- Hi, I'm Michael Wyetzner.
And I've been an architect for over 35 years.
Today, we're gonna look at every live action depiction
of Wayne Manor and how it has evolved over time.
Of course, Batman started as a comic strip
created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane,
in Detective Comics, in 1939.
So let's peek at the source material
before we jump into the screen portrayals.
So this was how Wayne Manor
was portrayed in the early comics.
So here's everything that jumps out at me.
It's sort of in a Spanish mission style,
with the stucco and the arched windows.
It's got this red tile roof.
Compared to all the grandiose palaces
that Bruce Wayne is later depicted as living in,
this one is extremely modest.
Even the windows just underneath this roof line
appear to be like they're in a low-ceilinged attic space.
So this is just a modest suburban house, nothing grandiose,
nothing luxurious like you would expect
the billionaire Bruce Wayne to live in.
The first live action version of Wayne Manor
is from the serial in 1943, simply titled "Batman."
- [Announcer] High atop one of the hills
which ring the teaming metropolis of Gotham City,
a large house rears its bulk against the dark sky.
Hidden headquarters of America's
number one crime fighter, Batman.
- So there's a dark and mysterious photo
and you can't see a lot.
But what you can see are these two gables,
which implies that there's two wings to the house.
So typically, a pitched roof has a ridge beam,
and then it has rafters to create the pitch.
And at the end of that roof is the wall,
and this is the gable.
So obviously the house has gotten much bigger
than what was depicted in the comic.
And it also has these sort of spires,
and chimneys, and these little towers coming off of it.
And you could see this one large dormer
coming off this gable on the left.
So not only is the image dark,
but the series has a dark side as well.
Frankly, this was made as an anti-Japanese propaganda film
in the middle of World War II
and has some very racist depictions of Asian people in it.
Next, let's look at Wayne Manor
from "Batman and Robin" in 1949.
So here's what jumps out at me.
It's just a regular colonial suburban house.
I mean, you could see the windows
on the second floor with their little shutters
and their double hung with their six over six windows.
You could see neighbors walking by.
There's not even a fence that sort of
walls it off from the rest of the community.
- Does that set up sound right to you?
- No, it doesn't.
And Batman and Robin had better look into it.
- It's 1949.
The war is over.
Compared to the last image that was dark and mysterious,
this is a sunny and happy suburban depiction of Wayne Manor.
So this house has a long history in film and television.
This is the Lindsay House on Blondie Street,
on the Warner Brothers back lot.
"Bewitched" was filmed here,
"Dennis the Menace" was filmed here,
The Three Stooges filmed some stuff here.
And in fact, it was Danny Glover's house
in the Lethal Weapon movies.
Next, let's take a look at the ancestral home of Bruce Wayne
from the television series in the 1960s.
- [Announcer] Millionaire, Bruce Wayne,
and his youthful ward, Dick Grayson,
have been summoned back to Wayne Manor
by an urgent but anonymous call for help.
- So there's a lot going on in this house.
It's got the double gables like we saw from earlier.
It's got this stone bay with an entrance below between them,
and the entrance implies a grander entrance
that one would use to enter into some big courtyard.
And it has this crenelated silhouette
of what appears to be like a bat.
Which I don't believe is intentional,
but nonetheless, once you see it, you can't unsee it.
It appears to be a collegiate gothic house,
with the windows with the stone mullions,
and then the smaller windows between
that you can see here and here.
It's made from clinker brick.
Those are the bricks that in the kiln stuck to other bricks.
And when they're broken apart, they become very irregular.
Which gives it a very textured, articulated feel.
And it's got these coins at the corners,
which were actually begun by the Romans
to reinforce the corners of brick structures.
But in this case, it's purely decorative.
So they used this motif of decorative limestone detailing.
And you could see it on the gables
that extend past the roof.
You could see it in this medallion.
And you could see it in the sills and the frames
on the windows and the lintels.
It implies a grander level of luxuriousness,
specifically because it's more materials,
and more workmanship, and just more labor.
Although the show was goofy, it somewhat can't be.
[dynamic music]
- Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb.
- It's a really grand and quite beautiful house.
And it's much more consistent with what we'll see
as we move forward.
Next up is "Batman" from director Tim Burton.
So here's everything that jumps out at me.
This is clearly a real castle.
It's got these crenellations,
which is indicative of a castle from the Middle Ages.
And then it's got these flanking wings,
which have this really ornate gothic feel to them,
with the stained glass windows, and the fine stonework,
and all this beautiful ornamentation.
So this is actually Knebworth House, which was built
for the Lytton family, starting in the Middle Ages.
And one of the descendants of that family
is Edward Bulwer Lyton, who was a writer,
and coined the phrase, the pen is mightier than the sword.
So if the last house was a grand residence,
this is now a palatial estate.
So in terms of the Batman story,
this is truly an ancestral home.
- Do you like eating in here?
- You wanna know the truth,
I don't think I've ever been in this room before.
- Next up, Tim Burton returns with "Batman Returns."
So what I like about this house a lot
is that at first glance it has the feel of a regular house
with this traditional pitched roof and these dormers.
But in fact, the scale is so overblown
with these multi-stories that he implies
by putting in all these tiny little windows
that it becomes this sort of fantastical kind of building.
And right away, you know it's not real.
He's using a whole series of styles
to portray a very spooky and mysterious kind of building.
The building has this tripartite feeling to it
with these three towers,
and the central tower being the entrance,
and a little different than the towers at the edge.
And it has this wacky arrangement
of these tiny little dormers,
which is where the staff would live
in a house like this, up in the attic.
And they're just placed sort of all willy-nilly.
You could see more detail on this building
on another model version of it,
which is sitting in a fish tank in the film.
[mysterious music]
- Ready?
- I think I'll take the stairs.
- You could see much more clearly that big,
tall stone base, which according to the rest of the building
looks like it should be three stories high,
with these tiny little slot windows,
and this huge overblown lintel above the slot window.
And you could see much clearer on this version
that the dormers that pop out
and create these sort of three towers.
It's got the scale of a huge apartment house.
It's like something you expect to see on Central Park West.
So this works really well for a movie
because the design is really all about fantasy.
[dramatic music]
- Meow.
- So this next depiction of Wayne Manor
has been used in several Batman versions over the decades.
[menacing music]
- Wayne Manor.
Hm!
- Starting from the top, it's got the silhouette
of the chimneys and they're all paired.
It's got the pitched roof with the dormers.
It has this very sort of detailed stone balustrade
separating the roof line from the rest of the building.
It's got these two wings
flanking the central piece of the building.
It has these punched windows that are framed in stone.
And it has this entrance that we've seen before
that implies a grander entrance into a court.
But in this case has been reduced
just to a double door with an arch.
And it has a water line,
the stone corners that ties the entire thing together.
And this is a collegiate style building, but in this case
it's much more stripped down, with very little ornament.
Although it is quite large
and you could see it's on a vast estate.
So what's a little different about this building,
compared to the other buildings,
is it sort of feels like a school building.
It doesn't feel like a palace
and it doesn't feel like a house.
It sort of feels now like a building
that's used for higher education, because that's what it is.
This is actually Stevenson Taylor Hall
at the Webb Institute in Glen Cove on Long Island.
And it was built in 1912.
This building was used in "Batman Forever,"
"Batman and Robin," "Joker."
And it was even used on the TV show "Gotham."
So what I find interesting about this depiction
of Wayne Manor is that it's a much more sober
and pragmatic building than previous depictions.
It gives a whole different feeling to the Caped Crusader.
Next up is Wayne Manor as shown in "Batman Begins."
Okay, so here's everything that jumps out at me.
Once again, we've gone to a grand, palatial estate.
So this is actually a revival of the Elizabethan,
or Jacobean style, which is all stone.
And it has this distinctive horizontal banding,
so it gives it this feeling that the building is stacked.
And this is actually Mentmore Towers in England.
And it was built for the Rothschild family in the 1850s.
And it was designed by Joseph Paxton, the famous architect
who built the Crystal Palace
for the World Exhibition, in 1851, in London.
And the other thing that Elizabethan buildings
are known for are their very long galleries,
which in this case is over here to the right.
And these galleries were used to display art.
And in fact, Rothschild, who built this house,
built it for that same reason,
to show off his great art collection.
So the Rothschild's one of the richest families
in the world at this time.
And so this house, like Knebworth House,
gives the impression of how rich and wealthy
Bruce Wayne is supposed to be.
[engine revving]
- Nice car.
- You should see my other one.
- Now we come to "The Dark Knight."
So right away you notice this is an interior view.
So Wayne Manor burned down in the last film.
- [panting] Everything my family, my father built.
- The Wayne legacy is more than bricks and mortar, sir.
- And now Batman is living in this penthouse in Wayne Tower.
So this is in fact the lobby
of a Mies van der Rohe building, in Chicago.
And so out the window, all this stuff is just
green screened in to make it appear
as if it's up in the air, and is a penthouse apartment.
And what leads you to believe
that it's a lobby is the great ceiling height
that you could see here.
It appears to be 25 feet tall.
The other thing that sort of implies
that this is the ground level and not a penthouse,
is that if it were a penthouse
these columns really wouldn't need to be this big
'cause they'd only be supporting the roof.
They wouldn't be supporting all these multiple floors
like they would have to in a lobby.
The other thing that makes it seem like
a Mies van der Rohe design is this very simple
ceiling treatment with these very small recessed lights.
And that ceiling extends out
to the covered colonnade beyond.
The thing about Mies van der Rohe
is he was a modern architect, very minimalist.
In fact, he coined the term less is more.
And so now Batman, instead of living in these really ornate
and luxurious homes, is now living in this sort of
more elegant, refined, stripped down,
minimalist sort of environment.
So the views that were depicted out the windows
in the previous image were actually filmed
on the 39th floor of the Royal Sonesta Hotel,
also in Chicago.
And they also used the Royal Sonesta
for the exterior shots of the apartment.
- [Man] You can throw a party, Wayne, I'll give you that.
- So here's a view of the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Chicago.
It's almost a pretty good match in terms of the colonnade
along the edge here, and the roof
extending out beyond the building.
And right away, you know that that interior shot
was not really filmed here
because in this shot you could see there's
these clerestory windows above the main windows.
And in that previous shot, that's not visible.
So clerestory windows are actually just windows
that are up high, above the main bank of windows.
And they actually have their origin
in Gothic architecture in Gothic churches.
They were the windows
above the side aisles in the main hall.
Okay, let's look at the very next film,
"The Dark Knight Rises."
So in this film,
Bruce Wayne lives in another palatial estate.
And this one in actuality is Wollaton Hall.
And this is a real Elizabethan building.
It's ironic that this is being portrayed as the rebuilt home
after the fire because Mentmore Towers
was based on this building, Wollaton Hall.
- [Person] What will you do?
- Rebuild it, just the way it was, brick for brick.
[dramatic music]
- So this is a real Elizabethan building,
built in the era of Queen Elizabeth I, in the 1580s.
And it was designed by Robert Smithson.
So obviously, using these two Elizabethan buildings,
and Mies van der Rohe,
Christopher Nolan has very good taste in architecture.
Next up is Wayne Manor as seen in the Zack Snyder films.
So this building, which is supposed to be Wayne Manor,
is way in the distance,
but you can still see a few things.
So obviously, this is a classical building
informed by Greek architecture.
And the way you could see that is right here,
at the center of this facade, there's the pediment
being supported by the four columns.
And in this version, Wayne Manor also burns down.
And we could get a closer view of it in the next image.
So here you could see more
of the architecture of the building.
So again, you see that Greek temple facade in the middle.
And then you see these sort of two flanking wings
with the paired pilasters, or pillars at the edges,
creating this sort of entrance way on either side.
And you could see the very strong entablature
along the top, and everything else is sort of burnt out.
So there is some CGI going on here
to make it feel like a ruin.
But in fact, it really is a ruin.
This is Sutton Scarsdale Hall,
designed by Francis Smith in the 1720s.
Which makes it a Georgian building.
And Georgian style buildings
quite often employed Greek elements.
And it's a ruin because it was actually sold to developers
in the early 1900s who stripped the entire interior,
including the roof, and sold it all off.
It had these grand interiors
with these beautiful oak panels.
And one of the people who bought some of the interiors
were William Randolph Hearst.
And he was gonna use these beautiful wood panels
to decorate his Hearst Castle.
But in fact, never ended up doing that,
and sold it to others,
who then used it as the interiors in other films.
Now we come to "The Batman,"
starring Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne.
So once again, now we have a tower instead of a mansion.
So this is what jumps out at me, starting at the top.
It's got this really ornate art deco-ey, gothic silhouette,
which is really quite common
for a lot of early skyscrapers in American cities.
And as the building moves down,
it becomes more stripped down
as it gets closer and closer to the ground.
And by the time it hits the sidewalk,
it's really just a very stripped down,
mid-century modernist design.
Albeit with this sort of classical colonnaded entrance.
So I suspect this is not a real building,
just because of the sort of amalgamation of styles.
And in fact, one can't help but notice
that they use the silhouette of a bat, at the very top,
with his wings extended.
So in this case, you could tell it was intentional,
because you know it's not a real building.
So what this appears to me is actually a piece of Chicago
that was then enhanced with CGI.
To the left, it appears to be Michigan Avenue.
And we're looking north.
And you could see the sunken railroad tracks.
And in fact, off here to the right,
you could see the Frank Gehry designed Bandshell.
So the top being really ornate like this
sort of reminds me of some of New York's skyscrapers,
like the American Radiator Building,
that have these really ornate tops to the building.
The other thing it's sort of reminiscent of
is of a gothic bell tower
like you would see at Riverside Church.
And that's interesting, 'cause when we look at the interior,
it's filled with gothic elements.
Okay, so this is Batman's lair.
And if it's not the interior of a gothic church
it's a really good forgery.
And what strikes me about it is the overbearing ornament
that's sort of reminiscent of bat wings,
you could see here.
These almost look like the legs of a bat
that's standing and its wings are extended.
And it has this very lacy, spidery stonework
that's still in the sort of Gothic language.
One could almost feel that they're almost
like stalagmites and stalactites
that you would find in a cave, like the Batcave.
So I think the filmmakers are doing that intentionally.
But then, at the same time, they give you this big,
really big window at the right to let you know
that it's still a modern building.
The idea is that Batman lives in this very dark
and mysterious cave-like place,
which is very reminiscent of the very first image.
So in the early 20th century,
when a lot of these skyscrapers were built,
they were built as sort of these
cathedrals of commerce they were called.
And the companies that built them liked to really
show off their sort of wealth and power.
And quite often they did these really ornate,
beautiful boardrooms on the interiors.
And this sort of is reminiscent to that,
but it's taking it to a whole other level.
So the last thing I wanna say about this building
is that the address of the building
in the film is 139 Kane Avenue,
a reference to Bob Kane, one of the co-creators
and illustrator of the original Batman comic.
So those are all the architectural details I noticed
in the live action depictions of Wayne Manor.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
[jaunty music]