Beautiful Doom: Heizer's "City" and Scott's "Blade Runner"
There’s a striking similarity between Douglas Trumbull and Ridley Scott’s pyramidal design for the “Tyrell Corporation” headquarters in Blade Runner (1982) and the photos I’ve seen of Michael Heizer’s monumental plaza, Complex City , which has been under construction in Garden Valley, Nevada since 1972. I’ve not seen any evidence that Trumbull & Scott would’ve been influenced by Heizer. I think the resemblance is probably nothing more than some shared archaeological interests. Still, I love the fact of the resemblance, because it really opens up a web of thinking about art and architecture’s relationship to the future. Both works explicitly and implicitly imagine futures, and both works have monumental properties: they commemorate the present for a viewer in distant time. I want to start by outlining the web of connections, here: Both City and Tyrell Corporation are obviously pyramid st ructures, and the structures really are similar—it’s as if Heizer’s massive scul