Along with limitless wealth, undyingly obedient henchmen, the company of glamorous-but-deadly assistants, and a good sense of your own global self-importance, one of the major perks of being a world-class super-criminal is access to some of the planet's very best architects and interior designers.
Ken Adam must be at the top of every villain's list. Known chiefly for his work on the James Bond movies and the famous War Room in Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), Adam has undoubtedly been the pre-eminent production designer of 20th century film; a master of vast spaces which fuse German Expressionist cinema and high Modernist architecture. The question was once asked 'who is the real star of James Bond - Connery, Lazenby or Moore?' The answer? 'Ken Adam'.
Curated by David Sylvester, it was apt and peculiarly compelling that the show straddled the millennium - apt in the sense that it focused on cinema, the 20th century's greatest artistic innovation, along with a number of that century's pre-eminent preoccupations, namely war and the future. However, architecture, stage and screen design exhibitions often tease rather than satisfy. You can never enter the buildings, explore the sets, play with the props, or even get to enjoy the films they starred in. Glass display cabinets can make you feel like the spectator of a non-spectator sport, such as chess or cards, witness to a game which is pleasurable only to its participants.
In the opening rooms of this exhibition, wall-sized blow-ups of drawings, along with stills from Dr Strangelove and Moonraker (1979), attempted to recreate the atmosphere of walking into an Adam set. Designed to wow, the rooms were vaguely disappointing and felt peculiarly surplus to the rest of the show. Perspective was skewed, continuity and sense of scale lost. Far more fascinating was the manner in which the following 100 or so small, inanimate drawings managed to convey so much about what such a large, loud action-packed medium as cinema can do.
Pinned behind glass screens, and arranged so that roughly one screen represented each film, the drawings covered Adam's earliest projects to the present. Curiously, the monotony of seeing hundreds of black and white drawings, with only a hint of colour here and there, served to produce a compellingly lucid overview. Each design, produced with Adam's trademark chunky black Flowmaster marker pen, look like exercises in the fundamentals of drawing. In Adam's study The Space Shuttle Launch Pad (1978) from Moonraker, lines start from a vanishing point somewhere in the future before flying out at an alarming speed. Most of these drawings look accelerated, as if Bond had slammed the pedal to the metal of his Aston Martin DB5 (whose gadgets were another of Adam's creations).
But in the absence of deadly perspectival lines, the circle is Adam's geometry of choice, and it pulls the viewer into a frantic whirlpool of draughtsmanship. As, for example, in The Interior of Willard Whyte's Penthouse Apartment from Diamonds are Forever (1971). Even his location scouting for later films, such as The Last Emperor (1985) and The Madness of King George (1994), reflect his eye for the Speer-esque hubris of brutal giganticism.
In drawing after drawing, details focus on the quintessential cinematic elements Adam recognises. With their vanishing points and construction lines, the designs look like projection beams turned on their audience. Loose and confident shading marks seem to be in perpetual movement. Two drawings in particular - The Brainwashing Chamber (1964) in The Ipcress File (1965), (written by Len Deighton as a riposte to the Bond novels), and The Laser Meditation Room from Star Trek (1977) - are exemplary in this respect. The similarity of both studies underscores an essential theme of the exhibition - they barely depict any discernible space at all. Adam's thick black pen blocks out the basics of a large empty area, spotlights pierce the dark and converge on a central point: in The Ipcress File they illuminate an unsupported ladder and three screens, in the Star Trek study, a lone figure. As with the cinema, it's just you, the projector beam, the screen, and the dark. And, in the case of these drawings, that's all you need to know.
