Full Description
Cinematic Starchitecture explores how examples of famous architecture have circulated throughout cinema history across diverse genres.
Building on the term 'starchitecture' - coined in 1997 for dramatic, monumental structures designed to gain international attention and economic advantage - the authors demonstrate that a crucial part of an architectural structure's iconic star status emerges through its engagement with (and codification by) the media, and with cinema in particular. The book explores how iconic architectural structures have performed a myriad of roles and functions that exceed buildings' everyday uses or identities as aesthetic objects, location markers, or spatial settings, to show that countless films globally have featured famous buildings as inimitable components of narrative exposition, character development, and/or identity construction.
This unique volume will appeal to students, scholars and researchers of Film Studies, Media Studies, and Architecture and Architectural History, as well as those in the areas of Media and Cultural Studies; History; Popular Culture; and Urban Geography.
Contents
Introduction: what is cinematic starchitecture?
Part 1: Starchitects and Cinema
1. Gaudí: Starchitecture, Iconicity, and Barcelona
2. The Iconicity of Architectural Decay in Detroit: The Posthumous Cinematic Re-mediation of Albert Kahn
3. Traces of a Proto-Starchitect: Erich Mendelsohn's Architecture on Screen
Part 2: Iconic Starchitecture in Cinema
4. Plaza and Fortress: Screening Lincoln Center's Ambiguous Iconicity
5. La La Land's (2016) Griffith Observatory: Through the Nostalgic Lens of Rebel Without a Cause and the Studio-Era Musical
Part 3: Lofty Towers and Vertical Views
6. Tokyo Tower on Screen
7. The Nearest Thing to Heaven: the Empire State Building as romantic icon
8. Millennial Global Starchitecture in the City of London and its Cinematic "Other" in Rocks
Part 4: Cinematic Starchitecture and Genre
9. Hong Kong Starchitecture and Action-Sci Fi Cinema
10. The Icon and the Grid: North by Northwest, the United Nations Building, and the Thriller Genre's Media-Architecture Complex
11. Building Dystopia: Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin County Civic Center in THX 1138 (1971) and Gattaca (1997)
Part 5: Architectural Typologies and Styles in Cinema
12. "Concrete Stardom": Brutalism's Cinematic Iconicity and the Spatial Imaginaries of London
13. Pensive Spectacles: On Museal Gazes in Cinematic Starchitecture
14. Poetic Referentiality: The Ocean Liner as Film Star
Index
