendered. This stage of preproduction therefore acts not only as an inspirational process but also as a means of controlling expenditure in true Ken O’Connor “purse strings” style:

We started very quickly, even back on A Bug’s Life, moving toward a model of building our sets out in a way that would give us the most flexibility in layout so we’d have this big beautiful set and we could take the camera anywhere we wanted in it. It was a little harder back then, given the speed of computers, to be able to scout in the way that they were able to on WALL-E, but we were really doing that back then. For me the discovery, once we’ve built a set, is a big part of the process - just being inspired by what I’m seeing and reacting to it. That’s just where a lot of the joy of filmmaking comes for me, so I like to have a set that I can look around, and what we’ve had to do over time is figure out a way, again, to have our cake and eat it too. And we’ve done that by starting to really previz in a big way, building very cheap versions of the sets so that we can get in there with cameras, try different lenses, and find ways of shooting the scenes so that we can feel very confident that we have what we need.

LOCATION SCOUTS & SWEET SPOTS Ewan Johnson, who joined the Pixar layout crew during Toy Story, made clear the advantages of doing exploratory work in these early stages:

I don’t know how we stumbled on this, but we realized that for every move, every attitude, there’s a “sweet spot”. When we get characters, then, we need to do camera tests just like when you cast an actor in a film. You need to look at them with a wide-angle lens and with a telephoto lens, and you need to look at them from up high, from down low, to find where the sweet spot is. They’re very definitive and they’re subtly different. With Woody, you need to be just below his sternum to get the really perfect view; with Buzz, you need to be just a little bit higher, and if you don’t pose the character, you don’t make the right decision about that. So that led us into the natural kind of staging: layout and blocking get married together because you have to do you first pass of blocking the character to do your layout. Ewan went on to explain how this “sweet spot” principle holds up when it comes to environmental geometry and, beyond the question of camera angles, how important it can be to venture out into the low-resolution version of an environment: During one of the initial modeling review on A Bug’s Life, one of the modelers was just spinning the geometry of Ant Island around to show John Lasseter a different angle of it, and John just stopped and said, “That’s it!! That’s the

opening of the film! What we need to do is be far away and come up from the riverbed and see this island and move in, and so we’ll go from small to big to small again!” Just by looking at a turn-around of a model to approve it for shape and form! Another instance of the sweet spot.

It really made me aware of the concept of “location scouting” and responding to the set as an element of visual design process, so a lot of what I try to do when I get into sets and get into sequences is actually, for a moment or two, put the sequence away and just “walk” through the set, just the way I would if I were going to in to shoot a live-action scene in a real location: where would I put my cameras? The story itself still governs the kind of camera placement possibilities that an extensive digital “location” may present to the director the editor, and the layout team, as Lee Unkrich explains: As we’ve developed over the years, we’ve worked our way

toward this notion of shooting “coverage,” very much in a way that you would in live-action. It depends on the scene. If I’m doing an action scene, I’ll often have the layout artist actually block out the characters going through the motions, and we’ll cover it from lots of different angles and try different things just for the needs of that one particular shot, rather than doing everything piecemeal the way we used to.

ONLY CINEMATOGRAPHERS IN THEIR OWN MINDS It has taken some time to arrive at this point, however. When he first joined the studio, Director of Layout Jeremy Lasky was surprised to find that, even at Pixar, there was no real consensus about the role that a Layout Department might be expected to play in the CG production pipeline: When they were staffing up A Bug’s Life, there weren’t any other 3D layout artists around. No one had made any other 3D films, so where do you go? So they were casting this wide net, just trying to find people that they wanted to work with and when I interviewed, the supervisor pitched the department as the cinematography arm of the studio. He said that they were really looking for visual

storytellers, and I got very excited. Here was this wonderful thing, they were staffing up for A Bug’s Life, and they had done Toy Story, seat-ofthe-pants with only two main layout people and a bunch of technical directors that they grabbed to help out. But what I didn’t realize until I here (because they hid it!) was that they were only the cinematography arm of the company in their minds! That as far as most of the company was concerned, their job was to set up shots for the animators because the animators weren’t technical enough to do it themselves. Lee Unkrich confirmed Jeremy’s account of this early period and the prevailing attitude to Layout, which, looking back, must seem rather primitive and confused: In the very early days on Toy Story, the Layout Department didn’t get any respect at all. It was considered an entry-level position; there was really no respect for them as artists. It took years here before that developed. And I think part of it was through me coming in early on from a liveaction background. When I thought about how I was going to film a scene, when I was directing or cutting something, it was rooted very much in that live-action sensibility, so that’s what I was bringing to the table. Jeremy Lasky chooses to remain philosophical about the struggle for recognition that the Pixar team went through in the early years. He arrived at much the same conclusion that his counterparts in the traditional animation industry had reach long ago: It took us years and several films before the studio as a whole started to recognize what a crucial set Layout specifically plays. Everyone “gets” Lighting because you can show them something as a before-and-after, and it’s this beautiful rendered image. You get it! And most people can’t figure out how to do lighting so there’s this inherent level of difficulty that’s assumed. Much like character animation, when you see Woody

or WALL-E moving around, you intuitively know that it’s hard to accomplish that. By contrast, when you see a shot framed well, you just take that for granted. “Of course it’s framed that way! How else would you do it? If it works, it works.” So much of our job is trying to stay invisible! You want the viewer to be engaged in the story and to follow the characters, not noticing what you’re doing with the camera or where you’re cutting of where you’re moving. So people don’t notice.

PRODUCTION DESIGN: “A LITTLE BIT BY FEEL AND A LITTLE BIT BY NECESSITY” Their work, of course, can only stay invisible if the layout artists remain in tune from the outset with the design sensibility that governs every aspect of the movie’s appearance. In order to do this they need to form a good working partnership with the production designer but, as Ewan Johnson remembers, it took time even for some of the more fundamental principles of cinema art direction to become part of the Layout Department’s mindset: Though I did”layout,” as that stage we had no idea what set dressing was. The concept of having to dress a set in CG was one of those things that we were still trying to figure out. I asked Ewan if, as a frame or reference for set dressing, they began to look to live-action, to theater, or to traditional animation. How were these emerging problems solved by the layout team? It was a little bit by feel and a little bit by necessity. It’s one of the great things about working with everybody at Pixar, with pretty much everybody in this industry: everybody’s always asking, “well, what are the images? And what are the stories we can tell through these images?”

Layout has to construct the set and put the characters in it so they can stage it. So Modeling builds these pieces but the Layout puts them together. And then you begin to realize that the way you construct the set is a visual design element, and the organization of the plants and the objects within the room are telling the story as much as the actual objects and where the camera is. At that stage, when we were starting to look at things, we realized that we needed to start bringing in more people to specialize in that kind of pass. And initially we did hire a couple of live-action set dressers to do the actual set dressing work.

GET-ABLE IMAGES: DOING YOUR JOB FROM A STORYTELLING POINT OF VIEW The primary function of the designed environment in feature animation, as in theater and live-action movie design, is to serve the story.

has information on what sets might look like and iconic shots in the film, the better. Animation in particular has very little time in which to communicate ideas so you’d better have images that sear into the mind as quickly as possible. Let the audience know where you are, what the scene is about. What the emotion is. As the story is begin developed on an animated feature, and while preliminary storyboarding is in progress, the Design and Layout teams have to start exploring and making suggestions too: Having worked in animation layout, too, I think art directing and production design that works “from the outside in” is wrongheaded. Art directing “inside out” means starting with the character and working your way out. Art direction “outside in” means thinking “It’s going to look cool!” or “We want the audience to think it’s busy so we’re going to put a bunch of busy shapes in there.” I say, “No! No! What is the character thinking? Why is the character think it that way? Where’s the character coming from? That’s what the audience responds to.

By making imaginative use of everything from props to lighting to the height and angle at which they imagine the camera may be placed relative to the main characters, the best layout artists often overlap with Production Design in their work. As Brad Bird explains:

You do your job from a story telling point of view. That’s the most important thing. It sounds so simple - and it is!

With somebody like Ken O’Connor, layout is not just some cinematic grammar for certain sequences, it’s also set design and it blurs the distinction between the two. Neither action nor dialogue can easily be followed unless, from the very first frame of each shot, the audience has a clear sense of where they are and why. As Pixar production designer Ralph Eggleston points out:

If you really understand that the director has the final call, no matter what, you say, “Here’s what we think the story’s calling for, here’s what we think you could do, here are some other options. What do you want? OK, great. Next!! It’s just problem solving, every day.

You want the audience to focus on the characters and follow that through. Those images have to be “get-able” immediately so we work with story a lot in that regard. The sooner the director

It’s ridiculously simple.

Likewise, in Eggleston’s view, the working dialogue between Layout, Lighting and Art Direction has to remain open and active throughout the making of the movie:

From a Production Design point of view, I can’t let go of Layout and Lighting. I won’t. I’m not going to just “design some stuff” and then let it go through Production. I follow it all the way through.

DOMESTIC INTERIORS: STAGING AND “GEOGRAPHY” FOR STORY IN FEATURE “How you stage the action is as much the designer’s concern as the director’s. Where are the characters’ entrances and exists? Where are they going to stand or sit? How close should the sofa be to the fireplace? You can’t lay out a set or pick a location if you don’t have that understanding.” - Henry Bumstead, art director, Hitchcock’s Vertigo

In Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmations, (1961) the central story is set in motion by the arrival of the scene-stealing Cruella De Vil. But the threat posed by a good cinema villain is only meaningful if we first of all care about the world she or he vows to destroy. So in the film’s opening sequence the layout designers introduce us to an appealing ramshackle world where Roger, an aspiring but absent-minded songwriter, shares a cramped, untidy bachelor flat with his pet dog, Pongo. The props and set dressing plan an important role in filling out Roger’s character beyond what the audience can hope to discover from the performance and the dialogue alone, as Brad Bird makes clear:

101 Dalmatians Disney 1996

One Hundred and One Dalmatians, was beautifully laid out. If you look at the drawings of Roger’s apartment, they tell you everything you need to know about Roger, and you don’t even have to see Roger to know who Roger is. It’s clear he’s a bachelor, it’s clear his interest is in music., it’s clear that he spends a lot of time working. And he’s engaged in his work rather than in his surroundings, so they have kind of a messy, haphazard artist thing going on there. It’s very English. The constant cups of tea piled on each other like the Leaning Tower of Piza? It’s great.

By the end of the brief, scene-setting “bachelor” sequence, both the main characters have found love and in no time at all we see the two young couples settling down to enjoy married life in a modest and peaceful terraced house in north London. We care about what happens next because we care about “good guys” and we care about these particular good guys because we’ve been thoughtfully introduced to the world they inhabit with all its appealing imperfections.

A STAGE WITHIN A STAGE: ROOM TO PERFORM At certain key points in the unfolding of a film’s narrative, the filmmakers may want to isolate an area within a background painting or set model so that a lead character can declare something of importance to the story. In the case of a villain this usually means outlining his or her evil intentions - but whereas a regular theater audience knows to accept certain conventions such as the “speech from the front of the stage,”

in cinema there is no “front of the stage” because there is no stage. The Dalmatians layout team even provided Mark Davis’s blatantly theatrical Cruella De Vil with her own miniature “proscenium” within which she could hit some of the key performance “beats.” To either side of this “stage,” the modest charm of Roger and Anita’s home is subtly heightened so that we are even more taken aback at the behavior of the intrusive, self-centered villain.

KITCHEN THINK In everyday life we go to the kitchen when we want to prepare a meal, and we climb in our cars when we need to drive somewhere. Characters in movies get into cars so they can have conversations that advance the plot and,even when they go to kitchen to cook, they

do so because the story requires it. In MGM’s Tom and Jerry series, the kitchen forms part of a domestic environment which is part playground, part assault course. A feature-length movie, on the other hand, needs to support a longer, more complex narrative, so the writers, directors, and designers need to work together from the outset to establish a plausible context in which the story can come to life. They have to provide a world that the audience will feel is both believable and worth exploring.

In Roger and Anita’s house, just as the living room is not a living room (it’s a stage against which the human couple’s lives can be turned upside down) and the attic is not a dusty space full of discarded objects (it’s a creatively chaotic retreat from which Roger is free to poke fun at the villain), down in the kitchen, the gas cooker is identified not as a practical necessity but as a source of warmth and retreat for the puppies’ mom-to-be, Perdita. In contrast to the suburban interior luxuries of California in the ‘40s and ‘50s that Tom and Jerry made so

familiar, British terraced houses of the Victorian era were built at a time when light and heating both public and domestic, were all gas-powered. The Dalmatians layout designs capture this fact in everything from the street lamps to the metal casing around the interior power cables the snake toward the ceiling from every light switch. They even show the precise way in which each metal leg was screwed onto the underside of a gas cooker. The scene played out between Pongo and Perdita in One Hundred and One Dalmatians is permeated by a sense of powerlessness over future events. By contrast, when we find ourselves underneath the cooker with Remy in Gusteau’s kitchen in Ratatouille, the whole sequence is charged with the urgent and desperate need of a single character to escape immediate mortal danger in unfamiliar surroundings.

CHASING AND SNEAKING However many times we see the same armchair pass as Tom chases Jerry around the living room, the gag itself is still going to “read” to us, just as the precise spatial relationship between the canyon precipice and the highway is of no real importance in the fatalistic physics of the Coyote’s desert world. In the longer format of features, the designers must, by stealth if possible, provide the audience with a mental map that grounds them in the imaginary world alongside the characters. The designers have to be both intelligent and respectful about the relative positions, not only of the objects within one environment, but of the separate dramatic spaces within the wider world of the story being told. As Brad Bird explains, using an example from yet another Disney feature: There’s a wonderful sequence in Lady and the Tramp where Tramp comes into the house. It’s dark and the lightning illuminates him as he comes to the bottom of the stairs. Ken O’Connor laid out that sequence, and that’s a great example. He understood that house and the way

the rooms were arranged so, early on, you get a very clear sense of the geography of the place. Basically a lot of modern filmmakers are trying to cover up for a lack of skill in conveying geography, and a lot of times in an action sequence you don’t know what the hell is going on because it’s fast and there’s cutting and it’s all punched up to where it’s engaging on a sort of caveman level, but you can’t feel as much suspense or involvement because you have no idea if these guys are five feet from each other or ten feet from each other. In Ratatouille, for example, the drama of the sequence depends on maintaining a sense of the geometry of the interior through the confusion of an elaborately choreographed chase, so the filmmakers prime the audience for Remy’s escape attempt by first sharing with them his detailed prior knowledge of the kitchen’s floor plan. By providing a point-by-point description of every workstation, corner, and hot plate, the writers have helped the layout team to orient the audience firmly in a world which, though strange and new, remains clearly legible throughout a series of fast edits and deliberate aboutturns. As Brad Bird went on to explain: The sequence was very carefully laid out to be on the floor with Remy and keep with him and experience this kitchen, which is a nice-size kitchen but it’s not at all a big room. We had to make it feel like it was a world. There were some tremensdous challenges as afar as keeping the audience clear on where everything was. The mantra was, “Always be able to check back with the window. Where’s the window?” Because we don’t want to lose the idea that the wants to get out and we want to show him getting seduced to the point where he’s finally at the window and he’s lost all interest in escape.

When Bob Parr arrives home after dark, cautiously letting himself in through the kitchen door in the “Bob Sneaks” sequence from The Incredibles, the audience knows what his wife, Helen, can only suspect: having pretended to go out bowling with his buddy, Frozone, her husband has once again given in to the temptation to exercise his superpowers (in this case to save people from a burning building) even though their family life will be turned upside-down if the authorities ever find out. For additional comic effect, the scene is played out as though it were leading up to a more familiar dramatic confrontation, that of the wife challenging the husband to confess that he’s been cheating on her. To emphasize Bob’s guilt (and to make sure he gets caught, quite literally, “with his hands in the cookie jar”), the filmmakers bait a very clear trap from him on one of the kitchen counter tops. Instead of tiptoeing directly through to the living room, Bob stops to retrieve a large slice of chocolate cake, and a floating breakfast bar that, in some early sketches, sits across his path, a direct path of action is cleared so taht Bob can stride directly into the line of fire as Helen spins round in her armchair, ready to confront him in the interrogation beam of the reading light next to her. Nothing is neutral or decorative in any of these three kitchen scenes. Everything has been carefully designed and laid out for a unique and specific dramatic response.

LIGHTING AND COLOR Many of the artists Disney hired to work on Snow White and Pinocchio were chosen specifically because of their background in illustration, so when either Gustav Tenggren or Albert Hurter created a design for a location or a scene, all of the pictorial information governing the composition, geometry, staging, and lighting would be coming from one brain, traveling down one arm, and arriving on the page via the brush, the pen or the pencil. When the Pixar team first moved into feature production with Toy Story, the creative and technical crew they assembled faced similar challenges to the crew that had

been brought together to make Snow White sixty years previously. As seems to have happened subsequently at many of the studios who decided to follow Pixar’s example, the notion of animation artists multitasking in this way proved problematic in the context of a heavily departmentalized CG production pipeline that was already well established and, for very good reason, highly specialized.

“DON’T YOU NEED A PLAN FOR THAT!” The first indication I had of this particular problem came halfway through my first interview with Rob Cardone, who moved from Disney in L.A. to head up a brand-new Layout team at Blue Sky Studios in New york, where the first Ice Age movie was about to go into production: When I first got to Blue Sky I said, “OK, here’s what Layout does! We set up this and we set up that and then you know, we do a tonal lighting plan and we figure out what the light direction should be and what shadow shapes should be and all that,” And as soon as I started to even talk about lighting, the hands went up and everybody was like, “Whoa! Whoa! Wait a minute! We have a whole department that does that!” So I said, “Well, yea, but don’t you need a plan for that?” Because lighting is 50 percent of the composition, you’re talking about layout. For many people, as Rob discovered, “drawing with light” only has meaning at those stages in the CG process when drawing itself is required. When you’re working with virtual light in a digital environment, handrendered 2-dimensional artwork is something to which technicians and digital artists refer for guidance along the way; it’s not an end in itself. The move to fully computerized feature-length animation production therefore brought about a peculiar collision

of sometimes mismatched practices from the already established and largely separate worlds of live-action moviemaking, traditional hand-drawn animation, and the often more academic approach of computer graphics research and development. The resulting dislocation, unapparent to many, as keenly felt by those moviemakers who, like James Williams, had started off in traditional animation and now found their own work, and that of the artists around them, begin redefined: Having Lighting and Cinematography as two separate departments, which normally don’t have much communication, can be very detrimental because you can reveal a character through lighting just as much as you can reveal them through physically moving the camera into that character’s position. Maybe the depth of field is going to reveal an object? How can an object be composed in a non-classical manner? It may look rather awkward on a layout artist’s desk but, with a view to how the shot will be lit, it can make complete sense. When live-action cinematographer Roger Deakins was invited in to advise the Pixar crew during preproduction on WALL-E, he too found the sequence of events in the CG animation pipeline difficult to understand, As Danielle Feinberg recalls: Roger said, “I can’t believe that you guys are doing camera without any lighting in there! Part of the whole reason you’re making camera decisions is that you’re telling a story and the lighting is part of that story, so how can you do the camera without the lighting?!” Just as he argues strongly for greater communication between Layout and Story, James Williams insists that Layout works closely with Lighting:

have to do that in the context of the scene and of the sequence. We have to work in context with the lighting design, especially with something that has strong lighting elements which create compositional regions of light and dark. It has to be a collaborative process. Camera movement in the CG environment also leans more toward the problems and practicalities of live-action cinematography as Geoff Darwin of the DisneyToons Previz Department pointed out: My background was in 2D scene planning and I was really thrilled to get into 3D, but one of the big differences is that they camera person is differentiated from the lighting person. In traditional animation you lay out your multiplane move in a drawn layout, the art director gives the values, it gets painted and away you go! But in 3D, the CG camera rotates, so the lighting values change You never have that problem in traditional animation scene planning. Even those animation artists who have worked exclusively in the computer are aware of the need to relate what’s happening in the CG environment to something “real” and observed, as Danielle Feinberg explains: In a certain sense there are too many degrees of freedom. On the computer you can do anything, and if it’s used wrongly, that can be a dangerous thing. Take light, for example. If you don’t understand the principles of what happened in real life with light, you can very quickly get into something that looks silly. When you sit there and noodle with things, you can really take it into this realm where it’s not a believable place anymore, and that distracts from the story. Pixar Director of Photography Sharon Calahan is equally keen to anchor her lighting design in the effects she encounters in the tangible world:

Layout is responsible for character and camera blocking, but we cannot do that in isolation, we

There’s a lot of stuff that you get for free with physical lighting that you to work hard for in the computer, If you really want to bounce light there, you ahve to add it, you don’t get that for free. Sometimes you think, “Oh! It would be nice if the computer could just do that!” instead of, “This leads to that leads to this...” But I’m also not a fan of going the global illumination route because as a painter, as an artist, I want to be able to control that bounce light. I want to. Outside black-and-white cinematography, it’s also impossible to consider lighting without addressing color and, as in traditional animation, the color script is used to create definitive “key” scenes, which will establish the required look of each sequence. David Burgess explains the importance all of these lighting choices can have for the character animators: We usually see the art director’s color keys for a sequence pretty early on, and that’s always exciting. They’re usually very simple and the level of detail that we actually get into the shots isn’t there yet, but if you have a key shot it’s always fun to track that because they generally start lighting that shot fairly early, since that’s going to influence the entire sequence. That’s one of those times where you can actually react to the lighting in your animation during the process. Generally, we finish animating a shot and then we look at it five weeks later in Lighting. Sometimes the glasses may be casting a shadow right across the character’s eyes and if you’d known that, you could’ve adjusted the head a couple degrees to get that shadow up or down a little bit.

DESIGN ITSELF AS A TEXTURE The significance of the relationship between color and overall design was one of the most important lessons

that Pixar artist Scott Morse learned form Maurice Noble: Maurice was very particular about where texture would be used and where it wouldn’t be used. He thought about design itself as texture. “Texture,” in the language of CG production usually refers specifically to the rendering of surface detail on anything from human skin to rusting metal. Lou Romano, another of the CalArts graduates to pass through the Turner studio on his way to a prolific design (and voice acting) career at Pixar, has been keen to explore Noble’s ideas of restraint and economy in the context of digital design, going so far as to employ a flat, “cut paper” approach to color script on a CG movie.

MAKE THE COMPOSITION SING WITH COLOR In his many conversations with Scott Morse, Noble himself endorsed the same clear approach to lighting. Although, for him, there was less of a need to create a separate step of working in monochrome: Maurice has a real sense of getting the tonal values to work, but using color at the same time, not just doing a black-and-white tonal drop-in. He could drop in major foreground elements and they would be darker or lighter depending on the shot. As long as it worked as a framing device. But he was a real master of making it work right out of the bottle! “This is purple against pink for this and purple against bright red for that...,” And, you known, first time out, he’d do the sketch and then he’d just start dropping in the color. He made the composition sing with the color. Alice in Wonderland Mad Hatter’s Un-birthday Tea Party Disney 1951

Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Opera Doc? Warner Bros.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligeri Adolphe Appia

1937

1920

T H E AT R E : A D O L P H E A P P I A REJECTED PAINTED TWO DIMENSIONAL SETS FOR THREEDIMENSIONAL “LIVING” SETS BECAUSE HE BELIEVED THAT SHADE WAS AS NECESSARY AS LIGHT TO FORM A CONNECTION BETWEEN THE ACTOR AND THE SETTING

Esplaces Rthymics Adolphe Appia Set 1909

Adolphe Appia (born September 1, 1862 in Geneva; died February 29, 1928 in Nyon), son of Red Cross co-founder Louis Appia, was a Swiss architect and theorist of stage lighting and décor. Adolphe Appia, a Swiss theorist and pioneer of modern stage design is most well known for his many scenic designs for Wagner’s operas. Appia rejected painted two dimensional sets for threedimensional “living” sets because he believed that shade was as necessary as light to form a connection between the actor and the setting of the performance in time and space. Using control of light intensity, color, and manipulation, Appia created a new perspective of scene design and stage lighting. Directors and designers have both taken great inspiration from the work of Adolphe Appia, whose design theories and conceptualizations of Wagner’s opera’s have helped to shape modern perceptions of the relationship between the performance space and lighting. One of the reasons for the influence of Appia’s work and theories is that he was working at time when electrical lighting was just evolving. Another is that he was a man of great vision who was able to conceptualize and philosophize about many of his practices and theories. The central principle underpinning much of Appia’s work is that artistic unity is the primary

function of the director and the designer. Appia saw light, space, and the human body as malleable commodities, when integrated create a unified production. He advocated synchronicity of sound, light, and movement in his productions of Wagner’s operas and he tried to integrate corps of actors with the rhythms and moods of the music. Ultimately however, Appia considered light as the primary element, which fused together all aspects of a production and he consistently attempted to unify musical and movement elements of the text and score to the more mystical and symbolic aspects of light. Appia was one of the first designers to understand the potential of stage lighting to do more than merely illuminate actors and painted scenery. His ideas about the staging of “wordtone drama,” together with his own staging of Tristan und Isolde (Milan 1923) and parts of the Ring (Basle 1924-25) have influenced later staging, especially those of the second half of the twentieth century. For Appia and for his productions, the set design and the totality or unity of the performance experience was primary and he believed that these elements drove movement and initiated action more than any thing else (Johnston 1972). Appia’s designs and theories went on to inspire many other theatre creators such as Edward Gordon Craig, Jacques Copeau and Wieland Wag. by DalcrozeSummer.com

Parsifal Adolphe Appia Illustration 3D Vision 1896

Die Walkure Adolphe Appia Illustration 3D Vision 1896

Espaces Rhythmics Adolphe Appia Set 1909

Espaces Rhythmics Adolphe Appia Illustration 3D Vision 1909

The Living Work of Art Adolphe Appia Set

Music and the Art of Theater Adolphe Appia Set

1921

1899

F I L M : F E D E R I CO F E L L I N I “TO SAY THAT MY FILMS ARE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL IS AN OVERLY FACILE LIQUIDATION, A HASTY CLASSIFICATION. IT SEEMS TO ME THAT I HAVE INVENTED ALMOST EVERYTHING: CHILDHOOD, CHARACTER, NOSTALGIAS, DREAMS, MEMORIES, FOR THE PLEASURE OF BEING ABLE TO RECOUNT THEM.” FEDERICO FELLINI

La Dolce Vita Marcello Mastroianni Federico Fellini 1960

Born January 20, 1920 Rimini, Italy Died October 31, 1993 (aged 73) Rome, Italy Occupation Film director and scriptwriter Years active 1945–1992 Influenced by Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Luis Buñuel, Sergei Parajanov, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman Influenced Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Pedro Almodóvar, Dariush Mehrjui, John Waters Spouse Giulietta Masina (m. 1943–1993, his death) Federico Fellini, January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993), was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, and is widely revered.[1] He won five

Academy Awards and was nominated for 12 in a career that spanned over forty years.

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION Enrolled at the Ginnasio Giulio Cesare in 1929, he made friends with Luigi ‘Titta’ Benzi, later a prominent Rimini lawyer (and the model for young Titta in Amarcord (1973)). In Mussolini’s Italy, Fellini and Riccardo became members of the Avanguardista, the compulsory Fascist youth group for males. He visited Rome with his parents for the first time in 1933, the year of the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner SS Rex (which makes an appearance in Amarcord). The sea creature found on the beach at the end of La Dolce Vita (1960) has its basis in a giant fish marooned on a Rimini beach during a storm in 1934. Although Fellini adapted key events from his childhood and adolescence in films such as I Vitelloni (1953), 8½ (1963), and Amarcord (1973), he insisted that such autobiographical memories were inventions: “It is not memory that dominates my films. To say that my films are autobiographical is an overly facile liquidation, a hasty classification. It seems to me that I have invented almost everything: childhood, char-

acter, nostalgias, dreams, memories, for the pleasure of being able to recount them.”[5]

in humorous monologues, Fabrizi commissioned material from his young protégé.[9]

ROME (1939)

CAREER AND LATER LIFE

In September 1939, he enrolled in law school at the University of Rome to please his parents although biographer Hollis Alpert reports that “there is no record of his ever having attended a class”.[6] Installed in a family pensione, he met another lifelong friend, the painter Rinaldo Geleng. Desperately poor, they unsuccessfully joined forces to draw sketches of restaurant and café patrons. Fellini eventually found work as a cub reporter on the dailies Il Piccolo and Il Popolo di Roma but quit after a short stint, bored by the local court news assignments. Four months after publishing his first article in Marc’Aurelio, the highly influential biweekly humour magazine, he joined the editorial board, achieving success with a regular column titled Will You Listen to What I Have to Say?[7] Described as “the determining moment in Fellini’s life”,[8] he enjoyed steady employment between 1939 and 1942, interacting with writers, gagmen, and scriptwriters that eventually led to opportunities in show business and cinema. Among his collaborators on the magazine’s editorial board were the future director Ettore Scola, Marxist theorist and scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, and Bernardino Zapponi, a future Fellini screenwriter. Conducting interviews for CineMagazzino also proved congenial: when asked to interview Aldo Fabrizi, Italy’s most popular variety performer, their immediate personal rapport led to professional collaboration. Specializing

EARLY SCREENPLAYS (1940-43) Retained on business in Rimini, Urbano sent wife and family to Rome in 1940 to share an apartment with his son. Fellini and Ruggero Maccari, also on the staff of Marc’Aurelio, began writing radio sketches and gags for films. Writing for radio while attempting to avoid the draft, Fellini met his future wife Giulietta Masina in a studio office at the Italian public radio broadcaster EIAR in autumn 1942. In November 1942, Fellini was sent to Libya, occupied by Fascist Italy, to work on the screenplay of I cavalieri del deserto (Knights of the Desert, 1942), directed by Osvaldo Valenti and Gino Talamo. Fellini welcomed the assignment as it allowed him “to secure another extension on his draft order”.[13] Responsible for emergency re-writing, he also directed the film’s first scenes. When Tripoli fell under siege by British forces, he and his colleagues made a narrow escape by boarding a German military plane flying to Sicily. His African adventure, later published in Marc’Aurelio as “The First Flight”, marked “the emergence of a new Fellini, no longer just a screenwriter, working and sketching at his desk, but a filmmaker out in the field”. [4]

EARLY FILMS (1950-53) In 1950 Fellini co-produced and co-directed with Alberto Lattuada Variety Lights (Luci del varietà), his first feature film. The production company went bankrupt, leaving both Fellini and Lattuada with debts to pay for over a decade.[18] In February 1950, Paisà received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay by Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, and Fellini. After travelling to Paris for a script conference with Rossellini on Europa ‘51, Fellini began production on The White Sheik in September 1951, his first solo-directed feature. Starring Alberto Sordi in the title role, the film is a revised version of a treatment first written by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1949 and based on the fotoromanzi, the photographed cartoon strip romances popular in Italy at the time.

BEYOND NEOREALISM (1954-60) Fellini directed La strada based on a script completed in 1952 with Pinelli and Flaiano. During the last three weeks of shooting, Fellini experienced the first signs of severe clinical depression. [20] Aided by his wife, he undertook a brief period of therapy with Freudian psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio.[20] During the autumn, Fellini researched and developed a treatment based on a film adaptation of Mario Tobino’s novel, The Free Women of Magliano. Located in a mental institution for women, financial backers considered the subject had no potential and the project was abandoned.

La Strada Federico Fellini 1954

While preparing Nights of Cabiria in spring 1956, Fellini learned of his father’s death by cardiac arrest at the age of 62. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and starring Giulietta Masina, the film took its inspiration from news reports of a woman’s decapitated head retrieved in a lake and stories by Wanda, a shantytown prostitute Fellini met on the set of Il Bidone. [23] Pier Paolo Pasolini was hired to translate Flaiano and Pinelli’s dialogue into Roman dialect and to supervise researches in the vice-afflicted suburbs of Rome. The movie won an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film and brought Masina the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her performance. With Pinelli, he developed Journey with Anita for Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck. An “invention born out of intimate truth”, the script was based on Fellini’s return to Rimini with a mistress to attend his father’s funeral.[24] Due to Loren’s unavailability, the project was shelved and resurrected twenty-five years later as Lovers and Liars (1981), a comedy directed by Mario Monicelli with Goldie Hawn and Giancarlo Giannini. The Hollywood on the Tiber phenomenon of 1958 in which American studios profited from the cheap studio labour available in Rome provided the backdrop for photojournalists to steal shots of celebrities on the via Veneto.[25] The scandal provoked by Turkish dancer Haish Nana’s improvised striptease at a nightclub captured Fellini’s imagination: he decided to end his latest script-inprogress, Moraldo in the City, with an all-night “orgy” at a seaside villa.

Pierluigi Praturlon’s photos of Anita Ekberg wading fully dressed in the Trevi Fountain provided further inspiration for Fellini and his scriptwriters. Changing the title of the screenplay to La Dolce Vita, Fellini soon clashed with his producer on casting: the director insisted on the relatively unknown Mastroianni while De Laurentiis wanted Paul Newman as a hedge on his investment. Reaching an impasse, De Laurentiis sold the rights to publishing mogul Angelo Rizzoli. Shooting began on March 16, 1959 with Anita Ekberg climbing the stairs to the cupola of Saint Peter’s in a mammoth décor constructed at Cinecittà.

The statue of Christ flown by helicopter over Rome to Saint Peter’s Square was inspired by an actual media event on May 1, 1956, which Fellini had witnessed. The film wrapped August 15 on a deserted beach at Passo Oscuro with a bloated mutant fish designed by Piero Gherardi. La Dolce Vita broke all box office records. Despite scalpers selling tickets at 1000 lire,[26] crowds queued in line for hours to see an “immoral movie” before the censors banned it. At an exclusive Milan screening on February

5, 1960, one outraged patron spat on Fellini while others hurled insults. Denounced in parliament by rightwing conservatives, undersecretary Domenico Magrì of the Christian Democrats demanded tolerance for the film’s controversial themes.[27] The Vatican’s official press organ, l’Osservatore Romano, lobbied for censorship while the Board of Roman Parish Priests and the Genealogical Board of Italian Nobility attacked the film. In one documented instance involving favourable reviews written by the Jesuits of San Fedele, defending La Dolce Vita had severe consequences. [28] In competition at Cannes alongside

Antonioni’s L’Avventura, the film won the Palme d’Or awarded by presiding juror Georges Simenon. The Belgian writer was promptly “hissed at” by the disapproving festival crowd.[29]

ART FILMS AND DREAMS (1961–1969) A major discovery for Fellini after his Italian neorealism period (1950–1959) was the work of Carl Jung. After meeting Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Ernst Bernhard in early 1960, he read Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). Bernhard also recommended that Fellini consult the I Ching and keep a record of his dreams.

La Dolce Vita Anita Ekberg Federico Fellini 1960

What Fellini formerly accepted as “his extrasensory perceptions”[30] were now interpreted as psychic manifestations of the unconscious. Bernhard’s focus on Jungian depth psychology proved to be the single greatest influence on Fellini’s mature style and marked the turning point in his work from neorealism to filmmaking that was “primarily oneiric”.[31] As a consequence, Jung’s seminal ideas on the anima and the animus, the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious directly influenced such films as 8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Satyricon (1969), Casanova (1976), and City of Women (1980).[32] Exploiting La Dolce Vita’s success, financier Angelo Rizzoli set up Federiz in 1960, an independent film company, for Fellini and production manager Clemente Fracassi to discover and produce new talent. Despite the best intentions, their guarded editorial and business skills forced the company to close down soon after cancelling Pasolini’s project, Accattone (1961). Condemned as a “public sinner”[33] for La Dolce Vita, Fellini responded with The Temptations of Doctor Antonio, a segment in the omnibus Boccaccio ‘70. His first colour film, it was the sole project green-lighted at Federiz. Infused with the surrealistic satire that characterized the young Fellini’s work at Marc’Aurelio, the film ridiculed a crusader against vice who goes insane trying to censor a billboard of Anita Ekberg espousing the virtues of milk. In an October 1960 letter to his colleague Brunello Rondi, Fellini first outlined his film ideas about a man suffering creative block: “Well then - a guy (a writer? any kind of professional

man? a theatrical producer?) has to interrupt the usual rhythm of his life for two weeks because of a not-tooserious disease. It’s a warning bell: something is blocking up his system.”[34] Unclear about the script, its title, and his protagonist’s profession, he scouted locations throughout Italy “looking for the film”[35] in the hope of resolving his confusion. Flaiano suggested La bella confusione (literally A Fine Confusion) as the movie’s title. Under pressure from his producers, Fellini finally settled on 8½, a self-referential title referring principally (but not exclusively)[36] to the number of films he had directed up to that time. Giving the order to start production in spring 1962, Fellini signed deals with his producer Rizzoli, fixed dates, had sets constructed, cast Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, and Sandra Milo in lead roles, and did screen tests at the Scalera Studios in Rome. He hired cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo, among key personnel. But apart from naming his hero Guido Anselmi, he still couldn’t decide what his character did for a living.[37] The crisis came to a head in April when, sitting in his Cinecittà office, he began a letter to Rizzoli confessing he had “lost his film” and had to abandon the project. Interrupted by the chief machinist requesting he celebrate the launch of 8½, Fellini put aside the letter and went on the set. Raising a toast to the crew, he “felt overwhelmed by shame… I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a

film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make”.[38] Shooting began on May 9, 1962. Perplexed by the seemingly chaotic, incessant improvisation on the set, Deena Boyer, the director’s American press officer at the time, asked for a rationale.

Fellini told her that he hoped to convey the three levels “on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional - the realm of fantasy”. After shooting wrapped on October 14, Nino Rota composed various circus marches and fanfares that would later become signature tunes of the maestro’s cinema.[40] Nominated for four Oscars, 8½ won awards for best foreign language film and best costume design in black-and-white. In Hollywood for the ceremony, Fellini toured Disneyland with Walt Disney the day after. Increasingly attracted to parapsychology, Fellini met the Turin magician Gustavo Rol in 1963. Rol, a former banker, introduced him to the world of Spiritism and séances. In 1964, Fellini experimented with LSD 25[41] under the supervision of Emilio Servadio, his psychoanalyst during production of La strada.[42] For years reserved about what actually occurred that Sunday afternoon, he admitted in 1992 that “objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my

Satyricon Federico Fellini 1969

unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to my self. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.”[43]

LATE FILMS AND PROJECTS (1981–1990) Organized by his publisher Diogenes Verlag in 1982, the first major exhibition of 63 drawings by Fellini was held in Paris, Brussels, and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.[45] A gifted caricaturist, much of the inspiration for his sketches was derived from his own dreams while the films-in-progress both originated from and stimulated drawings for characters, decor, costumes and set designs. Under the title, I disegni di Fellini (Fellini’s Designs), he published 350 drawings executed in pencil, watercolours, and felt pens.[46] On September 6, 1985 Fellini was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 42nd Venice Film Festival. That same year, he became the first non-American to receive the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual award for cinematic achievement. Long fascinated by Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Fellini accompanied the Peruvian author on a journey to the Yucatán

8 1/2 Marcello Mastroianni Federico Fellini 1963

8 1/2 Federico Fellini The woman raising skirt above her knees triggers one of Guidoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s childhood memories and the scene shifts from reality to a reminiscent fantasy. There is a camera shift as well as a complete spatial scene change for the memory frames to be filmed. The audience effortlessly follows Felliniâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s memories, fantastic realities, without question because the sets are perceived as tangible environments in which they can relate.

8 1/2 Fellini The woman transforms into a prostitute name Saraghina that Guido had a brief encounter with one afternoon while skipping school.

to assess the feasibility of a film. After first meeting Castaneda in Rome in October 1984, Fellini drafted a treatment with Pinelli titled Viaggio a Tulun. Producer Alberto Grimaldi, prepared to buy film rights to all of Castaneda’s work, then paid for pre-production research taking Fellini and his entourage from Rome to Los Angeles and the jungles of Mexico

INFLUENCE AND LEGACY Dedicatory plaque to Fellini on Via Veneto, Rome: To Federico Fellini, who made Via Veneto the stage for the “Sweet Life” SPQR - January 20, 1995

Personal and highly idiosyncratic visions of society, Fellini’s films are a unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy and desire.

8 1/2 Psychic reading Marcello’s mind Federico Fellini 1963

The adjectives “Fellinian” and “Felliniesque” are “synonymous with any kind of extravagant, fanciful, even baroque image in the cinema and in art in general”.[3] La Dolce Vita contributed the term paparazzi to the English language, derived from Paparazzo, the photographer friend of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni). [58] Contemporary filmmakers such as Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Tim Burton,[59] Terry Gilliam,[60] Emir Kusturica,[61] David Lynch,[62] Girish

Kasaravalli, David Cronenberg, Martin Scorsese, and Juraj Jakubisko have cited Fellini’s influence on their work. Polish director, Wojciech Has, whose two major films, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) and The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973) are examples of modernist fantasies, has been compared to Fellini for the sheer “luxuriance of his images”.[63] I Vitelloni inspired European directors Juan Antonio Bardem, Marco Ferreri, and Lina Wertmuller and had an influence on Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1974), Joel Schumacher’s St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), and Barry Levinson’s Diner (1987), among many otherts [64] When the American magazine Cinema asked Stanley Kubrick in 1963 to name his favorite films, the film director listed I Vitelloni as number one in his Top 10 list.[65] Nights of Cabiria was adapted as the Broadway musical Sweet Charity and the movie Sweet Charity (1969) by Bob Fosse starring Shirley MacLaine. 8½ inspired among others: Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965), Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky, 1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971), Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979), Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980), Sogni d’oro (Nanni Moretti, 1981), Parad Planet (Vadim Abdrashitov, 1984), La Pelicula delrey (Carlos Sorin, 1986), Living in Oblivion (Tom DiCillo, 1995), 8½ Women (Peter Greenaway, 1999), Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993), along with the successful Broadway musical, Nine (Maury Yeston and Arthur

Kopit, 1982).[66] Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), a Spanish novel by Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi, features a dream sequence with Fellini that was inspired by 8½.[citation needed] City of Women was adapted for the Berlin stage by Frank Castorf in 1992. Fellini’s work is referenced on the albums Fellini Days (2001) by Fish and Funplex (2008) by the B-52’s with the song Juliet of the Spirits, and in the opening traffic jam of the music video Everybody Hurts by R.E.M.[67] It influenced two American TV shows, Northern Exposure and Third Rock from the Sun.[68] Certain of his film related material and personal papers are contained in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives to which scholars and media experts from around the world may have full access.[69] In October 2009, the Jeu de Paume in Paris opened an exhibit devoted to Fellini, running through to January 2010. The exhibition included Fellini ephemera, television interviews, behind-the-scenes photographs, and excerpts from La dolce vita and 8½. It also featured the Book of Dreams based on 30 years of illustrations and notes by Fellini.[70]

“Our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious world a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for specific purpose, like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it… Unconscious wholeness therefore seems to me the true spiritus rector of all biological and psychic events.” Carl Jung ~Memories, Dreams, and Reflections

Casanova Federico Fellini 1976

I N T E R I O R FA N TA SY ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS MANIPULATE REALITY TO GENERATE CONSCIOUSLY PERCEIVED SPACE IN ORDER TO ELICIT AN EMOTIONAL RESPONSE. STAGING SPACE: EXPLORING SPATIAL DESIGN AS A MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION ALL THINGS SPATIAL Standard space is commonly described in the dimensions of height, depth and width. For everyone in any way engaged in the practice of spatial design, however, it comprises much more than simply dealing with three-dimensional configurations. Beyond practical, functional or aesthetic considerations, spatial design always communicates and thus itself constitutes a medium in its own right.

Designing space involuntarily includes the creation of semantic environments - whether consciously perceived or unconsciously experienced. The stimulating spatial structures presented in this book deliberately stress space’s communicative potential and aim to stage highly invasive environments that have been designed to carry a specific visual identity, atmosphere, message or even brand. By exploring a range of commercial

and non-commercial spaces, the book examines how a certain spatial and visual identity has been programmed into these spaces and how this affects the user experience. The examples here include everything from retail stores to experimental office spaces, from stage design to interactive environments, all the way to artistic spatial interventions.

MISE-EN-SCENE A filmmaker can affect and manipulate the viewer’s attention by using contrasts, movement, narrative emphasis, and visual patterns; a similar range of techniques is available to the designer of space. Deriving from the world of theatre and film, the French term mise en scene - literally meaning “putting on stage” - probably best describes this creative approach towards fully exhausting the dramatic power of space. It designates the calculated scenic arrangement in which image and space merge to form a narrative and sense-generating whole. The dedicated filmmaker along with the talented architect - or in this case more generally speaking the committed spatial designer - thereby attempts to bring complete and self-contained environments into being, which at the same

time remain open to the viewers’ or users’ own experiences and imaginations. The spectator then becomes part of a larger, carefully articulated spatial configuration. To the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, for example, architecture and space were even the essential points of reference, which means that

that respectively underline certain modes of the visual construction of spaces.

the themes of his films are never reducible to plot for they rather explore how the spaces inhabited by his characters explain their predicaments - something they cannot adequately do in words.

To do so, they play one of the space’s most powerful cards: the creation of a tangible, literally touching experience, which stimulates not only a novel sense of scale and dimension but introduces a palpable change of perspective to the visitor and user.

Even though the projects featured in this book are of the most diverse disciplinary origin and only a few actually come from the realm of theatre and film, they all share an extremely intricate understanding of the greater visual concept of eloquently staging space.

SENSE OF SPACE Diverse and eclectic as all of the projects presented in staging space may be, they all succeed in creating highly pervasive environments.

Here, the old McLuhan idiom that “the medium is the message” proves true. The affect of the medium is not so much about the content it delivers, as about the characteristics of the medium itself.

SHOWTIME The wide variety of international works presented here go beyond conventional notions and limitations of space, thus opening up new fields of action and giving insight into the performative surplus value of designed environments. Due to their broad range of origins, aims, and outcomes, the projects are grouped into five chapters

The Delano Miami Beach Philippe Starck 1995

THE SENSUOUS AESTHETICS OF CONTEMPORARY DESIGN MODERN hotel design is responsible for more bold, colorful and imaginative creations than any other architectural genre. Never before has there been such amazing diversity, such a potpourri of styles or such extravagant playfulness. Today’s hotel scene is like a box of chocolates - full of delightful confections, which present business travellers and holiday-makers alike with deliciously agonizing choices.

Taste is highly subjective, of course, and money is as instrumental as ever in defining exclusivity. Price and brand glamour still matter, but don’t necessarily eclipse connoisseurship. Today’s sophisticated and trend conscious hotel guests take pleasure from savoring the very latest discoveries ahead of the crowd - in hotels just as much as in the worlds of art and fashion. The latest developments in hotel design, as described in this book, reflect four main themes: ascetic modernism, nostalgic opulence, extravagant fantasy and exotic exclusivity. Drawing on these themes, chains and individual hotels adopt individual design strategies to enhance their brand images in an increasingly global marketplace. Three trends are predominant. First, quality has markedly improved in the business hotel sector, where the self-referential interiors of the designer hotels have been

softened and skillfully reinterpreted with an emphasis on comfort. Second, both designer hotels and business hotels are making a significant contribution to urban regeneration. In London, for example, commercial buildings in the West End have been transformed into brilliantly original hotels (including One Aldwych and Philippe Starck’s first two European projects, St Martin’s Lane and the Sanderson), while ailing but venerable railway hotels, such as the Great Eastern at Liverpool Street station and the Great Western at Paddington, are given modern makeovers. Third, hotel design is embracing the opportunities offered by ethno-cultural diversity. Several years ago, the South-east Asian Armanpuri group came up with the idea of incorporating local styles and cultural traditions into luxury hideaways; now even the larger chains such as Four Seasons and Dberoi are moving confidently into this expanding upmarket sector. The two main, contrasting forces in modern hotel design are the ‘intensive’ strategy, which focuses on small, expensive hotels where guests can expect the very highest quality of facilities and services (as found in the rejuvenated, lavishly redecorated Grand Hotels), and the ‘extensive’ strategy, whereby ever larger and more lavish self-contained leisure utopias are conjured up everywhere from Las Vegas to Dubai. Quite apart from their design attributes, today’s hotels have to fulfil two key requirements as the temporary homes of business travellers: they must function effectively as fully networked workplaces and they must offer a Wide range at relaxation possibilities. Rooms offering internet access and

other communications ‘facilities’ have become commonplace in such hotels; business centres are vital to ensure that the nomads of the information age have access to office equipment wherever and whenever they need it. Installing digital facilities does not generally have much impact on a hotel’s basic architectural structure but the same cannot be said about the luxury facilities for sports and relaxation - often designed with a touch of exoticism that are becoming a standard feature of many city hotels. Wherever their work may take them, today’s business executives and professionals want to be pampered in every way. Health consciousness is increasing, and the modern concept of ‘wellness’ has less to do with rock hard muscles than with physical and psychological contentedness: The American term ‘spa’ - supposedly derived from the Latin salus per aqua (well-being through water) ~ is frequently used for these oases of physical indulgence; within hotels they are often operated as spatially Integrated but economically independent units open to the wider public as well as to hotel guests. The expedition into semi-private worlds of secret desires and barely suppressed illusions begins with the choice of story and setting.

The spaces and props for enacting the ritual are drawn from the stylistic repertoires of classicism, kitsch and avant-garde. It is no coincidence that the leading representative of this transformation in hotel design is the French designer Philippe Starck. He was the first in the late 1980s

Sanderson London Philippe Starck 1991

THE POWER OF IMAGES A proper analysis of new developments in hotel design must go beyond the superficial world of stylistic vocabularies, design trends and conceptual strategies. The contemporary aesthetic can only be understood against a backdrop of the fundamental changes taking place in architecture, tourism and consumer perceptions. An important issue here is the power of images.

Our understanding of reality is increasingly conditioned by a fascination - or even a fixation - with the mythologies of the entertainment industry. These cliches define and limit our imaginative powers:

we look for experiences in the real world that correspond to the illusions created by film, television and advertisements.

Mondrian Los Angeles Philippe Starck 1996

Media manipulation of fantasy and perception is the source of an economically driven process, identified by the film director Martin Scorsese as ‘Disneyfication’. The saturation of our senses with prefabricated images of what is desirable and pleasurable is progressing apace:

leisure is becoming synonymous with entertainment, and entertainment value is the key to consumer behavior. It is all about turning life into a theme park. It is about idealized worlds that supposedly can be made real, worlds with a high ‘recognition value’; it is also about instant gratification. The epidemic that started decades ago in amusement parks has long since taken hold in retail environments, restaurants and hotels. Today the competition to engage customers’ attention and emotions means above all - a competition for their time. The aim is to ensnare us in a unique world that is alternately familiar and surprising. If today’s theme parks are, in the words of the Italian writer Umberto Eco, ‘allegories of consumer society’, then ‘experience’ hotels embody its creative desires - the material counterparts, both subtle and striking in their effects of changes in behavior and expectations. A hotel stay is almost always a transitory experience - giving the sense of a life dipped into - and this fact has shaped the hotel as a genre. Where else can the philosophy expressed by the German baroque poet Andreas Gryphius - ‘we are but guests on the earth, restlessly wandering’ - be experienced more elementally’ Where else can personal identity be changed more freely and with less inhibition, albeit for a short time.’ In a hotel anyone can pretend to be different from what he or she is in ordinary life.

‘No one is concerned with others in a big hotel. Everyone is alone with themselves. Perhaps at night someone steals from their room into someone else’s room - but that‘s all. Behind this lies a profound isolation. In their room, everyone is alone with their ego and no “you” can be reached or held.’ Despite its pessimistic tone, Vicky Baum’s observation in her novel Hotel Shanghai holds out the promise of a liberation from self through anonymous individuality. ‘In a hotel, guests should find what they dream of at home; said Conrad Hilton, one of the founders of the modern hotel industry. ‘Experience’ hotels aim to live up to this aspiration, whether the concept is based on a dream of Hollywood or the work of a star designer. In a highly targeted way visitors are given a surface onto which they can project their fantasies and obsessions.

The hotel becomes a stage, a film set, a place where guests can enact their desires and learn more about themselves. The escapism is effective because the opportunity to change roles, to act out a usually hidden side of oneself, follows a predefined formula.

to treat his interiors as stage sets, to assemble them using quotations and surprises, to arrange them as stimulating scene changes that are playfully managed and discovered by the guests; and he has done this in increasingly virtuoso fashion ever since. In doing this he anticipated the needs and desires of the consumer elite of the in formation age. The American sociologist David Brooks recently coined the term ‘bourgeois bohemians’ (or ‘bobos’) to describe this elite. The bobos have grown up with multimedia literacy, style-consciousness and self·awareness. For them, durability is just as important as curiosity value their quest is for quality in all things, as they alternate between power-working and serious relaxation. The combination of efficiency and hedonism in their lives, of Protestant work ethic and Dionysian self-indulgence, gives rise to what might be called a gentle materialism - and they react to images and new experiences in a correspondingly light-hearted and self-confident manner. They behave as consumers in the same way as they surf the net, and they check into a hotel in the same way as they check into their other life situations - on a temporary basis.

ARCHITECTURE AS VISUAL SENSATION EMOTIONAL qualities, powerful images and unmediated expressiveness are the most prominent elements of contemporary architecture.

Buildings are designed as adventures for the senses: overpowering, imperious, entertaining. ‘We are much more concerned with creating a building that arouses emotions, rather than one that represents this or that idea: explains the Swiss architect Jacques Herzog. His Dutch colleagues Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bas

identify the main features of an architecture of sensation; it should be ‘anticipatory, unexpected, climactic, cinematic, time-related, non-linear, surprising, mysterious, compelling and engaging’. Integral to the very nature of architecture and interior design is an artificial world of experience, but the creation of visual sensations and spatial illusions was for a long time subordinate to artistic, psychological and economic concerns. In 1947, in the book Vision in Motion, Bauhaus artist Laszlo MoholyNagy asserted that artworks and buildings should be seen as constructed sensual experiences, and that it is the artist’s task ‘to put layer upon layer, stone upon stone, in the organization of emotions; to record feeling with his particular means, to give structure

and refinement as well as direct ion to the inner life of his contemporaries’. Modern architecture can be read as the fulfilment of this injunction. On one hand it creates one·offs with no general relevance -

buildings that, like modernist works of art, stand alone; on the other hand it creates theatrical decors made up of quotations or borrowings from popular culture. In both cases it is moving away from the representation of functions and from architectural typology towards autonomy, excess, nostalgia and spectacle. The ‘wow” factor is what counts. The result is an architecture of grand gestures and big names. It is not political or religious power or the representation of community that lies behind the attention-grabbing, monumental constructions of today.

These are the cathedrals of the leisure culture - museums and arts complexes, airports, mega-malls, hybrid mixed-use complexes, hotel-casino resorts - which seem to lay claim to an exalted status purely on the basis of their size. Popular culture has turned architecture into a brand logo; architectural design is entertainment ‘capita l’ used in a targeted way by investors, politicians and brand strategists as a magnet for the public and a marketing instrument and, above all, as a source of profit.

The French writer Michel Houellebecq sums it up as follows: ‘Contemporary architecture implicitly takes on a simple agenda: it builds the shelves of society’s supermarket. The logic of the supermarket necessarily leads to a dispersal of desire.

And this superficial, shallow participation in the life of the world is designed to replace the longing for existence.’ According to Houellebecq, if ‘modern architecture is no longer called upon’ to ‘build places to live in’, then it will come to see itself as an inventor of environments for passers-by, visitors and travellers, and of consumer attractions.

Architects are in demand as suppliers of spectacle. Event architecture - opening up the city as an arena for events - is made possible only by what the German architect Axel Schultes criticized as the ‘architectural audacities of egomaniacs’. The Bauhaus ideal of the democratization of the arts becomes the vulgarization of style. Supposedly distinctive architectural images are increasingly interchangeable. A key characteristic here is architecture’s detachment from its context. The invasion of the human imagination by the myths of the entertainment industry has led to a proliferation of globally compatible architectural monuments that bear no relation at all to their surroundings.

The validity of phiosopher Jean Paul Baudril lard’s thesis of ‘architecture’s disappearance into the virtual’, where

‘reality turns into spectacle, the real becomes a theme park’ is now apparent. In Las Vegas, the booming US leisure metropolis in the Nevada desert, counterfeits are piled up to the point where they become overpowering realities. For the American architects Denise Scott· Brown and Robert Venturi, who wrote the book Learning from Las Vegas more than three decades ago, a decisive change has since taken place:

the change ‘from symbol to scenario’, from iconography to scenography, in which the New York skyline, the Eiffel Tower and Venice’s St Mark’s Square are set, chaotically and confusingly, side by side. An amusement-driven world theatre has left the auditorium to evolve into an open-air parade of curiosities.

The city itself has become a clicheladen interior; the architecture works with suggestive strategies and foreshortened perspectives, more or less turning itself into a three-dimensional stage backdrop.

transplantation and accumulation of set pieces is - inverted in the stage-set hotel, in its simulated privacy, where the strange attracts by means of the familiar. These environments for sale are temporary homes offering time-bound attractions. In the 1920s the Viennese novelist Joseph Roth described a situation that still applies to most of the thousands of hotel rooms piled on top of one another in Las Vegas: ‘In this room, fortunately, there is nothing, not a single item, that the eye would linger on with grief. When my suitcases are taken away, others will stand here. When I no longer stand at this window, others will stand here. This room creates no illusions - for itself, for you, for me. When I leave it and look back at it, it is no longer my room. The day is long, for there is no melancholy to fill it with.’ The difference is that today, beyond the simple accommodation, a multitude of temptations, targeted on the senses and the wallet, awaits the traveller - all the consumer attractions in the world absorbed into a garish adventure playground for the whole family, where the only compulsion to linger is the promise of unadulterated pleasure. It may seem that a vast chasm separates the rowdy world of Las Vegas from the subtle decors of the purist designer hotels, but the mega-palaces of kitsch and the small temples of contemporary

To use a term coined by Robert E. Somol, professor of architecture in Los Angeles, this ‘architainment landscape’ is based on a universal architectural model: the hotel·casino with attached shopping, show, conference and tradefair facilities. Here, Endo urbanism - the

style both offer ‘mood’ architecture, carefully devised backdrops against which guests can enjoy new experiences. In this they follow the rules of the ‘experience economy’ analyzed by the authors B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, which quotes, in a highly manipulative way: ‘Theatre is not a metaphor but a model. Staging experiences is not about entertaining customers, it’s about engaging them.’ Ian Schrager, who remains a trendsetter in the elite sector - his Starck hotels, compares the hotel’s spatial layout with a play: the lobby is the prelude, the first act of the hotel’s drama, which has its finale in the individual guest rooms. In recent projects such as London’s St Martin’s Lane, guests can even influence their own happy ending by adjusting the stage lighting in their rooms to the colors they desire. Interiors are planned to the last detail. Restaurants, signs, graphic designs and the appearance of the hotel personnel have to meet, in a clear and consistent way, the expectations of a cosmopolitan public well versed in the language of fashion and advertising. ‘They were the messengers of the Lord, selected for their upright Slature and attractive faces - advantages that were amply exhibited in their carriage and the look in their eyes. They were angels of this world.’ This is how, in the 1930s, the German writer

Wolfgang Koeppen saw the reception staff in the parallel and more beautiful universe that a hotel represents. To bring his vision up to date, the only thing you would have to add would be the name of the exclusive designer or brand responsible for creating the angels’ uniforms. ‘Image transfer’ is an increasingly important concept in both the popular and elite sectors of the hotel business. Leading figures in modern architecture such as the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and the Swiss duo Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have been engaged by the fashion company Prada to design its new flagship stores and headquarters - the hotelier Ian Schrager invited the same stars to design the Astor Palace in New York’s SoHo, the first new-build hotel in his luxury chain, before he changed his mind and transferred the project to the even more illustrious Frank D. Gehry. Schrager’s local competitor Andre Balasz responded by having his latest hotel project, the Broadway - just a few blocks away - designed by Jean Nouvel. The battle for customers’ attention is fought between star architects in Manhattan in just the same way as it is fought between gigantic postcard panoramas of fictional and non-fictional sites.

Las Vegas Strip

MORRIS LAPIDUS “IF YOU CREATE THE STAGE SETTING AND IT’S GRAND, EVERYONE WHO ENTERS WILL PLAY THEIR PART. WHAT AM I SELLING NOW? YOU’RE SELLING A GOOD TIME.” No American architect in the 20th century embraced more flamboyantly the flagrantly commercial aspect of design than did Morris Lapidus, who titled his autobiography “Too Much Is Never Enough.” Lapidus (pronounced LAP-i-dus), who died at age 98 in 2001, was long derided but later praised for designing some of South Florida’s gaudiest, glitziest and most glamorous hotels — including the Fontainebleau, the Americana and the Eden Roc — in the 1950s and 1960s. His style was mockingly called Miami Beach French, and critics scorned the ‘’obscene panache’’ with which he created what they called his palaces of kitsch, many of which have been razed or remodeled. But as Miami Beach underwent a renaissance, becoming a trendy place for the jet set, the critical winds blew in his direction. After being shunned by architecture critics and architects for much of his long career, he and his work are now referred to with respect by a new generation of writers and postmodernist architects — among them Rem Koolhaas and Philippe Starck. He had been, several critics decided, Fontainebleau Stairs to No Where Miami Beach Morris Lapidus 1954

Provincial and Italian Renaissance — with whiplash-curve facades and a splashy use of color — and he lavished ornament upon ornament. His most famous work was the Fontainebleau, built in 1954. Its interiors combined 27 colors. It had what was called a staircase to nowhere that actually led to a modest cloakroom, so that dinner guests could leave their coats and parade down in their sparkling jewelry and decolletage to the delighted stares of the crowds in the hotel’s lobby. The hotel was once called ‘’the nation’s grossest national product.’’ But Lapidus dismissed all critical jibes. He proudly referred to the Fontainebleau as ‘’the world’s most pretentious hotel.’’ Architectural understatement was not his style. He put live alligators in a terrarium in the lobby of the Americana, he said, so that guests would ‘’know they were in Florida.’’ ‘’I wanted people to walk in and drop dead,’’ he said of his celebrated hotel lobbies. His work, he said, ‘’set new standards, and a lot of old-line critics didn’t agree with me.’’ By the 1980s, though, he said, that had changed, ‘’because everyone is doing the unusual now.’’

‘’a postmodernist long before the term existed.’’ Lapidus was steeped in classical architecture, but he created an eye-catching mixture of French

Fontainebleau Sunken Dining Room Miami Beach Morris Lapidus 1954

Fontainebleau Miami Beach Morris Lapidus 1954

International Inn Washington DC Morris Lapidus

P H I L I P P E S TA R C K INTENTIONAL INTERNAL DRAMATIC TENSION AND DELIBERATE DISSOLUTION FORCES ONE TO QUESTION YOUR PERCEPTION OF REALITY.

“I like to open the doors of the human brain” Philippe Starck

“Subversive, ethical, ecological, political, humorous... this is how I see my duty as a designer.” Philippe Starck

Illustration Philippe Starck

The thousands of projects - complete or forthcoming - his global fame and tireless protean inventiveness should never distract from Philippe Starck’s fundamental vision: Creation, whatever form it takes, must improve the lives of as many people as possible. Starck vehemently believes this poetic and political duty, rebellious and benevolent, pragmatic and subversive, should be shared by everyone and he sums it up with the humour that has set him apart from the very beginning: “No one has to be a genius, but everyone has to participate.” His precocious awareness of ecological implications, his enthusiasm for imagining new lifestyles, his determination to change the world, his love of ideas, his concern with defending the intelligence of usefulness – and the usefulness of intelligence – has taken him from iconic creation to iconic creation... From the everyday products, furniture and lemon squeezers, to revolutionary mega yachts, hotels that stimulate the senses, phantasmagorical venues and individual wind

turbines, he never stops pushing the limits and criteria of contemporary design. His dreams are solutions, solutions so vital that he was the first French man to be invited to the TED conferences (Technology, Entertainment & Design) alongside renowned participants including Bill Clinton and Richard Branson. Inventor, creator, architect, designer, artistic director, Philippe Starck is certainly all of the above, but more than anything else he is an honest man directly descended from the Renaissance artists.

A CHILDHOOD OF ART “My father was an aeronautical engineer. For me it was a duty to invent”. Philippe Starck

Philippe Starck was born in 1949. From his childhood spent beneath the drawing tables of his airplane building, aeronautic engineer father, he retains a primary lesson: everything should be organized elegantly and rigorously, in human relationships as much as in the concluding vision that presides over every creative gesture. His absolute belief that creation should be used and enjoyed by all sees him relentlessly endeavouring to do well, right down to the tiniest detail.

But years later has he really left his first improvised office? According to him, not completely. “Ultimately they were children’s games, imagination games, but thanks to various skills, especially engineering, something happened. I’m a kid who dreams and at the same time I’ve got that light-heartedness and gravity of children. I fully accept the rebellion, the subversion and the humour.” Starck first showed interest in living spaces while he was a student at the Ecole Nissim de Camondo in Paris, where in 1969 he designed an inflatable house, based on an idea on materiality. This revelation bought his first success at the Salon de l’Enfance. Not long afterwards, Pierre Cardin, seduced by the iconoclastic design, offered him the job of artistic director at his publishing house. In 1976 and a few emblematic objects later, including a flying lamp and a portable neon sign, this intrepid dreamer created the audacious decor of the night club, La Main Bleue - in Montreuil – demonstrating that no venue is less respectable than another just because of its eccentricity. He went on to do the legendary Parisian nightclub Les Bains Douches and the Starck Club in Dallas. At the same time he founded his first industrial design company, Starck Product, which he later renamed Ubik after the famous Philip K. Dick novel. Here he initiated his collaborations with the biggest design manufacturers in Italy - Driade, Alessi, Kartell - and the world – Drimmer in Austria, Vitra in Switzerland Swiss and Disform in Spain, among so many others.

LIFE SPACES ARCHITECTURE “If there is no vision, humane, social or loving, a project doesn’t have the legitimacy to exist.” Philippe Starck

Although he considers himself no more an architect than designer, in 1989 Philippe Starck started devising buildings in Japan, each with completely new forms. The first was in Tokyo and was striking in its originality. Nani Nani was an impressive anthropomorphic building covered with a living material that evolved with time. The structure was born from the powerful conviction that creation must invest in an environment without destabilizing it while maintaining the greatest respect for its context. Like all of his work Starck’s architecture is virulently and explicitly humanist. A year later he confirmed his status as leader of avant-gardist architecture with the Asahi Beer Hall in Tokyo and then an ensemble of offices in Osaka, known as the Baron Vert, in 1992. A pioneer of impressionist reasoning bursting with relentless enthusiasm, he made buildings that even when dedicated to work reclaimed life. In France he was commissioned to design the control tower at Bordeaux’s airport (1997) and the extension of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (1998). Jean Paul Gaultier entrusted his imagination to transcend into his showrooms in London and New York and in 2002 Philippe Stark designed Gaultier’s boutique in Paris. Through the years this architectural vision

has re-occurred quite naturally in his numerous restaurant and hotel interior projects.

RESTAURANTS They may be different each time, but every one of Philippe Starck’s scenarios establishes firm connections with those who generate the soul of a venue, while taking an intimate approach articulated around subversion, sensuality, creativity and poetry.

Like a euphoric, optimistic director he treats every living space as if it were a theatre where a story unravels, creating a sort of drama sprinkled with surreal acts. The Teatron restaurant in Mexico (1985) and then the Teatriz in Madrid (1988) installed in an old theatre are the most obvious examples of this phenomenon. In 1988 he overhauled the old Parisian theatre hall, La Cigale, which continues to be a favourite among musicians for its unparalleled acoustics. Whatever the project, Starck enjoys highlighting its singular pulse, its special vibration, to create a venue in harmony with its environment while lighting its romantic flame. For the Felix restaurant in Hong Kong (1994) he created a crazy, poetic theatre, contrasting with the ultra-materialistic reality of the city it resides above. Added to poetry is ironic and political contradiction, like a subversive call to

order: life cannot be resumed by matter or materiality.

Through the emotions and reactions that a space provokes, the visitor becomes an actor in a story that takes him out of himself towards a dream and beyond showing him that another life is possible. “My only task is to show the path,” he underlines, “The only important thing to me is the effect my creations have on their users, on my cultural tribe.” As a good iconoclast Starck stamps his vision with theatricality, ensuring the show has a message that everyone can read, namely putting the importance of links back into the heart of the city, so communities prevail over the dispersion of individuals. Romantic, audacious and luxurious, the Palais de Cristal de la Maison Baccarat (2004), in a Parisian town house that once belonged to Marie-Laure de Noailles, blazes under its own impulsion. Adjacent to the museum and boutique is the restaurant, the Cristal Room Baccarat, which immediately imposed itself as an incontrovertible venue for Parisian gastronomes, but also as a space that spectacularly links the festive Noailles years to our own era. In love with this exceptional material, shaped by the hands of men and rich in sparkling facets - like so many romantic beacons - Starck has transcribed the implicit poetry of crystal and translated

the joy carried by its diffractions in timeless spaces. Four years later he took this vision to Moscow with the Maison Baccarat, Museum, Boutique and Restaurant, a world of illusions in which dreams, symbols and reality voluptuously come together...

rebellious gesture, the concept of a labyrinthine restaurant where one readily wanders, he transforms the quote to,

“Space without ideas is the ruin of man.” In the same spirit of modernity 2007 saw Shanghai welcome the Volar Club. Like a veritable party invitation this new stage became the epicentre of a burgeoning night life while underlining with explicitly festive creativity the importance of the tribal approach and the imperative necessity to create links.

HOTELS Iconic venues have been springing up in the biggest cities across the planet. The restaurants Bon I (2000) and Bon II (2002), the Mori Venice Bar (2006) and the Paradis du Fruit (2009) in Paris while for the USA there was the important arrival of Katsuya in Los Angeles (2006), the first of a series of Japanese restaurants. The same year he unveiled a subversive, Manichean vision of the world with the Bon restaurant in Moscow. In Beijing he concocted a theatrical extravaganza for the 6 000 m2 restaurant Lan (2007) where the abundance of objects and materials as well as the miscellanea of styles transport the diner on a surreal journey where, “the empty spaces are more important than the full spaces”. It’s the cheeky mocking of an era which boasts the merits of accumulation. There’s a Rabelais saying that Starck likes to quote: “Science with conscience is the ruin of the soul.” Through this intensely

1988 was a decisive year for the hotel world, nothing short of a flamboyant revolution. Along with Ian Schrager, Starck invented a new vision and a new set of codes for the hospitality business with the Royalton in New York, which put humans back into the heart of the designer’s work. The experiment continued with the Delano in Miami (1995) and the Mondrian in Los Angeles, then Saint Martin’s Lane (1999) and the Sanderson (2000) in London. Hotels are no longer impersonal transitional venues but living, pleasurable spaces bursting with humour and irony.

They are theatres where we act out our own destinies. With the Hudson in New York (1999) he continued his dream-like quest, conjuring up an acid-tinted phantasmagoria with numerous dreamy and reflective

surprises. In 2001 he designed the Clift in San Francisco and pushed the spectacle even further combining the city’s classical codes and archetypes with cutting edge technology - undoubtedly a bit mischievously yet with the constant aim of keeping the creation in perspective with its context. In 2005 the Hotel Faena in Buenos Aires - which had opened a year before - won the Wallpaper* magazine’s prize for best hotel of the year and Condé Nast Traveller singled it out for its atmosphere and design. He took a dilapidated building and breathed new life into it, offering it a future without flouting its past. The ex-nihilist had created a cosmopolitan yet human hotel that opened out onto the world and was destined to encourage encounters and creative life to blossom. In Rio de Janeiro, Philippe Starck designed the building for the Hotel Fasano which opened its doors in 2007. The materials – wood, glass, marble – and the furniture paid a discreet, humble and sincere tribute to the Brazilian designers of the 1950s and 1960s, who were so innovative in their approach to the environment. Committed to his ethics yet aware that the hotelier business must reflect the movements and flux of the world and its ideas, this tireless nomad and fruitful designer reinterpreted the codes of the luxury hotel industry in Paris with vigour and fantasy when he added a dash of poetic and surreal folly to the oldest five star hotel in the French capital... the Meurice. With the same momentum, end of 2010 will see the re-opening of the five star Parisian hotel, the Royal Monceau, a symbol of luxurious elegance splendidly revived.

“For me, the Royal Monceau was an opportunity to explore the nature of French identity and reinvent it without resorting to the simplistic or folkloric. With all its qualities and failings. And to rediscover its rebellious and subversive spirit that manages simultaneously to be very elegant, detached and noble. At the Royal Monceau, there is no possible doubt that you are indeed in Paris. It’s a place that no one can describe, a mental space, inhabited, air in vibration.” And there are many more new surprises to come... Always a man of paradox, from the 1990s onwards Starck committed himself to another revolution, that of the democratisation of quality, designer hotels. First with the Paramount in New York which offered rooms for $100 and which has since become a classic of the genre. In 2008 he applied this generous, humanist idea to Paris by designing the Mama Shelter. This hotel bears witness to the new social values of an open minded cultural tribe founded on rigour, honesty, humour, intelligence and sharing. On its origins, he explains, “There’s a story of profound friendship. As soon as I met the Trigano, who initiated this project, I became part of the family. This very human adventure based the project on love. Together we wanted to bring a democratic dream to fruition... give the best to the most people possible using the newest ideas and the energy of the young.” Born from a philosophical and political desire this establishment, in its neglected urban yet vibrating landscape, accompanies the most inventive, most determined aspects of the future. Just as Starck’s dreams are destined to sow their fruitful seeds everywhere,

those of the Mama Shelter will soon be taking root in Lyon, Bordeaux, Istanbul among other cities... The nineties, like the 1980s, required a revolution in the hotel industry. With the SLS in Beverly Hills (2007) under the impetus of visionary entrepreneur Sam Nazarian, Starck signed his very first luxury hotel in North America.

He wanted to give it heart, flesh and humanity by transforming the reception along with all its visual and sensory surprises into an experience where frontiers between design, art and daily life fade away.

“People know when to stop. There will always be something to discover, someone to meet, it’s like a permanent bubbling of energy. It’s a bit like the village square,” resumes Starck. It’s no real surprise that the fantastic culinary designer and extraordinary innovator, José Andrés, a pioneer of techno-emotional cooking, became involved in the adventure. Some twenty accolades have been awarded to the business, bestowed by Condé Nast Traveller, Wallpaper*, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times among others... Further to the east, in the heart of Iberian peninsular is the Alhondiga in Bilbao, a cultural centre nearly

30,000 square metres large, whose opening will be the event of spring 2010. “This project contains the crystallisation of life,” explains the creator, “We have preserved the 1909 facade and the walls which are ten metres thick. And it is precisely within these walls that the story of the building will unfold. No other space in the world will offer as many activities under one roof. You can work, eat, drink, see an exhibition, do sport or read. I like this idea of communion, of intermingling activities, all while remaining quite practical. It will encourage even more surprising magical moments because it is still a totally unheard of experience. Passers-by will be able to watch everything through the windows. I’m busy bringing life into our sights.”

May 2010 will be a key date in the world of sea adventurers as this great boat lover completes work on the development of Port Adriano in Majorca. There Philippe Stark will be offering a new urbanism designed to welcome boats up to 60 metres long, while utterly respecting environmental norms. For Philippe Starck telling a story is an integral part of the creative process: the meaning nourishes the form. His attachment to public places pleads his case for the setting up of a humane community determined to strive for change. “I’m carried along by a major theme… the adventure of our human species, essentially governed by intelligence.” It is time to remind ourselves that living well together is also living intelligently.

So the lobby at the SLS Hotel, the Bazaar, became a veritable life centre where a tapas restaurant and Norwegian health bar share space with a luxury patisserie counter and the mythical Moss concept store.

SLS Beverly Hills Philippe Starck 2008

DESIGN, A POETIC AND POLITICAL COMMITMENT “Every object, every shape, every style must have a meaning, and it is this meaning that influences us every day.” Philippe Starck

What is humanity lacking? Certainly not more objects… Because he is acutely aware of this and because he places the individual at the centre of his work, Philippe Starck enjoys telling us that the pencil is his only tool – weapon even – that he has for changing the world. Everyone, as far as Starck is concerned, deserves the best, and there lies the generosity and aspiration to satisfy a community sharing these values. He remembers having fought “to improve quality, reduce prices and be available to all. No one wanted me to, but every time I lowered the price, I also improved the quality and the product sold better. So manufacturers were forced to follow me… I never stopped campaigning to see perfect products emerge, quality products made to last.” As a pioneer whose spontaneity addresses everybody, Starck has never let his success obstruct his benevolence. Unlike prevailing conventions, when Philippe Starck began his career his designs were never destined solely for an elite but for the whole of society. He dreamt of design democratisation, in other words an optimal quality for a minimal price and diffusion to the largest audience possible.

He believes that sincere, modern elegance comes from the multiplication of an object, as opposed to the ideology of limited editions, where premeditation on rarity leads to a selection through money rather than necessity. Starck has successfully dedicated his life to the fight for imposing a design concept that goes beyond elitism. An approach aimed to give the best to the maximum of people and indeed why should it be reserved for a small privileged group? On this basis he has worked with the 3 Suisses catalogue since 1984 when he invented a line of furniture and where he later offered, from 1994, the historic “Maison de Starck”, an individual mail order house made from wood. In 2002 for the American supermarket chain, Target, he designed some sixty ultra creative objects, from a glass to a baby’s bottle. Affordable pieces created to modestly light up the daily lives of American housewives, even in the heart of Minneapolis. As a protean designer, Philippe Starck re-thinks the most ordinary objects from our daily lives and the most astonishing, always to the point of drastic reinvention.

He rebels against acquired laziness in order to serve us as well as possible while delivering his messages of humanity, love and poetry. His designs focus more on functionality than the object itself, aiming to provide the best possible service using a minimum of material. From this economy comes the elegance of a minimal line – almost a philosophy – and spreading curves that lean towards the disappearance of objects. So Philippe Starck developed plastic furniture, the pinnacle of which is undoubtedly the iconic Louis Ghost chair (Kartell, 2002) a veritable treaty of modernity with an inevitable dematerialisation. Since its launch no less than a million examples have been sold. Some of the numerous daily objects revisited with his mischievous approach have become the most emblematic examples of design today. He also created elements for the bathroom (for Duravit, Hansgrohe, Hoesch, Axor, 1994), a toothbrush (Fluocaril, 1989), the Zikmu speakers without cables (Parrot, 2009, awarded the global Bluetooth SIG “Best of CES” Prize, Las Vegas 2009”), a whole range of items for babies (Maclaren, 2004), the RT201, a radio alarm clock (Thompson, 1999) and the Optical Mouse by Starck (Microsoft, 2004). By creating objects that are good, human and intelligent before being beautiful, Philippe Starck is present in our daily lives. His creations make our lives, they are life themselves with the most anodyne discovering a hidden allure when they reveal their secret

poetry. So the toothbrush metamorphoses into an amicable reference point in the heart of the bathroom, an encouraging wink, as well as being rigorously functional... Every object created is a letter the designer wishes to send us. In 2007 Starck designed the line Privé for Cassina, with its two levels of understanding and whose vocation he resumes as, “Furniture that through its mobility, versatility and adaptability allows us to rediscover a slightly forgotten agility. It seemed coherent to me with our future lovers and new visions. “Prive” invents a new imaginative territory. FOR LOVE. TO LOVE! Indeed both practical and lascivious, adhering to innuendo with the ironic provocation that identifies its creator, Privé offers a line of armchairs and sofas that perfectly marry the contours of life, between night and day. But the relentless concern to deliver a political message doesn’t stop him from bringing spectacular enterprises to fruition with humour. From the poetic folly such as the subversive Gun Lamp (Flos, 2005), a giant architecture lamp, the Superarchimoon (Flos, 2000), 214cm high to the Haaa!!! and Hooo!!! lights created with the artist Jenny Holzer (Flos/Baccarat, 2009) or the monumental chandeliers from the Darkside collection, including the emblematic Zenith (Baccarat, 2005). Of the emblematic Gun Lamp, Starck described it as “a sign of the times”, highlighting a sad fact that “Gold on guns reminds us of the collusion between money and war”. By fiercely registering death in our daily landscape, he reminds us as much of our mortal condition as our passiveness before the crimes that surround us. A

percentage of the price paid for this rare object is donated to the charity “Freres des Hommes. As for the creation of Hooo !!! and Haaa !!!, these poetic manifestations were born from a desire shared by Flos, Jenny Holzer and Starck to “Assemble things that ordinarily shouldn’t be assemble-able to create a tension that creates new propositions. They resolve a paradox: on one side we have a sophisticated and archaic material and on the other the electronic technology that gives a voice to the poetry behind the crystal: that of mathematics, of human mutation and of Jenny Holzer.

to intervene directly on the human body, to flatter it, to encourage it, to assist it and it’s no less vital to offer the best fuel to allow the brain to function optimally so that intelligence flourishes and love fertilises, “One of the absolute finalities of our lives on earth.” In 2005 the launch of La Amarilla signified a new turning point: it was the first organic olive oil to be assembled by an oenologist. Starck’s priority is to give the best to everyone without exception. The daily prosaism makes peace with the humour and the romanticism it keeps hidden. It is as much a gauge of the serene present as a radiant future.

We wanted to touch people whose capacity for wonderment is still in tact and whose inclination to dream remains strong.”

THE FUTURE

A designer in love with heightened senses and dreamlike vitality, Starck doesn’t look down on the poetry of prosaism. Keen on nourishing the body as well as the soul, he perfected an innovative tubular structure that guarantees the Pasta Panzani coquillettes will be cooked to al dente faultlessness every time (1996). Carried by a generous, humanist enthusiasm and long before it was fashionable to eat well, in 1998 he established OAO - a food company that facilitated access to organic products - continuing the democratisation of design that he had begun in the 1980s with the ceaseless desire to improve the lot of everyone. From reading glasses to watches and clothes, he always wanted

“Let’s offer our children another history, another romanticism”. Philippe Starck

A polymorphic designer, a nomad perpetually travelling the world with his wife and muse Jasmine, always present where he is least expected (just like in life, “what happens when we do other projects”, joked John Lennon), always looking for natural elegance and a hero of democratic obligation, Philippe Starck will never give up on his hopes, desires, visions and duties. A major figure on the world’s cultural stage, exhibited in the biggest museums (the Pompidou Centre, the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, the Vitra Design Museum in Basel, the MoMA in Kyoto...), at the avant-garde of contemporary environmental concerns and responsibility, the subject of numerous books, omnipresent in the media, professor at the Domus Academy in Milan and at the Ecole Nationale

des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Philippe Starck is respected for the originality, rigour and quality of his work. Today his name and personality almost belong to the general public having become synonymous with the desire for a better life, here and now of course, but also for tomorrow. From his accolade of Officier des Arts et des Lettres in 1985 to the award of the médaille de Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, in 2000, he has regularly been paid tribute by his own country as well as internationally by other prestigious institutions such as Harvard from whom he received the Excellence in Design Award in 1997. His approach – and the praise of movement free of constraints it leads to – was consecrated in 2008 when he accepted the job of Artistic Director for the French Presidency of the European Union and then in 2009 when he accepted the post of Ambassador of Creativity and Innovation. He is constantly contacted to share his experience and his vision as much by international conferences as by businesses that see themselves in his work of a 1000 facets, inspired by his pioneering approach. His expertise shines way beyond the world of design. He has quite simply defined new paradigms for our very existence. His concern for democracy, whether it is ecological or design, is combined with a pedagogical desire to put intelligence and ideas first, wherever they are sexiest. So in June 2009 he presented La Nuit des Idées (The Night of Ideas) on Canal +, during which he presented the famous TED Conference to demonstrate the sheer brainpower

that contributes to our living well and well being. Starck likes quoting Boileau’s famous maxim, “Whatever we understand well we express clearly, and words flow with ease”. Devoted to the importance of sharing and transmitting he was asked by BBC2 to take part in the television program Design for Life, a series of six episodes based around the desire for transmission and a pedagogical concern aiming to demonstrate the mechanisms of creativity with the ambition of encouraging a young English generation to dare to create good objects. From high technology for the individual to necessary mobility, from food, housing, energy production and even clothing, there is no aspect of our daily lives in all its implications that has escaped his subversive, poetic and practical approach. Nothing human is foreign to him. Everything concerns Philippe Starck. From a precocious consciousness of our perilous lifestyles he has drawn even more energy and a will to share his vision. The generosity of his activity which he refuses to be restricted to any field or any elite - reveals that behind this famous, mediatic designer covered in accolades, is a man who wants the best for all of his fellow human beings. After three decades of creation, looking to the other side of the stars and the horizon, Starck is now turning towards the future more than ever, the destiny that brings us all together. By stimulating vocations and electrifying spirits, his gestures are guided by love, an unsinkable passion for his neighbour and the resolution to build happy tomorrows.

While Rimbaud wrote, “dawns are heartbreaking” Starck will never give up on making sure that they continue to amaze us. Through his commitment he hopes to help his cultural tribe place itself in a fundamental perspective: that of the progress of humanity in the heart of the universe. By humbly setting an example, he has shown us that we all have a responsibility to merit our existence and honour the link that unites us by showing inventiveness, courage, intelligence and responsibility.

Light Installation Philippe Starck

Mondrian Los Angeles Philippe Starck 2010

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Philippe Starck 2010

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The Delano Miami Beach Philippe Starck 1995

Delano Mondrian (top) The Delano (bottom) Miami Beach Marcel Wanders, Philippe Starck

Miami Beach Philippe Starck 1995

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The Delano Miami Beach Philippe Starck 1995

Miami Icon Miami Beach Philippe Starck 1990

The Delano Miami Beach Philippe Starck 1995

Mondrian Los Angeles Philippe Starck 1996

DAV I D R O C K W E L L LIVE EXPERIENCES THAT TRANSFORMS NOT ONLY THE WAY WE SEE THE WORLD, BUT ALSO HOW WE CONNECT WITH EACH OTHER. CELEBRATING SPECTACLE: A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID ROCKWELL, JULIE TAYMOR, SIMON DOONAN, INSTIGATED BY JOHN HOCKENBERRY As an architect and set designer, David Rockwell creates immersive environments imbued with a sense of theater. He pays attention to texture, craft, and narrative, as well as new materials and technology. According to Business Week,”He always builds a bit of magic into his spaces....to Rockwell, designing an environment means shaping an experience that lasts in the memory.”

The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas David Rockwell 2010

Now, in his new book SPECTACLE, in collaboration with noted designer Bruce Mau, Rockwell provides the first exploration of the phenomenon and history of public performance and spectacular man-made events around the world. From Burning Man in the Nevada desert to the Holi Festival in India to the American-born NASCAR, he offers an unprecedented tour of over 60 farflung and fleeting, beautiful and bizarre events and considers what it is about these shared, live experiences that transforms not only the way we see the world, but also how we connect with each other.

Through stunning visuals and behind-the-scenes interviews with spectacle producers such as Julie Taymor, Simon Doonan, Steve Wynn, and Quincy Jones, Rockwell shows how an empty stadium, an open field, a busy urban thoroughfare and even individuals can be transformed by spectacle. For a brief moment, people, place and atmosphere are electrified, and the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Join a conversation instigated by John Hockenberry with David Rockwell, Julie Taymor, and Simon Doonan, as they discuss the idea of spectacle in our contemporary world. Together they will explore what it means, in an age of technology, for our society to have the desire to participate in shared experiences. Prior to the conversation, witness a presentation of images offering a visual tour of the world’s most amazing public events projected around the dome of the Celeste Bartos Forum.

The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas David Rcokwell 2010

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R E A L FA N TA SY & FA N TA S T I C R E A L I T Y BEHIND THIS DOOR ALL OF MY DREAMS BECOME REALITIES AND SOME OF MY REALITIES BECOME DREAMS. gene wilder, charlie and the chocolate factory

Plastic Fantastic JSPR Frame Magazine

Come with me And you’ll be In a world of Pure imagination Take a look And you’ll see Into your imagination

There is no Life I know To compare with Pure imagination Living there You’ll be free If you truly wish to be

We’ll begin With a spin Traveling in The world of my creation What we’ll see Will defy Explanation

If you want to view paradise Simply look around and view it Anything you want to, do it Wanta change the world? There’s nothing To it

There is no Life I know To compare with Pure imagination Living there You’ll be free If you truly Wish to be Pure Imagination, Anthony Newley

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THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE by Guy-Ernest Debord

Chapter 1 “Separation Perfected” “But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence

is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.

The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global social praxis split up into reality and image. The social practice which the autonomous spectacle confronts is also the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal. The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production, which at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production.

of Christianity

1 In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. 2 The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world

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such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society. 9

12 In a world which really is topsyturvy, the true is a moment of the false. 10

5 The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.

The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general truth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible.

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To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught.

The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.

15 As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced today, as the general exposé of the rationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of imageobjects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society. 16 The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than the economy developing for itself. It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers.

The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.

The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate

11 One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity:

The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

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prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.

philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.

spectacle can be explained only by the fact that this practical power continued to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with itself.

Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.

The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic.

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of presentday society. But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combined with hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself. 19 The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize

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21 To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep. 22 The fact that the practical power of modern society detached itself and built an independent empire in the

24 The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of “mass media” which are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its total self-movement. If the social

needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of the existing system s administration, of the means which allow it to carry on this particular administration. The generalized cleavage of the spectacle is inseparable from the modern State, namely from the general form of cleavage within society, the product of the division of social labor and the organ of class domination.

condition. The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. The spectacle is the preservation of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence. It is its own product, and it has made its own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity. It shows what it is: separate power developing in itself, in the growth of productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are then dominated by the independent movement of machines; and working for an everexpanding market. All community and all critical sense are dissolved during this movement in which the forces that could grow by separating are not yet reunited.

25 26 Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor, the formation of classes, had given rise to a first sacred contemplation, the mythical order with which every power shrouds itself from the beginning. The sacred has justified the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded to the interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished that which society could not do. Thus all separate power has been spectacular, but the adherence of all to an immobile image only signified the common acceptance of an imaginary prolongation of the poverty of real social activity, still largely felt as a unitary

With the generalized separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost. Accompanying the progress of accumulation of separate products and the concentration of the productive process, unity and communication become the exclusive attribute of the system’s management. The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world. 27

Due to the success of separate production as production of the separate, the fundamental experience which in primitive societies is attached to a central task is in the process of being displaced, at the crest of the system’s development. by non-work, by inactivity. But this inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of activity, and in the context of the spectacle all activity is negated. just as real activity has been captured in its entirety for the global construction of this result. Thus the present “liberation from labor,” the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result. 28 The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds.” The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely.

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29 The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. 30 The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object (which is the result of his own unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.

The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time and space of his world become foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated products. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory. The very powers which escaped us show themselves to us in all their force. 32 The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production. What grows with the economy in motion for itself can only be the very alienation which was at its origin. 33 Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more lie is separated from his life. 34 The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.

Alice In Wonderland Disney 1951

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