Week 10// The Fountainhead // Ayn Rand


The fountainhead was quite an interesting film, full of heroism and the sort of motivation you got from watching a film like 'Rocky' where the once underdog finally gets the win, but I suspect such a feeling would be shared with architecture students as opposed to your average man on the street. Throughout you felt like you could relate to the main character, an aspiring young Architect Howard Roark who in this film is played by Gary Cooper. Howard Roark seems to stand for everything that doesn’t quite exist anymore in the field, or at least is dying a slow death for the majority, but is this a good thing?  

Ayn Rand


The novel itself is written by the Russian-American author Ayn Rand, she was a lady who stood for 'objectivism', being driven by the pursuit of your own happiness, essentially the world revolves around you and in everything you do it is your way or the high way. A position portrayed quite well in one scene where Howard is seen talking to a client, who is trying to change his work and in response he says "My work done my way, nothing else matters to me", such passion, such confidence, and of course why not, after all he made it through the rigor of architectural training only not to compromise on his ideas. Especially given the time he is portrayed to be designing in, the emergence of the modern movement and breaking away from what the people are familiar with.      

In a review by Paul Davis, who writes regularly for the Architectural Review and also lectures at London South Bank University, he writes the following "Further we cannot imagine Roark doing it for the money. Hence, entry-level students haven’t a clue why Roark dynamited his housing project but final-year students all too painfully do. This is why his myth has legs, and why it continually needs a bomb under it." As a student at the latter stages of training I too painfully see why he had to do it and why the likes of Foster and many other reputable Architects, would do the same given the opportunity, if there were no consequences, to avoid a misrepresentation of yourself as a designer and everything you stand for. 

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