So, have you noticed that a weird amount of leading men in film and TV is an architect? Like, a really, really weird number of them? As in, far more than even the most build-from-scratch city would possibly require?
TV shows love the dude-as-architect trope, from How I Met Your Mother to Hey Dad! to Partners to One Life To Live to Bewitched.
But it’s in movies that it becomes downright jawdropping.
The AV Club noticed this trend in romantic comedies like The Lake House, The Last Kiss, Three To Tango, Sleepless In Seattle, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Love Actually, Just Like Heaven, It’s Complicated, (500) Days Of Summer and One Fine Day.
And that’s not even scratching the surface of architects in movies: there’s also Jungle Fever, Housesitter, Indecent Proposal, Breaking And Entering, Click, The Butterfly Effect, The Cable Guy, You Me And Dupree, Three Men and a Baby… goddamn, is every character that’s not a cop, a lawyer or a superhero sweating over a set square?
Actually, I take that back: one of the Green Lanterns was a goddamn architect.
There are theories as to why this is. And they’re pretty compelling.
Cracked posited that architecture is an arts-adjacent career that still allows leading men to wear nice suits and live in fancy houses rather than pokey rented apartments, yet still be brooding and temperamental because THEY ARE ARTISTS, DO YOU PHILISTINES NOT UNDERSTAND?
Cracked’s podcast, however went further with an even more plausible explanation: Hollywood screenwriters don’t have normal jobs or really have much idea what a regular office job is like.
Their own job involves sweating over a desk and then having a big high-pressure meeting upon which everything depends in which they pitch their ideas.
And that would explain why architects in movies are always doing massive projects, designing iconic skyline buildings for which they must labour endlessly and then do a big presentation to the pencil pushing stuffed shirts who just don’t understand VISION – because it’s how writers operate.
And of course, architects barely ever do massive iconic solo projects. They’re mainly in teams planning building renovations, or project managing developments, or checking up on new safety legislation, or a thousand other necessary-and-unsexy things which don’t involve big all-or-nothing pitches to rooms of besuited men.
In any case, spare a thought for all those poor architects who entered the profession inspired by film and TV expecting kooky love stories and their surname on skyscrapers and instead are fighting with council over permitted height for a carport.