The database has been an on going experiment. Over the past couple of months I have been culling media sources for the presence of elevators. So far I've amassed a rather robust collection of images, quotes, passages and film clips which demonstrate how elevators pervade social and cultural life both on screen and off. Resources such as Vertical Transportation and Up, Down and Across have been helpful in the pursuit of mechanical knowledge and books such as Vertical reveal that others have been intrigued by the space, place and motions of elevator systems in film and fiction.
I have been loosely grouping my discoveries into genres > thriller, mystery, sci-fi/fantasy, romance and so on. What I've found most intriguing is how elevators (the cab, the shaft and the mechanisms) are utilized in film-- as a vantage point, as a theatre, as a portal, as a brothel etc.
In action movies the elevator is practically cliche. It is the break down of lift systems that offer the opportunity to occupy areas of the building formerly meant for machines. Building penetrations and invasions occur through the labyrinths of shafts that offer protection by their darkness. These films share narrative and cinematic traits with horror/thriller films. The elevator in free fall, plunging wildly to the dismay of its occupants, is a scene familiar in both genres. However, in the action film, the hero/ine eludes death by clinging haphazardly to the frayed remains of the rope some twenty stories up. The horror film reveals an elevator possessed. A manevolant force plunges the elevator occupants to a bloody hell. The invisible technologies that control the elevator run amok, reinforcing the dooms-day prophecy that humans will pay dearly for an ever increasing reliance on machines.
The love and comedy genres tend to portray the awkward social conventions we display when stuck with strangers in a confined space. The journey upward becomes curious and getting stuck a harmless, erotic moment. The elevator experience transcends the mundane to become an act of fate, uniting disparate individuals on a path to love.
I love the trailer I have for this one short film called eleVATE where "An insecure loner develops an unhealthy obsession with a voice activated elevator which leads to a disturbing connection". What appears to happen (since I haven't seen the actual short yet) is that the elevator becomes infatuated with the hero, and ends up jealously executing his human love interest.
For me, the most intriguing works in the database are the science fiction/fantasy books and films. As a group they create a varied continuum that reveals the elevator primarily as a portal of sorts. There is something about the encapsulated vertical motion of elevators, that we enter in one space and exit in another, that lends itself to the otherworldly, or in the case of films such as Being John Malkovich, lead us to the soul. Perhaps it is in these films more explicitly that the elevator reveals the same power of metamorphosis as the grotto. Like the grotto the elevator becomes a harbor for the fantastical; a passage way to a new reality.
Grottoes were (and perhaps still are) invitations to expect the unexpected. I am beginning to suspect elevators offer a similar invitation. I am interested in how the myth of the elevator, cultivated through cultural representations of the mechanism in film and fiction, might impact the behavior of the machine. How might architecture and elevator technology reveal these cultural narrative myths within the confines of a building that possesses it's own unique histories. Might elevator function embed its own narrative into the existing building story in a way that reveals the potency of the elevator space.
Just as the epic of Odysseus lends myth and magic to the grotto of the Emperor Tiberius at Sperlonga, the elevators in the JR Watkins building will inscribed a similar narrative which will inform the architecture of the evolving spaces. The metamorphic tradition of the grotto will infuse the elevator, the resulting built spaces and the occupants of the existing building.
[ On a side note, the original database was built in Appleworks 6.2. I liked the Appleworks platform because of its simple, customizable, straightforward templates -- i didn't want the glossy templates of Bento or FileMaker. Unfortunately though, the database had to be ported to FileMaker in the end because Appleworks kept crashing in OS X. ]
To view a .pdf of the existing Elevator Catalog database see below.
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