Ken Adam is dead: The man who showed us the future – SPIEGEL ONLINE

One of the most beautiful stories about Ken Adam goes like this: in 1981, when Ronald Reagan had just been inaugurated as US president and the Pentagon visited, he wanted the staff to know one thing: Where does the famous “War Room” is that center of power with its imposing trapezoidal shape over a wide round table, on the, as circular, a lighting UFO hovering – you knew them from Stanley Kubrick’s film “Dr. Strangelove”.

The disappointment of politicians become Hollywood actor must have been great when he stated that the real National Military Command Center in the basement of the building complex far more sober worked as the theatrical satire. But that was precisely the great art of the set designer Ken Adam: He created utopian spaces and architectures that looked fantastic and real at the same time. The “War Room” from “Dr. Strangelove” is his masterpiece.

Famous was Adam but mainly as a production designer for seven Bond film classics. Between 1962 and 1979 he built by volcanoes, designed stunning dwellings for villains invented Jetpacks and Aston Martins with ejector seats and brought the Space Shuttle used before it actually launched into space. The spatial and technical visions Adams were so strong that they feed back to the present day reality. Star architects such as Daniel Libeskind and Norman Foster to give liked to have been inspired by Adams Filmbauten.

Adam himself, who had studied architecture in England before he came as a production designer in the fifties for the film, was inspired by modernists like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Its buildings were from the outside so inconspicuous and impenetrable as the movie villain Blofeld, Goldfinger or Emilio Largo, who lived in them. Inside, however, fused elements of nature such as water with strict geometric shapes, often triangles to complex structures which precisely reflected also the dazzling character of its inhabitants.

Video: Ken Adam, the art director of James Bond

With the combination of constructive logic and spatial freedom came Adam, on 5 February (1921 v, 2014.) born in Berlin, as a child in contact.

His father ran the sports fashion business S. Adam on Friedrichstrasse corner Leipziger Strasse, whose modern glass facade architecture Star Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had designed. Little Ken, then still Klaus Hugo Adam, visited the French school and developed early an artistic talent. 2014 as the German Cinematheque at Potsdamer Platz opened the large exhibition “Bigger Than Life” with sketches of his transferred to Berlin archive, Adam once again returned to his hometown from which he was exactly 80 years earlier fled with his parents.

At the time we met Ken Adam for talks in the Hotel Savoy on Fasanenstrasse in Berlin West. Adam did not hear well, but gave himself cheerful and talkative, friendly, always joking DOMICILED to Gentleman, the one still remarked his former penchant for fast sports cars, blazing speed and adrenaline even in old age. In 1933 he had seen burning the Reichstag in Berlin, he told us, “the day after the fire, the Reichstag was on my way to school. Everything was full of smoke. We were afraid what would be the consequences of fire. The following year, we are after England moved. ” (The full interview can be read here.)

Not all family members were so lucky, his cousin Herbert arrived in Buchenwald concentration camp killed. Ken Adam himself came after studying in London as the first and so far only German service in the Royal Air Force and flew combat missions against Hitler’s army. Yet in 2014 gushed Adam inclined his life the adventure and bravado, the thrill of speed at the wheel of the fighter aircraft Hawker “Typhoon”.

New forms from the rubble of war

the images of destruction, which he had seen in Berlin and the war would, “may have contributed to that I always wanted to create something that did not exist in reality, something new, unseen,” Adam said in our conversation. “The cities were razed to the ground. It took a lot of imagination to imagine that you could live in one day.”

So were the megalomaniac, cluttered with deadly technology control centers of the Bond villains in films as “Dr. No.”, “Goldfinger”, “Thunderball”, “the Spy who loved me” or “Moonraker” for a visualization of totalitarian power, on the other hand always playful utopia of modernity, of itself from the rubble should raise war to new forms and colors.

An exotic locales of the Bond adventure he could live it up and his imagination run wild. The price: After the end of filming were its buildings and gimmicks pulped. They exist today only on celluloid and in approximately 4000 with his legendary Flo-Master sharpie-built drawings, which are archived in Berlin. For Adam no problem: If his buildings were well filmed, he said, “I had reached my goal.”

Twice Ken Adam was awarded the Oscar, ironically for more historical than futuristic designs: 1976 for Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon”, 1995 Nicholas Hytner’s “The Madness Of King George”. Even before, during and after his time as Bond designers refined Ken Adam numerous other feature films, including his first work “Around the World in 80 Days” (1956) and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (1968) and “The Addams Family” (1993). His last film was István Szabó’s “Taking Sides – The Furtwängler Case” from the year 2001. 2003 was the knighted long for British citizen named Adam by the Queen for his services to the film industry, in 2012 he received an honorary citizen of Berlin.

Sir Ken Adam died on Thursday night at the age of 95 years. He leaves behind his wife and constant companion Maria Letitzia, whom he had married 1952nd