touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-78912890
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Joaquin Phoenix in Her
engadget.com |
Hello Everyone:
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Today we're going to look at the architectural future. In Christopher Hawthorne's latest article for the
Los Angeles Times, "Spike Jonze's 'Her' a refreshingly original take on the future L.A.," architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne discusses how the movie
Her offers a glimpse into the future of Los Angeles, California. Mr. Hawthorne suggests that the Oscar™nominated film bucks the current fascination with all things retro,"...what the British music critic Simon Reynolds has called 'Retromania."
Her challenges "Retromania" by giving the movie goer a Los Angeles that's more lonely and less attractive.
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A scene from the movie Blade Runner
underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com |
Movies that imagine life fifty or hundred years into the future are standard fair for Hollywood studio. Often, they present a dystopic view of urban life. They tend to be violent visions often starring someone named Tom or Vin. These dark foreboding images have increasingly been replaced in the cultural landscape by film and television series such as
Mad Men, Downtown Abby, and
Inside Llewyn Davis, that try to recreate an historic period or an era that exists in time machine that mashes up elements of the past and present, as in
Computer Chess and
The Way Way Back. Her disregards the retro trend by plunging merrily and blindly into the future that is neither utopian or dystopian, rather, "...like our own era, and like every era-somewhere in the slippery in-between."
Her is set in Los Angeles, some two or three decades from now. The Los Angeles of Spike Jonze's future is a city dense with tall towers and a mass-transit system that would make London's envious. Cars have disappeared from the streets. The protagonist of
Her, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in a spacious downtown high-rise apartment and walks or the takes trains everywhere.
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A scene from Her
apnatimes.com |
The sidewalks and train stations of
Her Los Angeles are packed with people. Christopher Hawthorne uses the analogy of a benevolent Robert Moses taking over the political territory of Los Angeles. The crowded sidewalks and train stations are the product of the Mr. Jonze and his production designer K.K. Barrett, who digitally enhanced the city's skyline. Mr. Jonze spoke at length with architect Elizabeth Diller, whose firm, Diller Scofidio+Renfro is designing the Eli Broad contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles. Parts of the film were shot in Shanghai's
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Pudong, Shanghai, People's Republic of China
commons.wikimedia.org |
Pudong district, which has an impressive collection of new skyscrapers and a network of pedestrian sky bridges that have allowed the director to film without the interruption of gawkers.
Mr. Hawthorne notes, "The double setting also highlights the movie's interest in themes connected to surrogacy: to one person or thing standing for another. The operating system in Theodore Twombly's smartphone and computer is named Samantha and is meant to stand in for a real girlfriend that he cannot find following his divorce. A young woman fills in for Samantha, in what turns out to be a disastrous effort at sexual intimacy between man and his software.
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Office scene from Her
movie.ma.com |
Staying on the subject of surrogacy for a moment, Theodore is a stand in for he people who employ him, in the brightly colored offices of the fictitious company BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com to ghost write personal notes to friends and family. At the macro level, Shanghai is a stand in for the Los Angeles of the future. Mr. Hawthorne rightly points outs that the theme of surrogacy is a basic ingredient of the cinema. Actors are stand in for their characters imagined by screenwriters. The action caught in the camera lens stands in for real life. Los Angeles has stood in for other cities because of the generic looking downtown streets. Shanghai, a stand in for Los Angeles? This is an interesting question to consider. Spike Jonze doesn't use Shanghai as a surrogate for Los Angeles because it looks believably dense and development then the present day City of Angels.
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Aerial view of Pudong
scmp.com |
Shooting parts of
Her Shanghai allowed the director to capture something significant about Theodore Twombly, and the anxieties of modern day Los Angeles. The city is is caught in between two very different types of urbanism: the private and car-centric past and the more public and more connected future. The direction of current development projects points to a future with more and taller buildings, a livelier streetscape, and better public transportation. However, in a statement of the obvious, the process of building a better rail system has a long way to go, we Los Angelenos love our cars. We're trying to bury the private Los Angeles but haven't quite gotten to the public future yet. Alternating between Shanghai and Los Angeles gives this in-betweeness fleshed out form. The city, as seen by the audience, is trapped between two states of being, like our protagonist, feet on the ground, mind in the digital universe.
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Looking at his reflection
hollywoodreporter.com |
Placing
Her in a state of in-between make the film an "extended and surprisingly kindhearted meditation on how we grapple with major change-personal, cultural, technological and architectural." Mr. Hawthorne posits the reason we've become so creatively stuck is that we're endlessly recycle our own recent past. It's become too easy for practitioners and consumers to recall old material. It's also because own lives have become profoundly and dramatically digitized that we haven't had a chance to stop and make some sense out of what the digital revolution means culturally. This is such a broad, unwieldy, existential question that it's simpler to turn aside and find comfort in the past. "Retromania" can hardly be considered a creativity killer, it's given us some very imaginative and important, most of which appears to inhabit and animate styles gone by rather than imitate them. Think of the books and records being turned out by Gen X and millennial practitioners. Think Haim's debut album "Days Are Gone," which borrows eighties pop and still sounds so good or
The Luminaries by twenty-eight year old New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton, which mines Victorian fiction.
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FAT Architecture
fashionarchitecturetaste.com |
In architecture, "Retromania" has made looking forward tougher or more rare. Ironically, younger architects, like their post-modernist predecessors of the eighties, are falling back on historic tropes instead of leading the way forward. Mr. Hawthorne uses the example of FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste), the recently disbanded firm that rescued cheeky historicism from the sidelines of architecture practice.
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Lobby of Ace Hotel
Downtown Los Angeles
articles.latimes.com |
Another example is the newly opened Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles occupying the former 1927 United Artist tower by Walker & Eisen. The hotel's interior was designed by the L.A. based firm Commune and references twenties architecture with nods to Rudolf Schindler,
Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos. The hotel's design plan comfortably mixes period styles, layering artwork by contemporary L.A. artists such as pencil drawings by the Haas Brothers.
Seeking comfort in the past in the face of a rapidly more connected, more public world is fine. It reminds us of our humanness. It allows humanity to experience the world through our senses, not filtered through pixels. At some point we have to move out of the past and into the future.
Her presents a story of a state of in-between. The Samantha operating system is a stand in for a real girlfriend, Theodore Twombly is a stand in for us, Shanghai stands in for Los Angeles of the future. The cinema industry, as a whole, is a mediator between the real and the what can be. One way to approach the future is that it is a synthesis of the past and present. Another way is to look at the future as something completely new, as Christopher Hawthorne seems to suggest. Either way the future of our cities does not have to be a violent dystopia, they can be a lively wonderful place to be.
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