Oregon may not be considered a hotbed of classical architecture, but when the movie director and producer James Ivory was attending the University of Oregon in the 1940s, he came to appreciate the state’s earliest architecture—namely the Greek Revival courthouses, residences, and bank buildings that had been constructed in the 1850s and 1860s, around the time that Oregon became a state. He had grown up amid those columned buildings his whole life, but he had never really connected them with an architectural language that was grounded in the ancient world.
“Marion Ross, my history of architecture professor at the University of Oregon, made much of those Greek Revival buildings,” the 91-year-old cinema icon told me on Wednesday, as we sat in the octagonal living room of his magnificent 1805 Federal Style house in Columbia County, New York, that Ivory purchased in 1975 and which he has painstakingly restored ever since. “It never occurred to me there was the slightest link between what had been built in Oregon and the rest of the world, but he brought that to my attention,” he continued. "It was eye-opening. So it seems that classical architecture has affected me my whole life, even as a small child. That it what surprised me in doing this film; I’d never really thought about it or even talked about it.”
That’s the premise of Design in Mind: On Location with James Ivory, a half-hour documentary that is airing on PBS’s ALL ARTS station tonight at 7 p.m. (More airings are scheduled, so check your local PBS listings.) The second in a series from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, the film explores how Ivory’s grounding in historical architecture and design has affected not only the homes where he has lived and the furniture and objects that he has collected but also many of the 44 movies that have garnered Merchant Ivory Productions world-wide acclaim as well as multiple Academy Awards, among them painstakingly researched historical dramas such as The Europeans, The Bostonians, A Room With a View, Howards End, and The Golden Bowl.
“Mr. Ivory is a superb artist whom I hold in the highest esteem,” says ICAA president Peter Lyden, “and Merchant Ivory Productions always displayed such an informed engagement with traditional architecture, demonstrating a deep and historical approach to location shooting, so it was a natural fit for the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA) to tell this story.”
Though Ivory says he doesn’t “know how I got interested in houses and furniture. I just slowly did,” he does reveal that finely tuned interiors, usually historic in nature, became an obsession in his teenage years. Back then, he created miniature rooms furnished with cut-paper furniture that he hand-painted and occasionally sold to other miniature-room enthusiasts.
Ivory’s hobby was inspired by repeated viewings of the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, which he first saw in San Francisco in 1940, during a family trip to the Golden Gate International Exposition. Designed by Narcissa Thorne, a Chicago artist and society figure, and executed by expert craftsmen, “they are an ideal of domestic perfection, of furniture and objects and architecture, all perfectly accurate, and they had the most important impact on me,” Ivory says, noting that he copied some of Thorne’s interiors or used them as inspiration for his own small-scale works.
“I made at least a half dozen,” Ivory recalls with a laugh. “I was not considered a weirdo in high school. I mean, I was sort of a weirdo, but I belonged to a good social clique, everybody really liked me—I went to parties, and I took girls out to dances. I did everything you’re supposed to do," he says, looking back. "And, at the same time, away where no one could see, I was making these little rooms.” No better avocation for a man whose films eclipse mere entertainment, having become miniature worlds of their own.
