Best picture nominees
It is the kind of house that would kindle hot pangs of desire in even the most imperturbable editor at Dwell magazine: Clean, horizontal lines. Walls made of Betón brut concrete. Floors and ceilings from fine-grain hardwood. There is a pristine island kitchen with an induction cooktop and temperaturecontrolled wine storage. Plus, near the entrance, a graceful internal courtyard harbors a cluster of bamboo trees — illuminated, of course. (Uplighting vegetation is the design tic of the bourgeoisie.)
If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were to grant an Oscar for architecture as a character in a movie, the Minimalist manse inhabited by the well-to-do Park family in Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” would certainly be the lead contender. The home, which in the film is designed by a fictional starchitect named Namgoong Hyeonja, hits all the markers for tasteful displays of wealth, from the Minimalist furnishings to the Minimalist soaking tub — a desire for less-is-more that applies to everything except scale.
But as design critic Kyle Chayka writes in “The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism,” “Just because something looks simple does not mean it is; the aesthetics of simplicity cloak artifice, or even unsustainable excess.”
In the case of the Park home, the simplicity cloaks a disquieting secret in the basement.
Each of the best-picture nominees for the 92nd Academy Awards employed architecture and urbanism to help tell stories.
Martin Scorsese offered an epic take on a mobster’s regret-filled life in “The Irishman,” a picture redolent of clubby, Old World restaurants. “Ford v Ferrari” and “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood” traveled to the 1960s, a world of Space Age neon, wood-paneled executive suites and ranch-style houses. Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” remained firmly in the present, offering a view of a crumbling relationship set against blandly tasteful middle-class domestic settings and the barren Los Angeles apartment inhabited, at one point, by Adam Driver’s character, a setting whose principal design feature is beige wall-to-wall carpet.
The two best-picture films that take place in wartime are among the most intriguing for the ways they employ architecture — and its absence. So it is little surprise that both also received Oscar nominations for production design.
Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit,” which takes place during World War II, tells the fantastical tale of a German boy and his imaginary friend — who happens to be Hitler.
The exteriors (shot in the Czech Republic) evoke a Baroque German city. But the interiors of the home, where much of the action takes place, features Modernist, Art Deco design flourishes and boldly colored wallpapers — as if this home were a cocoon against everything happening outside. (A cocoon that happens to be hiding a young Jewish woman.)
Hitler, for the record, hated Modernism.
Quite different in its approach to architecture is Sam Mendes’ riveting “1917.” This World War I epic shows little in the way of architecture — but when it does, it is the stuff of nightmares.
There is the design of the trench, where so much of the film takes place, and where countless lives come to an end in a soup of mud and waste. But the most memorable scene shows George MacKay as Lance Cpl. Schofield running for his life through a bombed-out French village at night, flares and bombs illuminating the wreckage of this once picturesque settlement.
It is a hellscape. The end of architecture. Its crumbling ruin seeming to contain only the last vestiges of human life.
Taken collectively, however, the best-picture nominees use architecture in ways that tell compelling stories about the ways in which the poor and the wealthy divide.
Greta Gerwing’s “Little Women” is about the March sisters wrestling with their life options in Civil War-era Concord, Mass. — options on a continuum between getting married and thwarted attempts at a creative life. The film also tells a story of class and the ways in which women aspire to it.
The home belonging to kindly and well-to-do Mr. Laurence, a Georgian Revival mansion played by the Nathaniel Thayer Estate in Lancaster, Mass., sits within view of the March family’s more humble 17th century colonial farmhouse painted a dreary shade of brown. The drafty home of the poor Hummel family down the road highlights the social classes even further. In the Laurence home, the wood trim sparkles; in the March house, the surfaces have a genteel