{"id":9735,"date":"2026-06-16T09:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T09:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angesfinanciers.org\/?p=9735"},"modified":"2026-06-19T15:21:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T15:21:02","slug":"as-so-often-seems-to-happen-koolhaas-got-there-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/2026\/06\/16\/as-so-often-seems-to-happen-koolhaas-got-there-first\/","title":{"rendered":"“As so often seems to happen, Koolhaas got there first”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Still<\/div>\n

Following the surprise success of architectural horror flick<\/a> Backrooms, Edwin Heathcote<\/a> considers the basis for our morbid fascination with endless corporate spaces.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Is it only me, or do we all have that dream about finding a secret door in our too-small apartment that leads to another room, a corridor, or perhaps a whole basement?<\/strong> It’s the premise of Backrooms, but not in the vein of an exciting discovery, rather as a sinister undermining of everything we understand about the nature of space.<\/p>\n

The movie, currently in cinemas, was based on a series of smart, low-budget YouTube shorts<\/a> by a now 20-year-old Kane Parsons. These uncanny journeys through cursed leftover space became a breakout hit \u2013 viral pieces of faux found footage. Their blend of “creepypasta” urban legend, of pop and the paranormal, seemed to hit a nerve.<\/p>\n

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For most of horror history the haunted house has been the creepy gothic mansion<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The initial photo that inspired the series depicts a real place: Rohner’s Home Furnishings in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, when it was undergoing renovation work to transform it into a hobby shop in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n

Those short films were so striking, and so successful, because they evoked the nightmare of being stuck in a recognisable kind of corporate space, a never-ending labyrinth of generic, fizzingly fluorescently lit abandoned spaces. It is an image that has become familiar to us; from the cringing horrors of David Brent’s The Office to the corporate modernism of Severance (itself inspired in part by Backrooms and featuring Eero Saarinen<\/a>‘s chillingly cool 1962 Bell Labs in New Jersey).<\/p>\n

For most of horror history the haunted house has been the creepy gothic mansion, an imposing, creaking building of dark attics and cellars, cobwebs and odd-shaped windows. The archetype became so embedded \u2013 from Psycho to House on Haunted Hill \u2013 that it became a joke trope in the Addams Family, the Munsters, the Gruesome Twosome’s Creepy Coupe in the cartoon Wacky Races.<\/p>\n