The following piece is a continuation of a series, Behind the Frame by Chris Rogers, which analyzes how the built environment has been represented on the big screen. Previous pieces can be seen on INTJournal.com.

Architecture on screen can serve as metaphor, emissary or arena, as this series has shown. But it can also be merely another visual element of the finished film, alongside cinematography, costumes and effects. With two thousand years of achievement in a multiplicity of styles to choose from, the range of possibilities is vast. This final entry, then, simply enjoys cinematic moments that revolve around the building, in all its constructed variety.

If an Englishman’s home is his castle then the ultimate combination of occupant and fortified residence must be King Arthur and Camelot. To celebrate the fellowship of the Round Table in Excalibur, the monarch promises to build a hall about the table and a castle about the hall; thereafter this appears as glinting slabs of silver and gold, an obvious product of magic amidst the dark green of the forest. It is one of many connections between the fantastic and the natural in the narrative and the myth it follows.

Wood is one of the oldest of man’s construction materials. A pivotal scene in Witness sees fugitive detective John Book, hiding from corrupt colleagues within a traditional Amish settlement, take part in a communal barn-raising; during the course of a day dozens of men put the structure together, using only hand tools and sweat. Shot in a painterly way in contrast to the hard work depicted, a deeper authenticity underlies this effort – Harrison Ford was a professional carpenter before he found success as an actor, and so wielded hammer, saw and brace with credibility, whilst the timber used was selected months beforehand as a real family was to use the building after the production departed.

A community hub of a different kind is depicted in The Long Good Friday, when a challenge to a London gangster’s expansion plans includes a bomb devastating the Lion & Unicorn, an East End pub that he owns, just as he and his party arrive. Though typical of the drinking houses built to serve that city’s docks during the Victorian era it is in fact an imitation, erected for the film on a vacant plot in Wapping High Street. The mock-up stood opposite the junction with Scandrett Street, allowing repeated point-of-view shots from the approaching car in the moments before the explosion. Appropriately, given one of the film’s wider themes, apartments were built on the site years later.

The United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky is a stone and concrete pavilion, Modernist architecture from between the world wars. Executing – and foiling – the scheme conceived by Goldfinger to deny access to the gold within it meant extensive location shooting at the neighbouring US Army base bearing that famous name, and the villain’s Flying Circus really did pass within several hundred feet of the target building. When the action came even closer, however, Pinewood Studios in England had to take over, with a life-size replica of the exterior crafted on the backlot and, as the battle moved inside, a soundstage set for the invented multi-storey vault of chromed steel.

Moving up the scale of ambition, for more than sixty years every holder of the title ‘world’s tallest building’ could be found in New York. The most famous examples are the pre-war Empire State building and its post-war successor the World Trade Center. Both were completed just a few years before featuring in the original King Kong and its remake, respectively. Although miniatures were used for the last stand and final fall of the great ape in each version, only the update included substantial footage shot at the actual location. Filming the cavernous lobby of one of the twin towers at night when empty emphasised its impressive scale, whilst the five-acre piazza at the heart of the complex was thronged with extras staring at the body of the deceased Kong. Set in the same city is thriller Sliver, a high-tech variation on the voyeuristic neighbour plot set in a tall, narrow apartment block where the owner has installed hidden cameras. Shot almost entirely at Morgan Court, a Madison Avenue condominium block which still towers over its neighbours yet is only 33 feet wide, the building is filmed with a rare intelligence that recalls Hitchcock or the German Expressionists. Although relatively new at the time of filming in the early nineties, architects Liebman & Liebman had looked to the past for their design which evokes the Art Deco years in its ribbon windows, projecting balconies and curved corners.

Appalled by the Blue Thunder armed surveillance helicopter and a conspiracy to rationalise its deployment over Los Angeles, police pilot Frank Murphy steals the aircraft and triggers an extended aerial hunt around and between downtown’s skyscrapers. He and the ‘Special’ escape a heat-seeking missile by hovering in front of the reflective glass façade of the 52-storey ARCO building, showering debris on pedestrians below, but are stalked and then ambushed by the antagonist’s own helicopter from behind the uncompleted upper stories of the Crocker Bank Center’s towers. Helicopters were flown with unprecedented proximity in and to a complex urban environment to shoot the balletic duel that follows, with actor Roy Scheider performing some of his own take-offs and landings. With Last Action Hero the director who made the roof of another Los Angeles tower famous when it was taken over by armed robbers posing as terrorists repeated the trick with his tongue firmly in cheek. This time the top of the Hyatt Regency in the coastal suburb of Long Beach was the location, with a slapstick funeral scene involving a real crowd, a real helicopter and a real crane. A lift descending the outside of the hotel, though, was temporarily grafted on to the building – Post-Modern, like the film’s script – for the stunt sequence in which it features.

Given its plot revolves around extra-judicial assassination determined by algorithm and mass data mining, political drama is as critical to Captain America: The Winter Soldier as superhero action. Members of SHIELD debate the balance between liberty and security this idea represents, and ultimately do battle over the outcome. Locus of the programme and the moral and physical conflict it brings is the Triskelion, the agency’s Washington, DC headquarters, rising from Theodore Roosevelt Island just north of the Pentagon and towering above the Federal Triangle across the Potomac. Though entirely fictional, the building is convincingly embedded in the city’s built and governmental landscape, plausibly extrapolating recent local architecture in its design and pointedly placed within sight of both the Lincoln Memorial and the Watergate complex.

Old or new, palatial or modest, real or imagined, architecture brings texture, tone and meaning to film. This series has shown some of the ways in which that has been achieved, and perhaps prompted further investigation. For prior to moving beyond the frame, we need first to apprehend it. Thank you for reading.

Chris Rogers writes, speaks and creates tours about architecture and other aspects of visual culture. He has written three books, including How to Read London – A crash course in London architecture (Ivy Press, 2017), a publisher's best-seller. His work and thoughts on architecture, film, art, design and television can be found at www.chrismrogers.net

Think Pieces

Beyond the Frame #24: Cut

Interiors