FILM – ArchDaily – "The Fountainhead"

Excerpt from the article:

“Films & Architecture: “The Fountainhead”
Aug 2012
By Daniel Portilla

We jump back to the end of 1940′s to remember the film based on Ayn Rand’s acclaimed book, The Fountainhead. The movie talks about the architectural debate between the industrialisation of the profession and the individual creation. An issue that we can consider still questionable nowadays.

I guess most of our readers have seen this classic or have read the book instead. Let us know your thoughts about the “creation” concept in architecture.

MAIN INFO

Original title: The Fountainhead
Year: 1949
Runtime: 114 min.
Country: United States
Director: King Vidor
Writer: Ayn Rand
Soundtrack: Max Steiner
Cast: Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey, Kent Smith, Robert Douglas, Henry Hull

PLOT

Howard Roark, a brilliant young architect, is expelled from his architecture school for refusing to follow the school’s outdated traditions. He goes to New York to work for Henry Cameron, a disgraced architect whom Roark admires. Roark’s schoolmate, Peter Keating, moves to New York and goes to work for the prestigious architectural firm Francon & Heyer, run by the famous Guy Francon. Roark and Cameron create beautiful work, but their projects rarely receive recognition, whereas Keating’s ability to flatter and please brings him almost instant success. In just a few years, he becomes a partner at the firm after he causes Francon’s previous partner to have a stroke. Henry Cameron retires, financially ruined, and Roark opens his own small office. His unwillingness to compromise his designs in order to satisfy clients eventually forces him to close down the office and take a job at a granite quarry in Connecticut.

In Connecticut, Roark feels an immediate, passionate attraction to Dominique Francon, Guy Francon’s temperamental and beautiful daughter. Society disgusts Dominique, and she has retreated to her family’s estate to escape the mediocre architecture she sees all around her. One night, Roark enters the house and rapes her. Dominique discovers that this is what she had needed, but when she looks for Roark, he has left the quarry to design a building for a prominent New York businessman. Dominique returns to New York and discovers Roark’s identity. She realizes that he designed a building she admires. Dominique and Roark begin to meet in secret, but in public she tries to sabotage his career and destroy him. Ellsworth Toohey, an architectural critic and socialist, slowly prepares to rise to power. He seeks to prevent men from excelling by teaching that talent and ability are of no great consequence, and that the greatest virtue is humility. Toohey sees Roark as a great threat and tries to destroy him. Toohey convinces a weak-minded businessman named Hopton Stoddard to hire Roark as the designer for a temple dedicated to the human spirit, then persuades the businessman to sue Roark once the building is completed. At Roark’s trial, every prominent architect in New York testifies that Roark’s style is unorthodox and illegitimate, but Dominique declares that the world does not deserve the gift Roark has given it. Stoddard wins the case and Roark loses his business again. To punish herself for desiring Roark, Dominique marries Peter Keating.

[…]

Previously posted on this section…

– The Belly of an Architect
– Blade Runner
– Gattaca
– Metropolis
– My Architect
– Lost In Translation
– The International
– Equilibrium
– THX 1138
– Æon Flux
– Rear Window
– Koyaanisqatsi
– My Uncle
– Manufatured Landscapes
– The Architect
– Dark City“

To continue reading the article…

(Source: ArchDaily)