Prologue: Three Journeys
Introduction: Mapping the Lost Highway
1. Town and City
2. Home
3. Road
4. Stage
5. Room
Acknowledgments
Notes
Image Credits
Works Cited
Index
Critical assessment of the role architecture and design play in David Lynch's films.
Richard Martin is Curator of Public Programmes at the Tate, UK, and a tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK. He completed his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, UK having previously worked at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). He has taught at Birkbeck, Middlesex University and Tate Modern.
A thoughtful exploration of Lynchian space, The Architecture of
David Lynch ... [provides] a wealth of architectural readings, a
diverse bibliography, and a wonderfully insightful analysis of
Lynch's filmography that inspire and enrich re-viewings.
*New Review of Film and Television Studies*
Architecture is more central to the cinema of David Lynch than that
of any other film-maker, and now a book finally exists that not
only grasps architecture's significance for Lynch but shows that it
is impossible to understand these films without a thorough
knowledge of the role that architecture plays in them. Martin's
book is godsend for anyone with even a passing interest in David
Lynch or the relationship between architecture and cinema. He
bombards us with insight after insight.
*Todd McGowan, University of Vermont, USA*
In this important and original study Richard Martin explores
connections between the cinema of David Lynch and a series of
distinctive urban spaces, drawing on insights from architectural
history, cultural geography and contemporary film theory.
*Matthew Gandy, University College London, UK*
While David Lynch’s admirers have long marvelled at his talents as
an engineer of atmosphere, the director’s architectural thinking
has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. The
Architecture of David Lynch is thus a welcome study. Brimming with
insight and intelligence, this book inhabits the obsessive spatial
topoi of Lynch’s films, and finds there the traces of history. In
Martin’s fascinating account, Lynch’s moody architecture is a way
of engaging modernity’s built environments through the kinds of
spaces that only cinema can fashion.
*Justus Nieland, Michigan State University, USA*
The reviewer commends the author on the work’s intelligence and
insightful considerations of Lynch’s use of space, place and
architecture in his films... With an impressive bibliography and 62
color plates of film stills, reproductions of paintings, and
photographs of filming locations, the book is an important
contribution to Lynch scholarship and engages film scholars to
consider the dynamics of space, place and architecture in cinema...
Martin’s text effectively joins the canonical works of Lynch
scholarship, while simultaneously forcing all film scholars to
re-evaluate the impact, effect and importance of space, place and
architecture in film.
*CINEJ Cinema Journal*
Incisive and highly readable... Martin finds solid rhetorical
ground and a plethora of interdisciplinary source material from
which to articulate astonishingly deep, intricate, and, yes,
original readings of Lynch’s work... The Architecture of David
Lynch is clearly an indispensable entry in a densely analyzed field
of film and auteur studies.
*Jason Clemence, Cultural Politics*
Martin’s study is such an important addition to ‘Lynch’ studies,
offering a unique analysis of Lynch’s cinematic work through design
and construction... Martin’s particular, unique focus shows how
architecture forces us to confront the strange within the urban and
suburban, and the social forces at work in the use of architecture,
essentially re-establishing and altering our conceptions of the
everyday.
*Siobhan Lyons, Media International Australia*
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