The historical architecture of Wes Anderson
The Grand Budapest Hotel
O.I. Bierens (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
MTA van Thoor – Mentor (TU Delft - Heritage & Values)
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Abstract
This thesis explores the relationship between architecture and film through the analysis of the cinema of Wes Anderson.The research focuses specifically
on the understanding of the spaces which Anderson has created in a historical per- spective. First, the relationship between architecture and film is explored through lite- rature research.The articulation of lived space forms the basis and common ground for architecture and cinema. Being both arts of the author, cinema and architecture have the potential to generate emotions, awaken our soul and to shift the attention of the viewer from the inside to the outside. Both cinema and architecture have the ability to construct spaces in the mind, articulate the surface between the world and our own mental experience, where meaning and value are blend.
The architecture, which plays a central role in the films of Anderson, is analy- zed. Anderson introduces spaces through the habits, ideals and aspirations of the indi- vidual, bringing buildings to life. Anderson balances stories between reality and fantasy, transcending the rules of geometry. The architecture in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is analyzed as a case study. The film depicts the glory days and the fall down of a grand hotel in different eras but is above all a story of decay, loneliness and personal loss.Anderson intended to give homage to European Grandeur at the turn of the 19th century on the one hand and communist architecture on the other hand. The observations and research show contradictions and paradoxes in the blend of architectural styles depicted in the film. The conflicts and contradictions between foreign influences and ideological structures are both visible in the 1940s and the 1960s version of the exterior of the hotel. In the interior, the contradictory usage of material on the one hand and the rational floorplan and technological developments on the other hand shows the changing ideas about the function and definition of the hotel. Most important, the hotel resembles the personage of the characters who live in a forgotten and lost world.Anderson shows that spaces can question our narrative and imagination. When architecture can evoke this experience, the true quality of the practice is utilized and a level of consciousness is reached where dream, feeling and emotions reside.