The Good, The Bad, and Space
While Superman flies ahead of us, Batman lurking in shadows, Spider-man swings, and Daredevil jumps around the claustrophobic alley of Hell’s Kitchen. Each has their own preference for moving maneuver. We know that all superhero depends on their superpower to punish the bad guys, but little we investigate how their power really correlated with the spatial aspect of design. In this article, we will see in terms of movement, usage of space, relation to places, and memories-affection to show that each superhero architecturally embedded to space, and by design is an evident product of a particular place.
Batman and Dead space
Bruce Wayne is a millionaire that adopted the persona of bat-fetish crimefighter Batman on the night. Although ruined by Tim Burton with hard-nipple-rubber-costumed hero movies, Batman has lived as an iconic figure of DC comics. It is known from 1940 of its first action comic written by Bob Kane, Batman works at night and utilizes the darkness in order to play hide and seek with the bad guy. Since its early release, it has been said that the motive of his bat persona is to invoke fear to the heart of criminals. The cloak of night, it often said, is an actual extension of Batman dark costume. In contrast with Superman, that advertise his guardian attributes by flying across Metropolis in the daylight, Batman cannot work during the day, for he himself is simply the night.
Batman as a user of space, moving around in the spot that normally unused at night. He swings from tower to tower, watching vigilantly from the top of a gargoyle statue. He moved between gutter, playing with smokes and silhouette, and showed only his voice beneath the dark alley. All of these tropes is an element of surprise, to give the impression that he had total control of the space.
If we looked at the architecture context, Batman exploits a location in an unusual way. He traces the points where it is possible to hide his bodies and then moves according to these points. A lot of Superhero (more likely horror antagonist) use the same trick where they seem to be everywhere at once, but Batman fully embarks this motion to emphasize himself as an ominous symbol. A dead space, a notion imbued to space that no longer function as it’s supposed to, like alley at night, gutter, and broken statue, is embraced as active hiding points by Batman.
Daredevil and Affordance
Daredevil aka Matt Murdock moves differently. He used the stick (that symbolized his handicapped disposition), to move around in an acrobatic manner. In fact, by seeing the comic, most of all Daredevil movement consists of stunts that defeat the idea of disabled a person. His movement while limited to short aerial distance (unlike spiderman), closely resembles the art of parkour. A Traceur, or parkour practitioner, move from point A to B by negotiating with surrounding obstacles to achieve the shortest amount of distance. This object could be a fence, railings, stack of boxes, garbage disposal, or simply everything that an anthropomorphic body can use as a medium of displacement. To differ with Freerunner, a term that emphasized the beauty of movement, a traceur emphasized the ability of the body to respond to an immediate obstacle. Daredevil as a comic figure apparently portrayed to practice both.
The practice of parkour involves the concept of affordance. The term was coined by James J. Gibson in 1966. Meaning that the immediate possibility of an object to be used in different situations. An example could be stairstep that being used as a sitting object or a simple railing as skateboard paths. A traceur usually acquires the ability to sense this affordance in the everyday object as a pathway, for example, footing or landing object. Back to Daredevil, as a symbol of “overcoming disability” personage, showed the capability of bodies to move within dangerous space. While universal design seems to acknowledge the needs of the handicapped person, Daredevil subdue the limit of conventional movement.
Dr. Manhattan and Memories
Dr. Manhattan is a member of the Watchmen, a group of superheroes in late 1960 that eventually became a black sheep for the sake of world peace. The story first written by Alan Moore in 1998 and came into movies late 2009. Dr. Manhattan in this story is a human that has transformed into a near-omnipotent entity, thanks to an accident in a quantum physics laboratory. He is the only member of Watchman that possessed actual Superhero that can manipulate space and objects to atomic level by sheer willpower, while the rest member packed with human tragedies.
Juhani Pallasmaa in The Thinking Hand discussing the phenomenon of embedded memory. Simply put, an implanted memory contained the experience, a fragment of memories, that manifested in practice of creating. This notion questioning the position of architect both as pure creator and the product of his/her upbringing.
This became self-evident when we saw the segment where Dr. Manhattan showed Louise his Mars structure. He was isolating himself from the earth, reflecting his own humanity by building a structure like a kid and his sandcastle. This structure turns out to be a huge ball of cogs and gears, perpetually rolling without end while flying across the surface of Mars. This peculiar structure is known later to be inspired by Dr. Manhattan memories of his late father as a watchmaker.
In the next panel, we saw their relationship. Despite his son passion to follow the watchmaking crafts, the father threw away the toolbox, effectively defined his son’s path to be a scientist. The structure that Dr. Manhattan built, as it appears, seems to be the last connection between him and his human condition. An architect, it implies cannot avoid creating without remembering who he is.
Spider-Man and Neighborhood
“Your Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman” is a jargon that used to characterize Spider-Man. As a superhero, Spider-Man adopts the idea that everyone can be normal in a day and suddenly burden a load of responsibility the next day. He is known as… well, friendly towards his Manhattan people. But this not only the title he owns due to charming personality, but the structure of Manhattan itself is a home of Spider-man by all means.
Spider-man swings, that’s his identity. Meaning that he depends on high-rise building to move around. It seems so appropriate that the homeland of Spider-man be placed in Manhattan, New York, where the skyscraper race happened (circa 1930). Started out from Empire State Building as the foundation of civilized achievement, Spider-man turns the building as lighthouse where he could see his homeland. This affects practically everything from his story. Spider-man cannot act effectively in different places, say Wakanda, that portray the harmonic relation between land and place, nor Gotham, that normally and exclusively illustrated grounded from its dirty threshold and dark alley.
Simply put, a superhero usually site-specific when we observe how him/her utilize its city to move around. Batman has preferred Gotham as her and indirectly claimed that “The city makes it people, as she created me”, a nod to Churchill’s saying. Superman glamourous and its mighty attribute come together with the magnificent shining and of the positive nuance of Metropolis city. The relation between the city and its inhabitants, or superhero as its genius loci personification, can be found almost transparently.
Ultraman and Ant-man, the play of scale
What to offer in terms of size? Most of us have watched King Kong, the towering monkey that obstructs the Empire State Building as to mock human endeavor to colonized, some critics would say. But the relation of a city in this story to a gigantic entity always to show the destructive power of demi-god or some monster. This trope used in Ultraman, a Japanese superhero that could shift his size but barely talk. The gargantuan fight per episode between Ultraman and typical Godzilla-like monster keep ensuing monotonously, yet amusing to see how the city became just a plaything for both.
Ant-Man, on the other hand, showed a fresh perspective in terms of scale. Another MCU tropes, but in challenging cinematography. Ant-Man purposely funny and light superhero movies, and it utilizes the everyday object and place that seemingly normal, like a child bedroom, inside a suitcase, and turns them inside out to be a merciless fight arena by juxtaposition.
The first perspective led to Icarus Complex, a term coined by Henry A. Murray to describe a particular type of over-ambitious character. In an aspect of architecture, this embodied in a habit of a creator to be in total control of the design. In recent urban critics, it is shown that architect before 1970 has plagued by the tradition to approach design from an aerial perspective, just like the Icarus and leave the eye view untested. See Brazilia city, for example, awesome from satellite, yet considered horrid for a pedestrian.
Closure
A superhero probably cannot be a good architect for their differing usage of place and their mode of transport compared to the common man. Yet we could see how spaces are negotiated by an assumed entity that we always deem to exist. Whilst moving or trashing the city, a superhero as an extended version of man proves to keep intact with the thematic user-space relation, just in a more daring way.
