Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains by Chad Oppenheim and Andrea Gollin. Tra Publishing, 296 pp., $75.
This month Tra Publishing releases Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains, a playful and thought-provoking book about the way cinema has linked modernism to evil. From the Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired enclave in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest to the naturalistic compound in Ex Machina designed by Jensen & Skodvin, Lair asks the question: “Why do bad guys live in good houses?”
On October 10, Tra hosted a release party at New York’s NeueHouse, where a panel attempted some answers. Lairs turn out to have a few things in common. They are bunkers where villains separate themselves from society. They are bachelor pads where, in the words of Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt, bad men “invite pretty ladies to come and stay, and probably die.” Most importantly, they are aspirational. Whether it is Lex Luthor’s sprawling lair beneath Grand Central (surely the biggest residential space in Manhattan) or a Bond villain’s submarine house, lairs are kingdoms for one, perfectly designed to each villain’s dystopian vision. Or utopian, depending on how you slice it. Villainy is always a matter of perspective. They may be bad guys, but don’t you wish you could live there?
No one understands this better than Lair’s co-editor and conceptual father, Chad Oppenheim of Oppenheim Architecture. At the panel, Oppenheim shared that he saw The Man with the Golden Gun at age seven and knew he “either wanted to be an evil villain or an architect.” Since then, his practice has drawn no small inspiration from the cinematic lairs of his youth. His resort in Wadi Rum, for example, is a striking cross between Scaramanga’s cliff-side lair in the aforementioned Bond film and the desert compound in the 2008 Quantum of Solace. So while in some respects Lair is a fun architectural thought experiment, it is also something between a manifesto and a mood board for Oppenheim Architecture. It turns a villainous proposition into an architectural tenet: if you have the creativity, the money, and the daring, you never need to compromise. It may not be a good rule for living, but it’ll get you a damn fine house.