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Geoff Manaugh

N A K ATO M I S PA C E

While watching Die Hard the other night—

easily one of the best architectural films of
the past 25 years—I kept thinking about an
essay called “Lethal Theory” by Eyal
Weizman—itself one of the best and most
consequential architectural texts of the past
decade.

In it, Weizman—an Israeli architect and

prominent critic of that nation’s territorial
policy—documents many of the emerging
spatial techniques used by the Israeli
Defense Forces in their high-tech, legally
dubious 2002 invasion of Nablus. During
that battle, Weizman writes, “soldiers
moved within the city across hundred-
meter-long ‘overground-tunnels’ carved
through a dense and contiguous urban
fabric.” Their movements were thus almost
entirely camouflaged, with troop
movements hidden from above by virtue of
always remaining inside buildings. “Although
several thousand soldiers and several
hundred Palestinian guerrilla fighters were
maneuvering simultaneously in the city,”
Weizman adds, “they were so ‘saturated’
within its fabric that ver y few would have
been visible from an aerial perspective at
any given moment.”

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Furthermore, soldiers used none

of the streets, roads, alleys, or
courtyards that constitute the
syntax of the city, and none of
the external doors, internal
stairwells, and windows that
constitute the order of buildings,
but rather moved horizontally
through party walls, and
vertically through holes blasted
in ceilings and floors.

Weizman goes on to interview a

commander of the Israeli Paratrooper
Brigade. The commander describes his
forces as acting “like a worm that eats its
way forward, emerging at points and then
disappearing. We were thus moving from
the interior of homes to their exterior in a
surprising manner and in places we were not
expected, arriving from behind and hitting
the enemy that awaited us behind a corner.”

This is how the troops could “adjust the

relevant urban space to our needs,” he
explains, and not the other way around.

Indeed, the commander thus exhorted his

troops as follows: “There is no other way of
moving! If until now you were used to
moving along roads and sidewalks, forget it!
From now on we all walk through walls!”

Weizman illustrates the other side of this

terrifyingly dislocating experience by
quoting an article originally published
during the 2002 invasion. Here, a
Palestinian woman, whose home was raided,

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living room, which you know so

well; this is the room where the
family watches television
together after the evening meal. .
. . And, suddenly, that wall
disappears with a deafening roar,
the room fills with dust and
debris, and through the wall
pours one soldier after the other,
screaming orders. You have no
idea if they’re after you, if they’ve
come to take over your home, or
if your house just lies on their
route to somewhere else. The
children are screaming,
panicking. . . . Is it possible to
even begin to imagine the horror
experienced by a five-year-old
child as four, six, eight, twelve
soldiers, their faces painted
black, submachine guns pointed
everywhere, antennas protruding
from their backpacks, making
them look like giant alien bugs,
blast their way through that wall?

In fact, I’m reminded of a scene toward the

end of the recent WWII film Days of Glory
in which we see a German soldier blasting
his way horizontally through a house, wall
by wall, using his bazooka as a blunt
instrument of architectural reorganization
—”adjusting the relevant space to his needs,”
we might say—and chasing down the
French troops without limiting himself to
doors or stairways.

In any case, post-battle surveys later

revealed that “more than half of the

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their walls, floors, or ceilings, which created

several haphazard crossroutes”—a heavily
armed improvisational navigation of the
city.

So why do I mention all this in the context

of Die Hard? The majority of that film’s
interest, I’d suggest, comes precisely
through its depiction of architectural space:
John McClane, a New York cop on his
Christmas vacation, moves through a Los
Angeles high-rise in basically every
conceivable way but passing through its
doors and hallways.

McClane explores the tower—called

Nakatomi Plaza—via elevator shafts and air
ducts, crashing through windows from the
outside-in and shooting open the locks of
rooftop doorways. If there is not a corridor,
he makes one; if there is not an opening,
there will be soon.

Over the course of the film, McClane blows

up whole sections of the building; he stops
elevators between floors; and he otherwise
explores the internal spaces of Nakatomi
Plaza in acts of virtuoso navigation that
were neither imagined nor physically
planned for by the architects.

His is an infrastructure of nearly

uninhibited movement within the material
structure of the building.

The film could perhaps have been subtitled

“lessons in the inappropriate use of
architecture,” were that not deliberately
pretentious. But even the SWAT team

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garden on the building’s perimeter, and the

terrorists who seize control of Nakatomi
Plaza in the first place do so after arriving
through the service entrance of an
underground car park.

What I find so interesting about Die Hard—

in addition to unironically enjoying the
film—is that it cinematically depicts what it
means to bend space to your own particular
navigational needs. This mutational
exploration of architecture even supplies
the building’s narrative premise: the
terrorists are there for no other reason than
to drill through and rob the Nakatomi
Corporation’s electromagnetically sealed
vault.

Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions:

If you have to get from A to B—that is,
from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from
the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast,
carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way
there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars
and meandering through the labyrinthine,
previously unexposed back-corridors of the
built environment?

Why not personally infest the spaces

around you?

I might even suggest that what would have

made Die Hard 2 an interesting sequel
—sadly, the series is unremarkable for the
fact that each film is substantially worse
than the one before—would have been if
Die Hard's spatial premise had been
repeated on a much larger urban scale.

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areas, enter neighborhoods and homes in

search of suspects, and take suspects into
custody for purposes of interrogation and
detention.” This becomes a spatially
extraordinary proposition when you
consider that someone could be kidnapped
from the 4th floor of a building by troops
who have blasted through the walls and
ceilings, coming down into that space from
the 5th floor of a neighboring complex—
and that the abductors might only have
made it that far in the first place after
moving through the walls of other
structures nearby, blasting upward through
underground infrastructure, leaping
terrace-to-terrace between buildings, and
more.

An alternative-history plot for a much

better Die Hard 2 could thus perhaps
include a scene in which the rescuing squad
of John McClane-led police officers does not
even know what building they are in, a suitably
bewildering encapsulation of this method
of moving undetected through the city.

“Walking through walls” thus becomes a

kind of militarized parkour.

Indeed, recent films like The Bourne

Ultimatum, Casino Royale, District 13, and
many others could be viewed precisely as
the urban-scale realization of Die Hard's
architectural scenario. Even The Bank Job—
indeed, any bank heist film at all involving
tunnels—makes this Weizmanian approach
to city space quite explicit.

Tangentially, I’m reminded of Matt Jones’s

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Jones writes that “there’s no travel in the

new Bond”; there are simply “establishing
shots of exotic destinations.” By the end of a
Bond film, he adds, you simply “feel like
you are in the international late-capitalist
nonplace,” a geography with neither
landmarks nor personal memory.

Compare the paradoxically unmoving,

amnesiac geography of James Bond, then, to
the compressed spaces of Paul Greengrass-
directed Jason Bourne films. These films are
“set in Schengen,” Jones writes, “a
connected, border-less Mitteleurope that
can be hacked and accessed and traversed—
not without effort, but with determination,
stolen vehicles and the right train
timetables.” Indeed, Jones memorably
suggests, “Bourne wraps cities, autobahns,
ferries and train terminuses around him as
the ultimate body-armor.”

Rather than Bond’s private

infrastructure [of ] expensive cars
and toys, Bourne uses public
infrastructure as a superpower. A
battered watch and an accurate
U-Bahn time-table are all he
needs for a perfectly-timed,
death-defying evasion of the
authorities.

The space of the city is used in profoundly

different ways by Bond and Bourne—but to
this duality I would add John McClane of
the original Die Hard.

If Jason Bourne’s actions make visible the

infrastructure-rich, borderless world of the

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Nakatomi space, wherein buildings reveal

near-infinite interiors, capable of being
traversed through all manner of non-
architectural means. In all three cases,
though—with Bond, Bourne, and
McClane—it is Hollywood action films
that reveal to us something very important
about how cities can be known, used, and
navigated: these films are filled with the
improvisational crossroutes that constitute
Eyal Weizman’s “Lethal Theor y.”

As I wrote the other day, crime is a way to

use the city.

On the other hand, as Weizman points out,

this is not a new approach to built space at
all:

In fact, although celebrated now

as radically new, many of the
procedures and processes
described above have been part
and parcel of urban operations
throughout history. The
defenders of the Paris
Commune, much like those of
the Kasbah of Algiers, Hue,
Beirut, Jenin, and Nablus,
navigated the city in small,
loosely coordinated groups
moving through openings and
connections between homes,
basements, and courtyards using
alternative routes, secret
passageways, and trapdoors.

This is all just part of “a ghostlike military

fantasy world of boundless fluidity, in

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Treated as an architectural premise, Die Hard

becomes an exhilarating catalog of
unorthodox movements through space. I
would suggest again, then, that where the
various Die Hard sequels went wrong was in
abandoning this spatial investigation—one
that could very easily have been scaled-up
to encompass a city—and following,
instead, the life of one character: John
McClane. But, when taken out of Nakatomi
Plaza—that is, out of the boundless, oceanic
fluidity of Nakatomi space—McClane is
reduced to an action film cliché whose
failing charisma no amount of wise-
cracking can salvage.

Originally published With thanks to Geoff

on Bldgblog.com in Manaugh.
2010.
http://www.bldgblog.
com/2010/01
/nakatomi-space/

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