I started reading the Harry Potter books in my mid-thirties. Most people who did that were reading them to their kids. I did it for my own enjoyment. I'm a big fan of dumb books. I don't think I could stand to read any of them again but I do like to watch the movies occasionally. Mostly to hear Alan Rickman draw his sentences...
...out.
Part of the fun of the Harry Potter films is trying to figure out how the fuck Hogwarts itself is put together. The people who designed it for the films did a really great job. My favourite parts are the bathrooms - which have a pretty big role in the films. Bigger than I remembered until I looked at them again. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is through a bathroom; Hermione turns herself into a cat in one trying to use the Polyjuice Potion; Mertle tells Harry the secret of the egg in the big tub in the prefect's bathroom; Harry fights Draco in the bathroom, using the Sectumsepra spell; that's all I can think of off the top of my head.
The bathrooms in the early movies are more Hogwarts-ish than in the later ones. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is a nice piece of set design but it doesn't look like it belongs in any bathroom outside a school for witchcraft and wizardry. The one where the fight occurs between Draco and Harry is fantastically strange. It looks like the designers decided to stick all the fixtures one might have found in a boarding school circa 1950 into a gothic cathedral. Really odd and great. I think they might have changed set designers around the fourth movie. The interiors for the first three are mostly borrowed from actual buildings. I guess once the producers realized every movie was going to make about a billion dollars they started spending more on them. The twin spiral staircase (which, if you think about it rationally makes no sense at all) that gets you to the prophecy class in the 5th movie or to the offices of Horace Slughorn in the 6th is a bizarre and wonderful treat. NOTE: I tried to find a picture of this one on the internet but all I got was a bunch of images of the hall with the moving staircases.
I'm sure someone has published a complete book of Hogwarts with technical drawings of all the sets. They have one for the Millenium Falcon so there must be one for Hogwarts. Let me search Google...
Unbelievably, there is no book for Hogwarts itself. You can get a complete Lego set and a bunch of other shit but no book of technical drawings. The free market fails again. Fuck you Milton Friedman! I guess the invisible hand of the market has some drawing to do!?!
This is way off topic but thinking about the spiral staircase made me think of Frank Gehry's addition and renovation of the AGO in Toronto. And that illustrates the essential lameness of Gehry's post-Bilbao work. Instead of sitting down and coming up with some real architecture he just said, "Find me some places I can do something sculptural and not have to think about proportions or the hierarchy of elements or any off that bullshit". That's probably not a direct quote. The Guggenheim in Bilbao is a masterpiece. In 80 years or so, when architectural historians start writing "Architecture in the 21st Century" Bilbao will be the second chapter. The first will be important shit that happened in the 20th - like Corb and so on. But since Bilbao, which has all the same characteristics, defects, and essential fucked-upness of all Gehry's projects but was the first time we'd seen anything like that so it gets a pass, Gehry has traded on his reputation and made it work because sycophants (and sycophantic critics) don't bother to wonder whether all architecture ought not be judged by the same criteria. I think it should. So architecture today (whether or not you are Frank Gehry) remains subject to, and the product of, the same considerations as the Doric temple and the Gothic Cathedral. Shape, proportion, hierarchy. Those of you who disagree with the inclusion of hierarchy in that list might remember Vitruvius (who is dubious in other ways but dead on in this) made it one of his main elements of architecture - only he called it by a different name. And by these criteria, the correct criteria, Gehry is an ambitious, self-centered, egotistical failure.
Even more unfortunate than the fact Gehry's name has enough magic in it to get shit projects realized around the world is that his is the kind of failure many young architects aspire to.
That turned into a downer. I should have stopped at making fun of Milton Friedman.
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