Why ‘Die Hard’ is the best architecture film ever filmed (and also a Christmas one) | ICON Design

December 25 is an ideal date to defend ideas that, at any other time of the year, would require a padded room, a friend to take away your matches and, at the very least, a drink before starting to speak. The body asks for a sofa, peeling shrimp, a strategic 40-minute nap that ends up being two hours and a low-voltage domestic discussion about whether the dishwasher supports half a load or whether that is a bourgeois superstition. And yet, here we are, because there are truths that can only be said when the world lets its guard down, the agenda is suspended and television programming definitively surrenders to impossible advertisements for equally impossible perfumes. Here is one: crystal jungle It’s an excellent Christmas movie and also the best architecture movie ever made.

What I am making is a literal, technical and quite serious statement, although it comes wrapped in machine guns, bad jokes and a man in an undershirt, barefoot and bleeding from a corporate carpet that cost more than your car. It also helps the confusion that this debate has historically been treated with the same intellectual rigor as deciding whether Gremlins counts as children’s cinema or as a veiled threat to responsible parenting. The difference is that there is structure here. Literally. Concrete, steel, ducts and a boss section.

Architecture, when it appears in cinema, usually does so in disguise. Sometimes it is dressed in beautiful scenery: iconic buildings, often signed by famous architects, so well lit that they seem to apologize for existing, as if they were afraid of distracting the viewer from important feelings, those that always occur in front of very expensive windows. Other times he adopts the disguise of the architect-artist: tormented, misunderstood, always two coffees away from a great idea and one from an existential crisis, with dark circles under his eyes that could have their own zip code. Both options have produced great films. Both carefully avoid architecture as it works in real life, which includes decisions inherited from people already retired, systems that no one fully understands, and meetings in which someone asks, with a smile, if “that couldn’t be done cheaper.”

That’s why Gattacafor example, is as beautiful as it is remote. Its architecture—by Frank Lloyd Wright, no less—is impeccable, sharp, perfect for walking around in an Armani suit (not a minor fact: the costumes are, indeed, by Armani) while you look to the future in silence and with the look of having understood something important. It works like an expensive suit: it styles, accompanies and never interferes. And that’s why The Brutalist o The Springwith all their power, use architecture as an interchangeable craft. You change shots for canvases or scores and the film continues to breathe the same. The drama is in the creator, not in the craft, nor in the small detail that buildings, unlike poems, fall if you cheat.

crystal jungle Enter through another door, one that is usually marked “Authorized Personnel Only” and that almost no one looks at because everyone goes straight to the hall. Here the building intervenes directly in the action. It generates it.

To begin with, Nakatomi Plaza is a specific skyscraper, located in a precise place and at a very specific time in the urban development of Los Angeles. A skyscraper from the 1980s, which in Los Angeles means something like “tall, but not crazy” and “corporate, but still proud to be new.” It is relatively isolated, like a one-to-one scale model forgotten on a table. It is not part of a skyline; inaugurates it. And that matters more than it seems.

This isolation turns the building into a closed ecosystem. Far enough that the police will be late. Alone enough that everything that happens inside has to be resolved inside. If Nakatomi Plaza were embedded in Manhattan, the movie would be 15 minutes long and end with someone yelling, “There’s a protocol for this!” Here, however, the building can display its personality, which is a polite way of saying its section.

Because Nakatomi Plaza is half finished. There are finished floors and floors that seem like a guided tour into the soul of the building. Ducts, exposed concrete, installation closets, false ceilings that still do not pretend to be sky. The building is shown at its most honest, just before it is made up for the institutional photo. Any architect recognizes that exact moment when everything works and no one wants to see it.

John McClane moves through these spaces like a maintenance technician with post-traumatic stress. It circulates where technology circulates, not where power does. And therein lies the key: McClane survives thanks to that hidden, but essential, system of the building. Thanks to secondary routes, air conditioning ducts, little steps, spaces designed to be invisible. The hero does not win by strength, he wins by section, which is a phrase that should be printed on t-shirts and handed out first in the race.

In any building of a certain height and complexity, the section separates circulations, and the circulations separate worlds. People enter through the lobby, a space designed to reassure shareholders and disorient visitors; while things enter through the basement. The cargo, the logistics, all that stuff that never appears in the renders Because it does not look good with fine typography, it circulates below, through the functional subsoil where the epic becomes an instruction manual. Hans Gruber and his people understand this from minute one and enter from both ends of Nakatomi Plaza: with armed theatricality in the lobby and with almost administrative efficiency in the basements. There they park a truck that will then deliver to an ambulance, a perfect old trick. That basement, invisible by definition, becomes the place where everything is possible, precisely because no one looks, no one asks and no one believes that what is important could be happening there.

This is where the building stops being a stage and begins to behave like a character. This separation of circulations is not only functional or aesthetic, it is a way of ordering the world, of deciding what is seen and what is hidden, who is in charge and who runs. Here architecture distributes power, creates advantages, creates traps. McClane learns to read the building as he goes; the villains believe they have read it all before entering. The conflict appears in that minimal margin, that place where someone thought that nothing else needed to be checked. As in almost any work, by the way.

Once this logic is accepted, everything that happens next becomes perfectly reasonable. The building acts with implacable coherence with itself. Everything works as designed. It really works. Nakatomi Plaza does not fail, it operates efficiently. And that’s why it allows everything to get out of control, that’s why disaster is so efficient. And so much fun for the viewer, who deep down also enjoys when well-done things are taken to the limit.

Sometimes they ask me what is the best architecture book that has ever been written and I usually say that it is Crematoriumby Rafael Chirbes, a novel that we will not see on the art and architecture shelves of bookstores. But it is. Chirbes writes about what architecture produces when it solidifies in territory, money and custom. Without star architects or singular buildings. Just spatial decisions repeated until they become a moral landscape. crystal jungle does essentially the same thing, but with Christmas carols and very polite Germans shooting with machine guns. It is an architectural film in the strictest and least academic sense possible. Move forward without theorizing, trusting that the building explains itself. And he does it. With elevators, stairs, glass, basements. The skyscraper functions as a true protagonist because of its capacity for intervention, not because it is iconic or charismatic. Nakatomi Plaza imposes routes, limits options, decides who is in charge and who runs. Practice architecture instead of talking about it.

Oh, and yes, it’s also a great Christmas film. And it is something that has to do with time, not with the atmospheric but with the other. Let’s see, both in the script by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. De Souza and in the direction by John McTiernan, there is a deeply architectural knowledge of time. Not only in the exquisite placement of pauses between the general trepidation (the glass walk scene is a formidable example of how to understand narrative rhythm) but in the ecosystem itself that gives shape to the film: Christmas night. Essentially the only day of the year that the building will be empty, or almost empty. And there, and then, the company party that unfolds as a ritual prior to the collapse. Corporate architecture is designed for the day, for the schedule, for the representation of order. At night, and at Christmas, she becomes porous, naive, a little childish in her technological faith. As if no one had foreseen that the building could be used for anything other than working or pretending to work. A space designed for routine that is left without routine, and that is where you see how it really works.

So this December 25, if anyone insists that crystal jungle It’s not a Christmas movie, you can try to explain what was in the previous paragraph. Or they can do something better: look at that half-finished skyscraper, planted in Los Angeles as a premature certainty. To its ducts, to its elevators, to its scenic rooftop, to its impeccable lobby and to its invisible basement. There, between pipes and corporate carpets, is one of the most honest architectural lessons that cinema has ever given. And it also explodes. That always helps to establish concepts.