- Hi, I'm Michael Wyetzner
and I've been an architect for 35 years.
And today I'm breaking down some
of the hidden architectural details
from the film "The Grand Budapest Hotel."
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Let's take a look at the exterior of the hotel.
- A picturesque elaborate
and once widely celebrated establishment.
- So here's what jumps out at me.
First off, it's obviously a model, it's fake
and I think that's the director letting everybody know
that this is a fantasy and it's not real.
- I beg your pardon.
- The other thing that jumps out at me
is that it's sort of this French Chateau
growing out of the mountain.
And so you've got these two turrets
on either side with dormes on top.
There's a mansard roof with these curve, dormers on them.
And mansard roofs were developed
in the 1600s by an architect named mansard in Paris.
And they were used to skirt the zoning laws
of the time to get an extra floor on top of their buildings
because a regular roof is peaked like this
but a mansard roof it angles out
and you are able to inhabit that top floor.
It's resting on this very rusticated
almost infrastructure like base that looks
like it could be supporting an aqua-dock.
And that gives it the idea that it's sort of growing
out of the mountain
and the canopy above the entrance appears
to be an art nouveau canopy, something you would see
at the entrance to the subway in Paris or Belgium.
So this image appears to be like one of those sanatoriums
that you would see in the mountains of Europe,
up until the 1930s, people went there to recover
from tuberculosis quite often, or other ailments
even sometimes just to recharge their batteries
and they were resorts, but they also had a whole sort
of health club and spa side to them.
And typically these hotels were for very wealthy people
who would have extended stays sometimes for a month or more.
- Times have changed.
- Okay, let's take a look at the entrance to the funicular.
[soft instrumental music]
So what jumps outta me immediately is
he's created this grand arch
and arches were built by starting with the Romans
to celebrate an event or a victory
or a conquest, but arches are essentially portals
and they take you from one place into another place.
And in this case, it's the entrance
to a whole other world to this mountaintop retreat.
Okay. Let's take a look at the entrance to the hotel.
- Each month is Emissary known as deputy Cobas
arrive to review the books
and convey messages on behalf of the mysterious proprietor.
- So the first thing that jumps out at me is
that it clearly does not match the long shot
that we saw earlier
but there were these very ornate columns
flanking the entrance with globe like fixtures on them.
There were these arched windows above those
and there's this curved window above the entrance.
It's a very diminutive sized entrance
for a building this big
and this grand there's just one entrance door.
And also the name of the hotel
in the previous shot was shown way up high.
And here it's just above the door.
So there's all this sort of decoration that's done in gold
on this very white background, which is very reminiscent
of the secessionist era of, of design.
And the secessionists were basically seceding
from the academy, the really stuffy
conservative art movements that had reigned
over Europe for the 19th century.
And this was a whole break.
And the idea was that it was total design
where they were going to unify architecture
painting and the decorative arts.
And in this image here, you could see a lot of elements
from that, including the decorative forms,
which row out of nature
of these leaf and flower like patterns.
You can see these stem
and stock like patterns under the curved window.
And you can see the window grates as well.
All very soft flowing forms that are very reminiscent
of that movement.
Okay, let's go inside.
- They had to be rich, old insecure.
- So we're looking at this multi-story entrance lobby.
And what jumps out at me immediately is the circular desk
in the center, the grand chandelier above it
the stone base at the ground floor or the lowest level.
And we're looking back out through the entrance doors
and you can see that it has the same motif
as that exterior door where it's got
that circle inside the arch.
So it has this stone at the base
the Stone's the most expensive
but it's also representative of the earth.
As the atrium rises, it gets stripped down
and lighter as it moves up towards the sky.
So the people who built this hotel
the stone is more expensive
than everything else than the plaster above.
So they put it down low where everyone could see it,
feel it, touch it.
So actually this was filmed in an old department store
the Golet ware in house, in Germany, in a town called Golet.
So this was quite common for department store architecture.
You could see it here in New York
at the old water makers in Philadelphia
at the gum department store in Moscow
or gallery Lafayette in Paris,
where they built these multi-story atriums
to really wow people
and to bring them into the store
and to eventually buy stuff.
That evolved into the mall where you got multiple stores
but eventually I think space became a premium
and it was more important to put as much merchandise
on the floor as possible.
And these sort of grand spaces
were just taken over by merchandise.
So here's another view of this really grand space
and it's got this great skylight on the top.
So it's flooded with light.
It's really ornate.
The pains are very small.
Obviously glass was very expensive.
It was very difficult to make large pans of glass.
So they took advantage of that
and they made these really beautiful
ornate mullion patterns that sits on top
of this very odd thickened arches that support the ring
that the skylight sits on.
And then those arches are supported by these funny columns
which are obviously, this is all decoration
because typically when you'd have columns supporting
something, there'd be columns underneath them
and you could see that there's nothing below them.
So the other thing that really jumps out at me
about this space is this stair that they built
that sort of comes out into the middle of the space.
And typically when you build an atrium like this
quite often, you can't get into the middle of the space.
You could see it from the sides from the edges
or from below,
but you never really get into the middle of the space
and stand under the skylight as you can here.
So they're allowing the viewer to see what has been created
and what has been built.
And in some of the overhead shots in the film
you could actually see some of the hints of the tile work
between the carpets.
So what's really interesting to me
is sort of how this space is starting to transition
from this very sort of decorative heavy stone base.
And then it sort of lightens as it goes up,
but also gets much more industrial
because that's the time actually that this takes place in.
And you can see that the steel is exposed on the stair
and on the rail and in the skylight.
So we're moving from this much more sort of decorated stone
and plaster work into a much more industrialized flavor
where they're embracing these new technologies
- More flavorful so they say.
- Let's take a closer look at the stairs.
So here's what jumps out at me right away is
that you see the stonework that we were just looking at
at the base.
You could see these two lamps
that sort of demarcate the staircase
that brings you up to the desk.
And then these two really stripped down doric columns
that flank the entrance to that desk.
And then there's really bright red at the back.
So it pulls your eye all the way in.
So this is interesting to me
because typically architects try and avoid color
because they can come dated very quickly.
- The colors completely wrong.
- Oh really don't like it.
- It's not that I don't like it.
I am physically repulsed.
- And they use a really interesting combination
more of like what a painter would do
than what an architect would do
with these pinks and sort of pale creams at the top.
And then this bright red,
and again these pinks at the bottom and these oranges
but obviously this is a film and they want it to be as rich
and sort of over the top as it can be.
And the red has this effect
of drawing your eye right into the middle.
The other salient characteristic
about this shot is how symmetrical it is.
And symmetry is something that is used
in architecture all the time.
And it goes back to being human.
We're very comfortable with symmetry
because we're symmetrical right down the middle.
It's a very easy design motif
because it balances immediately.
And that ties in to the west Anderson sort of motif
which is very formal and symmetrical.
Let's take a look at the bathhouse.
- A lobby boy is completely invisible here always insight.
- So what we have here is another multi-story atrium
space actually, but very different from what we saw
in the lobby of the hotel here, it's almost Romanesque
with these very simple arches on brick piers.
So the first thing that jumps out of me
is that it's a totally different building.
You could tell by the treatment of the arches
sitting on the brick piers,
and the more stripped down brick piers above that
and the white arches there
you could also see it in its very different tile pattern
around the somewhat small pool, which is a little odd
but it's more like a ceremonial pool
or almost what you'd find for physical therapy
which is sort of appropriate
for this kind of spa like hotel.
So in the early 20th century in New York for instance
bathhouses were quite common
because the working class where they lived
they didn't really even have plumbing.
So the only place they can go and take a bath
were at these public bath houses
that were scattered throughout the city.
And a lot of those bath houses actually ended up
becoming recreation centers 'cause they had large pools
and some of them were even built with gymnasiums.
But in this case with such a small pool
it's intended for a much more sort of therapeutic use.
- The thermal baths are very beautiful.
- Okay, let's talk about the dining hall.
So there's a wide shot of the dining hall
but now we're in the Soviet era.
In the 1960s.
We're no longer in the austro-Hungarian period
that the film begins in.
So clearly the hotel is on hard times
and I love what they did here in this arrangement
that instead of keeping all the tables close together
in say one portion of the room
they use the entire room and they make this array
of 20 tables in a really precise manner.
And they're all super far apart.
Cause one of the rituals of dining,
especially in a multi table dining room
is that you're all together
and there's a whole sort of energy created by that.
And here that's completely eliminated.
So there's this huge landscape painting in the back
which was also part of the hotel in the 1930s.
And in this case, it's a painting of the Alps
which is where this hotel is located.
But there was also a whole school
of these huge landscape paintings
particularly the Hudson river school here in New York
where some of the paintings were so ornate and so large
that they would actually go on tour
as like a form of entertainment
and people would pay to go see them
'cause they were such a spectacle.
So in this case, it's just another part
of the hotel that shows off its grandeur.
So let's take a look at some of the images
of the hotel when they fast forward into the 1960s.
- It was off season.
And by that time decidedly out of fashion
and it had already begun its descend into Shabiness.
- So the first thing I see is the tarts are still here
but now they have antenna on top of them instead of domes.
And it speaks very much to communications and to satellites.
I really love this shot because they took what used to look
like a French Chateau and they've turned it
into a Soviet era, bureaucratic building.
The turrets are still there
but now they've taken the main section and they've framed it
and they put these small punched windows in it.
So Soviet architecture has this reputation
for being very drab and very sad almost
but they are one of the originators
of modernism with the constructivist movement.
And this is very reminiscent
of something Corbusier designed in Moscow in the 1920s.
- What a few guests we were
had quickly come to recognize one another by sight
as the only living souls residing in the vast establishment.
- So obviously now the lobby is totally different.
It's the 1960s.
The first thing that strikes you is the signage
the lit reception sign,
the white on black signs that are just stuck on the desk.
I love that they have dental clinic appointments
on the left.
The chambermaids available on the right.
The desk is made out of what appears to be some sort
of plastic laminate or for Micah
as we was commonly called the colors have been changed.
Now it's sort of this ochre
and light avocado green where before it was that really
really ornate red that drew you to the back.
Now it's just sort of this orange G color.
The columns are still there flanking
that what was the concierge desk in the back
but there's no longer that ornate round desk in the center.
And the ceiling particularly is the biggest issue.
Now they've installed.
What is this illuminated ceiling
which is a real modernist idea.
You could see it at the Seagram building in New York
or the famous manufacturer's Hanover bank on fifth avenue
just north of the library where the whole ceiling glows.
And it's a very modernist idea, but for a hotel like this
it's really sort of an anachronism.
Something that just really doesn't belong.
So all this modernist Bricka Brack is almost
like an invasion and the hotel lobby has been taken
over and it just barely peaks out of what it used to be.
So again, the filmmakers now are using color,
but in a different way to convey something else
where before it was this sort of ornate
and very rich reds and oranges and pinks.
Now it's these sort of much more austere kind
of Sage green and yellow Oakers
and these much more sort of sixties modernist colors.
So earlier we talked about how architects try to
avoid using color because it dates really quickly.
And this is a perfect example of how the colors
they used here brings us right to the 1960s.
So clearly the filmmakers are trying to show
that the hotel has lost all its grandeur
and all of its beauty and opulence.
And this image shows that perfectly.
- What more is there to say?
- So there you go.
Those are some of the architectural details that I noticed
in the Grand Budapest Hotel.
What show or movie should we look at next?
Let me know in the comments below.
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