Believe me when I tell you that no one on the planet loves Alfred Hitchcock movies, particularly Rear Window, more than my beloved. Seriously. So unless a hospital emergency pulls us away I’d bet money that on Tuesday March 18, 2008 at 6PM you’ll find us at the Speed Museum for the lecture The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
In
1954, audiences were first treated to what is perhaps the
ultimate Alfred Hitchcock movie, Rear Window. The
film’s unsettling murder mystery was certainly entertaining
enough, but Hitchcock achieved more than the usual resonance
with audiences, through the use of his mammoth set representing
an apartment-house courtyard between West 10th and 11th
Streets in New York’s Greenwich Village. Hitchcock’s apartments
in Rear Window are emblematic of many factors common
to American life in 1954, from new questions of privacy
generated by smaller living spaces, to a need to individualize
near-identical housing units, to the anonymity newly available
to those who would live outside society’s rules. The
Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window will
attempt to demonstrate how the director used commonly encountered
architectural elements and used them to manipulate his
audiences into acceptance of the tale he wished to tell.
Sandy McLendon writes about architecture and design. His
work has appeared in Old House Interiors and Arts & Crafts
Homes, as well as Modernism Magazine, where
he is a contributing editor. His book about the use of
prefabrication in building custom housing, PreFAB Elements,
was published in 2005 by HarperCollins. Admission is free.
Presented in the auditorium.
Speed Museum
2035 South Third Street
Louisville, Kentucky 40208
March 12, 2008
Architecture, Art, Lecture, Museum, UofL