What is the best scene ever designed? Ask Steven Spielberg! For him, it’s Ken Adams architecture for him War Room in Stanley Kubrick’s war satire “Dr. Strange Or How I Learned To Love The Bomb”. A sparsely lit machine room of power, where the most powerful men in the world sit in a circle and then face the end of the world.
Ken Adam is arguably the most famous exponent of an art that tends to only get the spotlight at the Oscars for Production Design once a year. The cinema is pure scenery work and the depiction of the world – even with all its distortions – needs a craftsman who understands something about reality and its imagination at the same time. The Briton, who was born in Berlin as Klaus Adam into an upper-class Jewish family, seemed to have this in his cradle. His parents owned a chain of department stores – and Adam came into contact with their magnificent buildings, including those by Mies van der Rohe, early on. After studying architecture, he longed to work in cinema. The starting signal for his impressive work was the set design for “The Curse of the Demon”, a kind of “Cat People” variation from 1957. This was followed by several films in the genre area and work in the art department for classics such as “Around the World in 80 Days ‘ and ‘Ben Hur’, until by 1962 he had already found his life’s work: making stages for James Bond.
Ken Adam was cast in James Bond: 007 Chases Dr. No” (1962), the first film in the series, and stayed with the agent for a long time as film set designer. Just two years later, with “Dr. Strange…” his already mentioned masterpiece. Kubrick relied on his talented hands and vision – he designed all his film sets as sketches with a broad Flo-Master felt-tip pen – even for his complicated historical film “Barry Lyndon”. In the course of his career, which ended for the big screen with “Taking Sides – Der Fall Furtwängler” in 2001, he worked on numerous productions, most of which used his work very subtly. It also included some films that would hardly have been associated with Adam: the Nazi sex trash “Salon Kitty” and the charming comedy “Coffee, Milk and Sugar” starring Whoopie Goldberg, Mary-Louise Parker and Drew Barrymore .
With numerous sketches, concepts and photographs from his archive at the Deutsche Kinemathek, a hand-signed Collector’s Edition now shows his impressive works. Many pictures can be seen for the first time. While the excerpts impress, the real treasure is arguably the series of interviews his biographer Christopher Frayling conducted with him, which reveal what a hell of a job it was sometimes to please great directors and design the right sets (or designs in the last one). moment to overthrow and redesign).
The Ken Adam Archives
Christopher Frayling
In collaboration with the Deutsche Kinemathek, which has housed Ken Adams’ personal archive since 2012
Hardcover, bound in iridescent bicolor fabric, with 4-phase hologram, 36 x 36 cm, 3.88 kg, 360 pages, with engraved acrylic book stand
Collector’s Edition of 1,000 copies numbered and signed by Ken Adam
850 euros
Next page: Exclusive look at treasures from the Ken Adam Archive