Vandamm House

A Mid-Century Modernist masterpiece that was immortalised on celluloid - despite never actually existing

- Delwyn Mallett

AS MID-20TH CENTURY Modernist houses go, the so-called Vandamm House, built above the Mount Rushmore National Monument, ranks as one of the most recognised, spectacular and admired.

However, much to the disappointment of architecture fans, some of whom tried to find it, it doesn't exist outside the celluloid of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 masterpiece North by Northwest. Even then, it's on screen for a mere 14 minutes, with wide shots of the magnificent cliff-top cantilevered exterior lasting only a matter of seconds.

It was conceived as a paean to 1950s consumerism and luxury as Hitchcock wanted an ultra-modern contemporary home for one of the movie's key scenes. In it, the debonair Madison Avenue ad-man hero Cary Grant attempts to rescue the equally sophisticated and elegant undercover FBI agent Eva Marie Saint before she is spirited out of the country by her lover (it was a risqué film for 1959), the Cold War spy-villain Phillip Vandamm, played by James Mason.

The much-publicised Guggenheim Museum, by Frank Lloyd Wright, was nearing completion in New York at the time. Being America's most famous architect, he was approached but rejected when his fee amounted to 10% of the movie's total budget.