• • The Black Cat (1934) was the first-ever horror movie to pair the two masters of the macabre: Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. It was also the first one ever to feature a modernist architect as the monster. Instead of the usual crumbling gothic pile, the villain of this piece inhabits a modernist house of glass and steel with a great curving chrome-railed staircase.
    
    This is the house of Hjalmar Poelzig [sic] (Boris Karloff), an Austrian architect-cum-psychopath, who of course has designed the house himself. It was built on the ruins of an old fort, which coincidentally Poelzig commanded himself during WWI. In the movie, Poelzig is accused of having betrayed the fort under his command causing the death of thousands of Austro-Hungarian soldiers who now lie buried around the house. On top of this, Poelzig’s bizarre taste in decoration takes the form of dead women stacked in glass coffins. Things get really weird when his black cat is killed only to reappear the next morning as if nothing has happened... before, during the film’s climax (spoiler alert), the house gets blown up. For full effect we highly recommend you take a look at this architecture-horror-classic for yourselves. I  (fh)

  Modernist Monsters

   

  The Black Cat (1934) was the first-ever horror movie to pair the two masters of the macabre: Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, it was also the first film ever to feature a modern architect as the monster. Instead of the usual crumbling gothic pile, the villain of this piece inhabits a modernist house of glass and steel with a great curving chrome-railed staircase.
  
  

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  Image © NBCUniversal

• COVER

  COVER

  Cover
• Table of contents

  Table of contents
• EDITORIAL

  EDITORIAL

  Editorial
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  Memento Mei!

  The strange ternary work of Argentina’s Francisco Salamone

  Text: Rosario Talevi
• FOUND

  FOUND

  A Tomb with A View

  Le Corbusier’s Grave

  Text: Rob Wilson
• CASE STUDY

  CASE STUDY

  Añorbe Cemetery Extension

  Navarra, Spain

  Text: George Kafka
• CASE STUDY

  CASE STUDY

  Funerary Shelter

  Pardesiya, Israel

  Text: George Kafka
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Towers of Silence

  The Zoroastrian way of death

  Text: Sara Faezypour
• INTERVIEW

  INTERVIEW

  The Orientation of Hope

  An interview with Charles Jencks, co-founder of the Maggie’s Centres by Rob Wilson

  Text: Rob Wilson
• FOUND

  FOUND

  The London Necropolis Company

  A railway for the dead

  Text: George Kafka
• CASE STUDY

  CASE STUDY

  Islamic Cemetery, Altach

  Vorarlberg, Austria

  Text: Florian Heilmeyer
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  The Great Beyond

  Herbert Wright on architectures of the afterlife

  Text: Herbert Wright
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Murder Most Marple

  Pocket-sized crime scenes

  Text: Sophie Lovell
• CASE STUDY

  CASE STUDY

  The New Crematorium

  Stockholm, Sweden

  Text: Fiona Shipwright
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Where Ideas Go to Die

  The Palace of Failed Optimism

  Text: Florian Heilmeyer
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  Who Wants to Live Forever?

  Arakawa and Gins' Reversible Destiny Lofts by Léopold Lambert

  Text: Léopold Lambert
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Modernist Monsters

  An architecture horror classic

  Text: Florian Heilmeyer
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  Protestant Death Ethic

  Leon Berger’s Southampton Crematorium by Owen Hatherley

  Text: Owen Hatherley
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Saving Us From Ourselves

  The Golden Gate Bridge suicide barrier

  Text: George Kafka
• FREEHAND

  FREEHAND

  Freehand

  Luciano Scherer

  Text: Luciano Scherer
• FURTHER READING

  FURTHER READING

  Further Reading
• NEXT

  NEXT

  Next

  Storage
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  THE SCENE AND THE PROTOCOL

  Athens and the opportunity for new urban strategies

  Text: Aristide Antonas

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