Influences: Ike Ijeh and Hitchcock’s North by Northwest

Ever since I was a child I’ve always been a huge fan of Alfred Hitchcock, an adoration that only increased when I found out that he had grown up just yards away from me in Leytonstone, east London. His classic films are too many to mention but my favourite remains an architectural as well as cinematic masterpiece.

To date North by Northwest (1959) gives one of the most powerful cinematic depictions of how architecture can drive a narrative and provoke a heightened emotional response. In a number of beautifully crafted set-pieces, we see Hitchcock cleverly using highly theatricalised architectural backdrops to turbocharge drama and suspense.

First, after a murder takes place at NYC’s recently completed UN HQ (by Corbusier and others), we see the ensuing commotion from a camera perched high up – a simulacra of the skyscraper’s façade – as if the dizzying height is a metaphor for the chaos unfolding below.

Right at the end of the film just before an iconic scramble across Mount Rushmore, the hero plots an ambitious rescue from a villain’s lair conceived as a sumptuous rendition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, the scale of his plight graphically conveyed when he scrambles precariously along one of its mighty leaning steel girders perched over a rocky gorge.

Hitchcock may have been an Englishman and a film director. But in this classic film he creates one of the most stirring odes to American Modernist architecture ever captured on screen.

About Ike

Ike Ijeh is an architect, author and former parliamentary candidate who has been an architecture critic for the past 10 years. His practice, LondonArchitectureWorks.com, specialises in residential, commercial and public realm work. He also founded  LondonArchitectureWalks.com, an architectural guided walks provider. Ike has recently published his latest book, Designing London: Understanding the Character of the City (Lund Humphries) and can also be found on alternate Tuesdays as the resident architecture expert on BBC London Radio 94.9’s Robert Elms show.

Ike sat his Parts 1 and 2 at the University of Liverpool and his Part 3 at South Bank University in London. He will be a visiting examiner for Part 3 VIVAs this autumn.