A new book celebrates the late production designer whose elaborate concepts for films from Bond to Dr Strangelove influenced the likes of Norman Foster – and it all started with a felt-tip
in Spain could be a Bond baddie’s lair. A longtime fan, Foster once described Adam as “a master of space and light”, who realised the kinds of spaces that the 18th-century architectural draughtsmen-dreamers, like Giovanni Piranesi and Étienne-Louis Boullée, had only imagined. “Those legendary architectural figures” had “hypothesised visually, graphically, environments of awesome power”, he said. “Ken Adam builds them.
Edited by the film historian Sir Christopher Frayling, a longtime friend of Adam’s, the book is peppered with revealing conversations between the two. The Bond series, for example, almost didn’t happen for Adam. When he received the initial treatment for Dr No in 1961, he wasn’t impressed. “You can’t possibly do this,” he recalls his wife, Maria Letizia, protesting at the time. “You would prostitute yourself.
Still, that was nothing compared with what he would concoct five years later, at Pinewood Studios, for You Only Live Twice. In this epic, Bond tracks down Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the shadowy chief of criminal organisation Spectre, to his headquarters inside a dormant volcano in Japan . The gargantuan set for the volcano lair included a movable helicopter platform, a working monorail system, a launch pad, and a full-scale rocket mock-up that could simulate lift-off.
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