Villainous Lairs
John Hill
24. October 2023
Architect Valery Augustin of DNA A+D explains how the Vandamm House in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, at top, was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. (Photo: Screenshot from “Architect Breaks Down Why Movie Villains Live In Ultra-Modern Houses”)
A new video from Architectural Digest delves into something fans of architecture and cinema have long appreciated: the prevalence of ultra-modern houses as the lairs of villains in Hollywood movies.
Architect Valery Augustin is hardly the first person to explore the relationship between cinematic villains and modern architecture*, but his approach to explaining houses/films such as the Vandamm House in North by Northwest (1959) and John Lautner's Chemosphere in both Body Double (1984) and Charlie's Angels (2000) — sitting at a cutting mat with images of the houses — is effective, especially combined with the numerous film clips and descriptive overlays. The 14-minute video is worth watching for Augustin's analysis, which includes films that were not included in previous explorations of villainous lairs.
*Readers with a strong interest in the subject should check out:
- Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films by Benjamin Critton (B. Critton, 2010)
- Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains, edited by Chad Oppenheim and Andrea Gollin (Tra Publishing, 2019)
- The Architecture of Suspense: The Built World in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock
by Christine Madrid French (University of Virginia Press, 2022)
Halloween Bonus!
In another recent video from Architectural Digest, architect Robert Cangelosi gives a walking tour of “New Orleans’ Most Haunted Houses”: