2001: A Home and Office Odyssey

The Medicis, style setters in medieval Florence, favored religious art and earth tones. America’s robber barons fancied themselves as American royalty and built palaces on Rhode Island’s shores that they filled with whatever treasures could be plundered from Europe. Every age has its own moneyed group, who get to express who they think they are through their environments.

What’s the aesthetic of today’s techno-rich? For the new movie “Antitrust,” production designer Catharine Hardwicke’s task was interpreting high-techie taste, in order to envision the home and corporate campus of a multi-billionaire software entrepreneur living in the Pacific Northwest.

The thriller, opening in theaters Friday, follows the adventures of an idealistic young computer genius recruited by NURV, a corporation run by Gary Winston (Tim Robbins). NURV is not unlike Microsoft, and Winston is, in many ways, Bill Gates’ intellectual and financial cousin. But since Winston’s activities range from not very nice to criminal, it was important that he be seen as a completely fictional character. The principal locations Hardwicke designed could help distinguish “Antitrust’s” corporation from any real ones.

Nevertheless, the Texas-born production designer, who holds an architecture degree and has contributed to such films as “Three Kings” and “2 Days in the Valley,” wanted the NURV campus and Winston’s home to reflect the form-fits-function sensibility the wealthy, technologically adventurous computer industry has brought to contemporary design.

Late in 1999, she embarked on a research tour that took her from Hollywood, site of several futuristic John Lautner houses, to the Oregon coast, where she searched for an estate to suit a modern Medici. The Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., was not on the itinerary. “They have mostly black glass buildings set in the woods, anyway,” she says. “We wanted a different look.”

A number of Silicon Valley corporations also welcomed Hardwicke and her director, Peter Howitt (“Sliding Doors”), including Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Netscape and Oracle. In Los Angeles, advertising agencies, music video and special effects production houses were nearest the cutting edge of office design, and proved a strong source of inspiration. The Venice office Frank Gehry designed for TBWA/Chiat/Day in 1991 had the sort of open plan Hardwicke learned had become popular in Silicon Valley, where shared space is encouraged for its ability to foster community and creativity.

While “Antitrust” was in pre-production a year ago, there was great competition for technological talent in rapidly expanding information industries. In order to attract the best and the brightest, computer and Internet corporations built cafeterias equipped to fulfill any culinary desire and stocked work environments with all the comforts of home. Once Hardwicke had seen a number of the New Economy’s most innovative workplaces, she set about designing the Egg, the NURV command center where its young programmers congregate.

In the story, NURV’s top programmers are assigned to a project with a tight deadline, so they work, eat, sleep and play in the place where their ideas incubate. “They were working around the clock, so we put a stainless-steel-front washer and dryer in the Egg, as if the workers would bring in their dirty clothes and get their laundry done,” Hardwicke says. “We put glamorous, glass-front refrigerators right in the work space filled with all the hippest juices, every drink you could ever want, every kind of snack food you could dream of.”

Hardwicke designed steel-framed partitions between computer workstations that could be left open, or enclosed with bulletin boards or artwork. In Silicon Valley she’d learned about “groundhogs,” the office type who, in a warren of cubicles, pokes his head up above a partition like a rodent sniffing the air. Partitions less than 4 feet high encourage groundhogging, so Hardwicke kept the ones in the Egg low.

“Since the individual creativity of the programmers is important, we wanted each work space to be distinctive,” she says. “We gave each cubicle a theme. There was Mr. Mom, a family man who had pictures of his children tacked all over. And George of the Jungle, whose nest was full of plants.”

Since high-tech wizards are often associated with a fondness for brainteasers a giant chessboard with people-sized pieces decorates one corner of the Egg. As a modern take on a conference table, Hardwicke designed a modular table that fits together like a child’s wooden puzzle. Surfboards, skateboards and snowboards were mounted on the walls of the Egg, both as decoration and as a reminder of the workers’ favorite sports.

Home as a Symbol of Wealth, Power

It’s important that NURV’s work space be appealing enough to help the corporation recruit the best workers. In the movie, Winston’s house also serves as a potent symbol of the company’s wealth, power and vision. Early in the story, Milo (Ryan Phillippe), the brilliant programmer Winston hopes will help NURV secure domination of its field, is brought to Winston’s house for a meeting.

Director Howitt says, “Gary uses the house to manipulate Milo. He takes him into the grandest room and asks, ‘What would you do with a billion dollars?’ as he’s showing him what money can buy. He takes him for a walk out on the beach, where they look back at the house from different vantage points. They look at the house from a distance in an ‘All this can be yours, my son, someday,’ kind of way. The house is intimidating and awe-inspiring enough to impress this young man. It’s playing a part in a very clever seduction.”

Actually, the mansion the actors seem to be looking at doesn’t exist. A computer-generated facsimile of the house’s image was inserted into the film long after the actors had finished their work. Initially, the filmmakers wanted to find a real mansion to shoot in. Nothing quite spectacular or isolated enough existed in Vancouver, British Columbia, where the movie was filmed. Although visits to tech companies had yielded many ideas for the NURV campus, the homes of tech moguls were less accessible.

“On the Internet you can get access to many, many things,” Hardwicke says. “We found diagrams and floor plans of Gates’ house online. But the fact that we didn’t see many of the homes those people had built was OK too, because we wanted to create our own, not re-create what already existed.”

The 55,000-square-foot Gates house was more traditional than Hardwicke wanted Winston’s mansion to be. “I looked at a lot of the newest, edgiest architecture for inspiration,” she says. “My idea was that a forward-thinking mogul would hire a very innovative architect.” For this, she did not look to Bill Gates but, rather, to another Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen, who hired Frank Gehry to design the Experience Music Project building, a rock ‘n’ roll museum in Seattle.

A Modern Master Offered Inspiration

No single person or firm has emerged as the court architect of the technological aristocracy. As Hardwicke set about creating a modern palace for Winston on a rocky, imaginary stretch of Oregon coastline, her greatest influence was John Lautner. Winston’s travertine and glass fortress is a series of wings connected by glass bridges. Lautner, a modernist who gained popularity in Los Angeles in the ‘50s and ‘60s and enjoyed a resurgence before his death in 1994, has been a particular favorite of filmmakers. Lautner homes were featured in “Lethal Weapon II” and “Charlie’s Angels.”

“He paid a lot of attention to the relationship of the indoors and the outdoors and was influenced by Japanese themes, especially their landscaping style,” Hardwicke says. “In a Lautner house, you’d see the landscaping from inside, especially because he used a lot of glass walls. He used a lot of modern materials and detailing that we also incorporated, like a steel railing we put on an interior bridge. In Winston’s living room, we used the idea that three beautiful rocks existed before the house was built, and the structure was built around them. That’s a very Lautner kind of concept.”

The bulk of the production design budget went to create rooms in one of the Winston estate’s wings inside a Vancouver sound stage.

The focus of the circular living room is natural rock formations that jut from sunken pools. Hardwicke sent a script and sketches to Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly, asking if he’d be interested in having some of his work shown in the film. Chihuly created glass sculptures of water lilies to complement the rocks and lent the production a chandelier that hangs over a 30-foot-high spiral maple staircase at the living room’s edge. The sculptor’s participation was appropriate, since he’s as close to an artistic pet as Silicon Valley culture has embraced. “Bill Gates has had parties attended by Chihuly and people from his workshop, and they’ve blown glass sculptures as part of the entertainment for the guests,” Hardwicke says.

Details in Winston’s office that Hardwicke and set decorator Rosemarie McSherry added were indicative of Winston’s enthusiasm. “We decided that he was interested in the art of war,” Hardwicke says, “so we gave him a collection of samurai swords and prints of samurai warriors.”

Winston’s office is decorated with a four-part diorama that depicts the four seasons. In each window box, set into the stone wall, is a Japanese maple tree. In one view, snow sprinkles. In another, leaves are falling. In the spring box, the sun shines. “It represents man dominating nature. The idea was that this is a man who is so powerful that he has control over his environment and can create whatever season he wants to be in.”

He can also enjoy an electronic art collection. Gates has experimented with virtual canvases, screens on which images rotate. Such changeable art gives an art lover the ability to keep his Van Gogh “Sunflowers” in his office and display an image of the same work in his country house.

“The theory of it is that you walk into the house and a sensor lets the house know you have entered,” Hardwicke says. “Then it is programmed to display the art that you like. If another person comes in whose preferences are programmed into the system, it will display their favorite. I think Gates is more excited by the engineering of it than the aesthetics, and that might be true of Winston, too.”

Electronic art, Hardwicke suggests, is one of the ways that technology is creating a new kind of interior design. In “Antitrust,” it also affects the course of industrial espionage. When artwork changes because sensors react to a person’s presence, walls give soundless warnings. It can make it pretty hard to hide from the bad guys.