The Wrong House

Alfred Hitchcock is an architect – this is the unusual assumption of this book, which uses the conventional layout of an architectural monograph. Illustrated by floor plans especially made for this publication, each chapter deals with a specific building and its furnishings.
Architecture plays an important role in Hitchcock’s films. Having worked as a set designer in the early 1920s, Hitchcock remained intensely concerned with the art direction of his films, which feature a remarkable collection of Victorian manors, suburban dwellings, modernist villas, urban mansions, and posh penthouses. In addition, Hitchcock emphatically used architectural motifs such as stairs and windows, transforming the house into a place of anxiety or disturbance. Particularly his gothic melodramas of the 1940s such as Rebecca, Suspicion, or Shadow of a Doubt, present the house as an uncanny labyrinth and a trap. Last but not least, some remarkable single-set films, such as Rope or Rear Window, explicitly deal with the way the confines of the set relate to those of the architecture on screen. Discussing how Hitchcock’s cinematic spaces are connected with the narrative, the characters, and the mise-en-scène of his films, Jacobs also situates these fictitious buildings in the history and theory of architecture.