High anxiety

Norman Bates outside his home in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ (1960)

In 1925 Edward Hopper painted a house which looks strangely familiar and familiarly strange. “House by the Railroad” depicts a tall, lonely, 19th-century house as isolated and alienated in its blank landscape as Hopper’s human figures are in his vague, generic interiors.

The picture is as odd as the house. A rusty railroad runs across the bottom and it looks as if the house might be travelling along it, a strange, placeless dwelling moving silently from the edge of one town to the edge of another. The horizontality of the rails reinforces the verticality of the house; this is a dwelling desperate to impose itself on the landscape, a tall tower, chimneys as red as lipstick. Our eyes are drawn to that room at the top, an eerie eyrie.

The reason the house looks familiar is that it inspired some of the most memorable houses in Hollywood history. It was this image that inspired Norman Bates’s house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as well as the Addams Family mansion in the 1960s television series. It has become the ultimate house of horror, an archetype, both dark and a knowingly self-conscious parody of itself.

In Psycho, filmed 35 years after Hopper painted his house, the horizontality of the railroad has been superseded by the flatness of Bates’s single-storey motel next door. Trains have given way to freeways, if anything increasing the sense of atomisation and alienation, the idea of a lack of connection to place which seems to allow this kind of rootless narrative. The motel, wedded to the blacktop plain of the freeway, accentuates the verticality of this tall house on a hill in the middle of nowhere.

The period bookended by Hopper’s painting and Hitchcock’s film represented the zenith of modernism, the period in which the key desires of modernist architects began to filter from the European avant garde to the educated US bourgeoisie and beyond into the space of consumer choice. This was the era when horizontal villas spread across the landscape with pools and terraces echoing the sense of space in an American dream. The starkly vertical Victorian house had become the mid-century nightmare, a pile of rotting timber, dusty, dark rooms overstuffed with moth-eaten taxidermy and bulky wardrobes, of cellars and, particularly towers, which evoked the bats in the belfry of Bates’s twisted, schizoid murderer. The gothic house with its trademark tower had become the space of the past in a country fixated on the future.

It wasn’t always like this. In ancient Egypt the hieroglyph depicting a tower represented not only height but the ascent of an individual in the hierarchy of society. In the medieval era it was churches which rose above the city or the village so towers were associated with the sacred, a link between the earth and the heavens. But the tower also contains the seed of its own destruction. It is the symbol of hubris. The Tower of Babel was toppled by God after man had tried to climb too close to the heavens whilst the Tarot card depicting a tower shows it being struck by lightning and toppling, an ill omen and a herald of catastrophe and ruin. The stones of the tower are often flesh coloured (its verticality makes it symbolise Man) and stones are often shown striking two figures below: the king who commissioned it and the architect who designed it.

The image of the tower built in hubris, a symbol of human pride and smashed by aliens or by the elements, was once a clichéd disaster movie trope but post-9/11 bears a terrible potency.

Towers have also always brought with them another meaning, that of isolation. Hopper’s elevated mansard tower looks a lonely place above a lonely house. Attics are not only repositories of memory and the past but also of things that are best forgotten – including errant daughters. Acrisius was told by the oracle of Apollo that his daughter Danae would bear a son who would kill him. So he locked her into a tower of bronze in a dark chamber with no doors and only a tiny window. But Jupiter found her and visited her as a shower of golden rain, transforming the cell into the fields of Elysium. She bore his child, who became Perseus and you can guess the rest. In Rapunzel the heroine is confined to a similar tower with no doors and lets down her hair to receive and also fall pregnant by a prince.

Tower House in London, designed by William Burges (1875-80)

The tower itself falls in and out of favour. Classical architects had no time for houses with towers but the goths loved them and by the mid-Victorian era they were everywhere, evoking a sense of a mythicised past. Medievally attired, opium-smoking architect William Burges’s wonderful houses were almost nothing but towers.

These houses may have gone out of fashion with the rise of modernism but apartments are now being built in towers that would formerly only have accommodated offices. The tallest skyscrapers increasingly house apartments near their peaks – where the real value resides. The meaning of these structures is clear: an apartment at great height over the city expresses an idea of dominion. It represents a return to the medieval idea of the tower as symbol of ascent, or of that Egyptian hieroglyph, of rising up above the masses.