There’s a fantastic article on Life Without Buildings, Jimmy Stamp’s blog about architecture out of context, on how Gotham City came to have the look we know from the Tim Burton films (within the Batman universe, that is) and includes a touch of literary criticism along with some great images, not least of which is a comparison of Hugh Ferriss’s renderings with Anton Furst’s finished design sketches on the first Burton film.
To explain the distinctive skyline of Gotham City, Alan Grant wrote a story for the series in 1992, Destroyer, which introduced an overzealous architecture historian (and Navy SEAL) who
bombs abandoned and derelict “soulless concrete” buildings that obscure the Neo-gothic architecture of the city’s original designer, Cyrus Pinkney, on whom the Mad Bomber wrote his thesis. While carefully planting explosives, our antagonist’s inner monologue is rampant with polemics decrying the conformity induced by the contemporary architecture of Gotham. “Live in a box, shop in a box, die in a box. Robots, that’s what they want. Not people. Robots that consume. Straight lines – sharp angles – square boxes. No wonder the city’s gone mad.”
Stamp observes that
Since its inception, Gotham City has been presented as the embodiment of the urban fears that helped give rise to the American suburbs, the safe havens from the city that they are. Gotham City has always been a dark place, full of steam and rats and crime. A city of graveyards and gargoyles; alleys and asylums. Gotham is a nightmare, a distorted metropolis that corrupts the souls of good men.
He continues:
we learn that the religious fanatic architect Cyrus Pinkney was hired by the equally moralist Judge Solomon Wayne, ancestor of Batman’s alter-ego, Bruce Wayne. For Solomon Wayne, a city should be a sanctuary, a fortress protecting culture and civility from the “godlessness of the wilds.” For Pinkney, Gotham needed structures to defend itself from the evil spirits responsible for corrupting man. Through a mystical epiphany, the Mad Bomber came to believe that Pinkney’s buildings literally kept “the demons” at bay. Cities have the power to effect the consciousness of its inhabitants and the ubiquitous gargoyles of the “Gotham Style” were intended to frighten people onto the path of righteousness.
Stamp mentions Ferriss’s observation that if architectural form follows function, then an effect on the inhabitants follows form; just imagine, then, how warped the inhabitants of Gotham City must be! He goes on:
Through the filter of the bomber’s insanity, Batman is, ironically, seen as one of the demons corrupting the city. Indeed, as drawn in this series, Batman is a kind of expressionist demon; cloaked in shadows and violent movement of swirling of cape and cowl. But is he a demon, or is he a living manifestation of Gotham’s gargoyles? Of its stone protectors? A man shaped, perhaps unconsciously, by the gothic vaults and flying buttresses and monstrous sculptures of Cyrus Pinkney. A man who, like the city he protects, frightens the citizens onto the path of righteousness.
With his psychological origins linked to the rampant criminal behavior of Gotham, Batman is inarguably a product, an expression, of the city he lives in. But is he its demon or its savior? … Despite his noble intentions, it’s entirely possible that Batman is in fact one of the major causes of Gotham’s problems.
The full article is well worth a read. Check it out here.
