Oppenheim explores his darker road not traveled in "Lair," a recent book from Tra Publishing, that renders 15 highly secretive dwellings in black-and-white architectural drawings. They include the Nordic alpine hideaway in "Ex Machina," the spidery underwater sea home in "The Spy Who Loved Me," the sleek Mount Rushmore abode in "North By Northwest," and the eerie Brutalist Wallace Corporation HQ in "Blade Runner 2049."
The lairs generally share commonalities: They are pristine, awe-inspiring, high-tech, otherworldly, often impractical, and draw heavily on the tenets of modernism. The book poses the question: Why do bad guys live in good houses? [...]
Oppenheim and his team came up with a rubric for which hideouts made the final cut -- and what counted as true villainry. "First, primarily, the lairs had to be aspirational. They also had to be incredibly beautiful from an architectural standpoint," he explained. They omitted the lavish John Lautner-designed mansion of porn director Jackie Treehorn in "The Big Lebowski," not deeming him a real antagonist. Darth Vader's hellfire stronghold in "Star Wars" also lost out in favor of the Death Star because Oppenheim decided nobody would actually want to live on an untenable volcanic planet.
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