A Home for Billy Wilder

摘要

IT was 1949, and the os-car-winning director and acidic raconteur Billy Wilder had two very different houses spinning around in his electrically creative imagination. One was an immense, dreary heap in which a madwoman loses what's left of her shaky mind in the odd Holly-wood-on-Hollywood movie he was writing and filming that year. The other was a steel-and-glass gem for him and his sharp, chic wife, Audrey, to live in. The former, owned by one of J. Paul Getty's ex-wives, was sweetened (or, perhaps better, further soured) for the occasion by Paramount's art director, Hans Dreier, and his team of set decorators, who added gloomy draperies and a few stained-glass windows to enhance the mansion's funereal air (see Architectural Digest, April 1998). The latter, with its clean angles and spare construction, was designed for the Wilders by their close friends Charles and Ray Eames. The musty, fusty mansion would be the architectural expression of its occupant's dreadfully declining state of mind.