UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS LONDON
visually exploring Stanely Kubrick’s greatest works
INTERIORS
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
INTERIORS
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Kubrick’s meticulous attention to detail and fastidiousness is legendary but interestingly the film also set new standards in movie making in being one of the first examples of innovation through strategic product placement: The 2001 team invited commercial product manufacturers and designers of the time including IBM, Honeywell, Whirlpool (kitchens), Macy’s, Dupont (fabrics), Hilton Hotels, Parker Pens, Nikon, Kodak (cameras), Hamilton (watches) as well as outstanding interior and furniture designers of the time to create projected versions of how their products they might look decades later in the year 2001.
The 2001 team invited commercial product manufacturers and designers of the time including IBM, Honeywell, Whirlpool (kt (fabrics), Hilton Hotels, Parker
POSTMODERNISM AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE SPACE RACE
The film therefore stands not only as an outstanding piece of film making but also as a platform for progressive contemporary design – driving design innovation.
INTERIORS The one item which could at first appear to languish out of place is the colourful quilt adoring Alex’s bed. Look closer and the hexagonal and triangular mix appear to push outwards, providing a fabric ‘spike’ to the only comfortable looking aspect of Alex’s room. This is enhanced when an orgy played at high-speed happens on the quilt, the acceleration of the footage and the spikes in the quilt adding to an overloaded Kubrick representation of sexual brutality.
brutalism in exteriors, interiors and a quilt
INTERIORS Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian A Clockwork Orange (1971) depicts a future where the disenfranchised youth run wildly amuck, blood-lust fuelled by a popular cocktail known as Moloko whilst sprouting profanities in a bastardised concoction of English and Russian. Kubrick himself stated that
One of Alex’s droogs filling up his glass at the Molokov Milk Bar. The white figures of women turned furniture were inspired by the sculptures of Allen Jones.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE “modern art’s almost total preoccupation with subjectivism has led to anarchy and… the notion that reality exists only in the artist’s mind, and that the thing which simpler souls had for so long believed to be reality, is only an illusion…” (ref Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange by Michel Ciment).
Inside the Korokova Milk Bar, furnished with sculptural female forms turned table tops
Allen Jones’ Chair from Table Chair and Hatstand
INTERIORS
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Kubrick is renowned for his obsession with detail and his decoration of Alex’s room not only purports to amplify his character, but acts as a counter point to his parents’ own tastes. His room serves not just as an act of rebellion, but the externalisation of his violent and lustful nature. It comes as no surprise that when he is ‘cured’ by science he returns home to find his room reduced to dumbbells and football cut-outs by new lodger ‘Joe’.
Venture inside those punishing exteriors and there is no escape from the violence in a visceral orgy of 1970’s postmodernist kitsch. None is played out more prevalently than in Alex’s flat where gold wallpaper, bulbous chrome-cladded walls and JH Lynch paintings rise-up to bite you on every corner.
COLOR + PATTERN