Behind the Design in Breaking and Entering

Read the design philosophy behind the fictional firm Green Effect in Anthony Minghella’s new film.

Jude Law stars as a landscape architect in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering. Photo by: ©The Weinstein Company, 2006/Laurie Sparham

The movie Breaking and Entering, opening this month in wider release, is about social classes, break-ins and broken hearts, all set against a backdrop of a rapidly changing London landscape—centering on a central character played by Jude Law who is, in one of the most important details of the film, a landscape architect.

It’s a fact noted by critics (in other publications that would not likely draw accusations of a bias to the profession) that landscape architecture plays a significant role in the movie.

The character, Will Francis, works at the firm Green Effect. The firm’s notable project in the film is a large-scale plan in King’s Cross, a transit hub fallen into squalor which has become a redevelopment site of historical proportions while spurring gentrification.

To better develop the identity of the character and the firm, Anthony Minghella, who directed and wrote the screenplay for Breaking and Entering, wrote the following manifesto, provided to LAND by the Weinstein Company and Miramax Films. The manifesto provides extra insight for potential moviegoers, if not some interesting philosophical elements. Keep in mind one atypical detail about landscape architect Will Francis: He hates flowers and plants and loves concrete.

Green Effect Manifesto

Green Effect is certainly not against nature, although we are accused of being against nature. Rather, we are against the fraudulent advocacy of nature, the misnaming of mediated space as natural, the mistaking of grass as nature, of green as nature. We are against decoration—the flowerbed, the plant, the lawn—those miniature gestures of appeasement which nature would not recognize. Nature is not tame, by definition, and there is no space in Britain or Europe that can be described without irony as natural. That a site is designated green space is already a gesture of control. It can be termed a national park or a wildlife sanctuary, its boundaries marked, its animal life monitored—Nature this way!

What Green Effect advocates is hardly modern. Nash was designing both internal and external spaces in the nineteenth century. The Regent’s Canal, Regent Street, and Regents Park are all illustrations of a coherent arrangement of private and public environments—elegant terraces grouped around the park, with its inner and outer circles. Regent’s Park is made, of course, a construct no more or less natural than the curving rows of stucco buildings. The confident harmonies, which develop from this marriage of house and environment, have direct and positive impact on those who inhabit them. It’s great to walk in the park and look at the facades; it’s great to look at the park from inside the buildings. These values are self-evident. The same is true of the Italian Piazza; its grandest expressions—in San Marco in Venice, the Piazza Navona in Rome—without a blade of grass, are as architectural, as pleasing, as defining as any building, as communal as any park. They say something about a culture in the way as our endless verges, our muddy borders, our clumps of bamboos, forlorn trees, and concrete flower beds speak volumes about our current society and its lack of respect for what happens to our citizens when they leave their front doors travelling to the glass boxes of their offices. A glance at the budgets for enclosed spaces and exterior spaces indicate society’s true valuation of our constructed environments.

Green Effect views the built landscape as an art, one which requires as much care as any structure and as much acknowledgement of design. We believe that there has to be more than a token recognition by architects that they contribute to an environment gestalt, that the choreography of bound and unbound space should be determined as a whole and not simply with the one determining the other—I’m here, fill in around me. Every large-scale urban project should employ landscape and building architects simultaneously, and Green Effect will only commit to projects where such a dynamic exists and where the possibility lies for the demands of landscape to genuinely effect the position and external characteristics of any structures. Where possible, Green Effect will design both. It will favor environment, it will insist that harmonies between the so-called male and female spaces have political impact, not least on crime but most of all, that respect and wit toward exterior space improves the quality of life of every citizen.

Green Effect Partnership. 2005

Paul Burkhardt served as the interim editor for LAND Online. He currently writes for the Associated Press.