Architecture in the Movies
Architecture infuses our lives with emotions, ideas, splendor, and stress all the time. It’s only fitting it does the same in great movies. Here are famous classic films where the buildings are more than a backdrop. Am I forgetting any? Let me know…
Blade Runner, 1982
The classic “architecture in the movies” movie. It has it all: hyper-vertical cities, buildings-as-advertisements, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Anyone who took an architectural class in college watched this movie.
The Third Man, 1949
The backdrop of urban glory and urban decay (Ferris wheels and rubble piles) makes The Third Man a contender on its own. Filmed by Carol Reed with deep, moody shots of interiors and tense, odd-angled shots of streets and facades, its depiction of city chaos is beyond perfect.
Metropolis, 1925
A view of the future in which people either live underground or in a wonderous above ground city. Another bit of required viewing. The prime example of a modernist utopia: simple, spotless, and monumental, with the workers hidden out of sight.
Batman, 1989
Tim Burton’s Gotham is New York on steroids, or acid, or both: towering, smoke-choked and claustrophobic, it’s total dystopia: a warning against unchecked, unedited, unselfconscious development.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, 1988
The moon scene alone puts this movie on the list. Robin William’s disembodied head buzzes around a bizarre landscape that’s part Italian fascist monuments and part stage set.
2001, 1968
The set’s architecture, starkly modernist as it is, is insanely detailed, down to instructions on how to use the space toilet in the bathroom.
Brazil, 1985
The nightmarish futuristic satire effectively blurs all lines between illusion and reality. A government statistician who chooses to blind himself to the decaying world around him.
A few great documentaries
The Architecture of Doom, 1999
The film captures the inner workings of the Third Reich and illuminates the Nazi aesthetic in art, architecture and popular culture. Hitler worshipped ancient Rome and Greece, and dreamed of a new Golden Age of classical art and monumental architecture.
Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney , 2005
Filmed by Sydney Pollock, it chronicles the friendship between director Sydney Pollock and the famed architect every bit as much as it does Gehry and his work, and it makes for a delightful window into the world of creativity and genius.
My Architect: A Son’s Journey, 2003
Louis I. Kahn is considered by many historians to have been the most important architect of the second half of the twentieth century. The film is a riveting tale of love, art, betrayal and forgiveness — in which the illegitimate son of a legendary architect undertakes a worldwide exploration to discover and understand his father’s and the personal choices he made.
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1998
The beauty of Frank Lloyd Wright is that aside from telling a long and often melodramatic story lucidly, it deals with issues of art and architecture in ways that are approachable but not simplistic.
