The Wrong House

‘excellent’ - Tony Williams, ‘The MacGuffin’ Web Page

‘Extremely well documented’ - Hera van Sande, A+U

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