MODERN HOUSE WITH DOLLHOUSE VIEWS
I watched the Bling Ring, about a group of high school students who rob the homes of Hollywood celebrities, with little interest in their exploits. What I really wanted to see was the landscape of Los Angeles, where I spent a blissful sabbatical four years ago. But the movie unfolds mostly inside – of the sun-filled suburban houses where the kids live, the compact cars they drive around in, and the opulently appointed mansions they plunder at night. We see more of Paris Hilton’s dressing rooms, a maze of gaudy, gilded, chandelier-lit chambers, than we do of the city’s skyline.
But there’s one heart-stopping cityscape, of a modern house in the Hollywood Hills at night. It’s meant to be Audrina Patridge’s house, where the group’s robbery was captured on security camera video and came to the attention of the police. We see the drama unfold as a bird would, from a point high behind one corner of the house, with the hills spilling down around. The view resembles an axonometric, a type of architectural drawing that shows an object without distorting its vertical or horizontal dimensions. It’s a view that feels, somehow, more objective, cooler, than a perspective, which distorts the scale of objects that are very close and very far.
The house’s skin is opened with glass and balconies on all sides, and its rooms are flushed with cool white light, so that, like a dollhouse, all its insides are revealed. (Its architecture, anchored by two floating concrete floor slabs, is a splendid homage to Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino.) The camera remains still for several minutes and we watch, silently, as the kids enter the house from below, survey the first floor, arrive at the second floor, and then, slowly, wander back downstairs and leave. After they drive away we’re left looking for about half a minute more, far longer than the story demands. The house remains empty, and the city pulsates around it like a tissue of light.