Every shot of a movie organizes a space. It does so by using pieces of furniture, elements in the background, urban and non-urban landscapes and, above all, by placing the action (who does what? In what part of the shot? In what direction are they moving?). In cinema, the organization of the space works exactly the same way in which architecture and design tell their stories or contribute to the life and stories of those who surround them.
10 masterpieces of cinema in which architecture and design are fundamental
Movies that talk about architects and architecture, but also in which design plays a fundamental role. From Bertolucci, to Greenaway, to Spielberg's Minority Report.
Less is more, and in this case the absence of delimitations becomes an opportunity not to deny the spaces, but to create new ones by exploiting the spectator's perception.
And in the end, when it all ends, we're in a cottage in the woods. The landscape changes, the materials change, the design changes, the organization of the interior changes, and that’s the way the film tells us that everything has changed. Finally.
The past, together with the present and the future.
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- Gabriele Niola
- 17 March 2020
So, there are movies that tell the stories of architects, there are movies set in architecturally significant places, there are movies that create a whole design world to communicate certain ideas, and finally there are movies that use the surroundings to interact with the rest of the scene. In any case, architecture and design play a fundamental role in conveying the cultural and intellectual aims of the movie. The plot will always be the first and most important vehicle to do that, but images and spaces have their importance, too.
When Billy and E.T. ride on their bike in front of a full moon, in one of the most crucial, significant and beloved movie scenes of all time, Spielberg creates a precise composition, and organizes the horizontal space so that the entrance and exit from the scene traces a delicate arch in the sky as the music builds. That's the architecture of image.
And even when, at the end of Back to the Future Part II, Marty McFly runs back to Doc, running from the back of the scene to the front, that’s a specific way of organizing the space, in order to give the viewer more time to realize what's about to happen and anticipate Doc's astonishment, instead of making it happen all of a sudden.
And also when a design detail is used to define what a character wants, thinks or plans to do, like the interior of Patrick Bateman's house in American Psycho.
The films not to be missed by architecture and design lovers are the most revolutionary and daring, both in the use of space and in the narration of what it means to work in that field. We have listed them for you in no particular order.
This is the only comedy on the list, a very light-hearted but also extremely accurate movie that depicts the relationship between client and architect in a quite unusual situation. The movie mocks both the clients' dreams of greatness, soon to be scaled down, and the architect’s arrogance, who thinks of himself as an artist, together with the clichés about modern architecture. It is both a silly and reliable description that seems to be based on the worst stories told by real architects and clients.
Unlike the previous one, this movie by King Vidor (based on a novel by Ayn Rand) is a very detailed and ambitious movie, in which Gary Cooper is an architect who wants to bring a change into a world much more conventional than he is. In addition to this, the movie also manages to show the tension that exists between construction and destruction, the desire to see a sketch become reality and then its opposite.
In one of the most successful ones of the series, you can see how the classic James Bond movies (the ones with Sean Connery) made a very special use of the setting. Introducing a different villain each time, they used the places, the interiors and the exteriors to describe them. Not only the headquarters of Spectre have a very precise and coherent design, where evil is an integral part of the architecture (like the electrified chairs), but also Goldfinger (the villain) is introduced thanks to the interior of his home, which was designed by Ken Adams. The whole setting recalls the American origin of the character, but after a short time it becomes an instrument of death - an extension of his intentions. And when he illustrates his plan, he brings out a model around which all his allies gather, a model in which James Bond is hidden and symbolically surrounded by the enemy.
This movie has a wonderful script, and that's exactly what it takes to make a good thriller. To this, however, Polanski adds a crazy location where much of the story takes place, a high-tech villa (literally) on the beach, with a bold design and full of nooks, full and empty spaces in which the protagonist gets lost but also where he discovers important details. He’s trying to solve an enigma inside his head while walking around a house that seems to be an enigma itself.
The setting of Dogville is minimalist, and that’s the most extreme choice of all. It takes place on a stage, but it's nothing like a theater play. By giving up the scenography and especially the walls that delimit the rooms, it is up to the sequences, zones and characters to create defined spaces. Lars Von Trier works with a much more complicated dimension of storytelling, in which everything is on stage, and he cannot exploit most of the props usually used to help the viewer understand what it’s Happening.
Less is more, and in this case the absence of delimitations becomes an opportunity not to deny the spaces, but to create new ones by exploiting the spectator's perception.
Fascism lies in its architecture. Bertolucci's movie tells the story of philosophy professor who is secretly working as a spy for the fascist regime. Every single shot pays great attention on the costumes and the environments, and employs rationalist design and the width of the rooms or the smooth white walls of the buildings to frame the character in a world that seems like a propaganda manifesto, in which the immorality of his actions is in great contrast with the aspirations of greatness and solemnity of the for which he’s working.
From Blade Runner on, science fiction is mainly about its cities. The way we live in the future determines our mood and the mood of the movie (see the strange combination of Shanghai and San Francisco in the movie Her). But no one has worked as hard as Minority Report to create and imagine new places based on real plans, ideas and suggestions. The city of the future has a very strong personality, it's not an experiment on design, but on functionality. The movie took some trends of the time in which it was filmed, and made them even more popular. We can't say we got there and maybe we never will, but the ideas of the present are still the same.
And in the end, when it all ends, we're in a cottage in the woods. The landscape changes, the materials change, the design changes, the organization of the interior changes, and that’s the way the film tells us that everything has changed. Finally.
The triumph of design in cinema. There's no detail that wasn't meticulously studied by Kubrick, there's no structure that wasn't built on purpose, especially the spatial ones that simulate a gravity different from ours. Special effects that blend with what in 1968 was the design of the future and an unscrupulous use of white to create a muffled atmosphere. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, design is everything. The contrast created by technology and how it regulates life in space is decisive for the great final journey beyond physics, when furnishing elements from different eras coexist in the room together with the monolith.
The past, together with the present and the future.
It was a failure. The Tron sequel carried on its shoulders the weight of honouring the changing technological scenario and being able to use computer graphics and technology beyond its limits again. It didn't manage to do that. But what it did was to bring inside the cinemas an experience beyond the limits of video art, where black was the dominant color along with fluo orange, blue and red lines, where each element was linked to a very precise design made of soft and rounded shapes and finally Daft Punk cpntributed to an amazing soundtrack. It was pure synesthesia: the plot becomes a pretext, everything there was to know about the world created by Joseph Kosinski lied in the visual delirium of the forms.
Peter Greenaway's cinema is a pure exaltation of form, and he has never worked as hard on exact geometries as in this movie. A gigantic research on the vanishing point and on architectural landscapes, where views of gardens and houses hide details and mysteries, where seeing is a game and almost a challenge and watching is an obligation. A man has to draw a series of views of a villa, a way of fixing reality as photographs. Those views will reveal what the naked eye can't see. The landscape, its forms, the order of the gardens and the houses is all that matters.