There is nothing real about the movie that made Almodóvar famous. Everything is reconstructed in the studio, which means that each element is purposefully chosen and placed. One standout gem of Almodóvar’s design prowess is Carmen Maura’s apartment, a quintessential example of what came to be known as Almodóvarian design – a fusion of vibrant colors, gleaming surfaces, pop culture objects, and unique spaces. These elements serve not only to reveal the characters’ personalities (as seen in how he depicts his home in Dolor y Gloria) but also pay homage to the iconic design of American comedies from the 1960s. 

In this movie, Almodóvar provides us with an extraordinary sense of his era, an homage to the rounded surfaces and artistry of the 1980s. Many have attempted to embrace Pop Art in cinema, but Almodóvar goes further by seamlessly integrating Pop Art aesthetics into his sets – so much so that one could say that his stories actually take place in the world of Pop Art. Even the taxi that frequently appears in the movie is decorated like a house. As Almodóvar himself famously said about the set of his movies, “If I’d had the money and the contacts, I would have asked David Hockney to design it”.

Gothic architecture is not among the dominant styles in Italy. When crafting his horror stories, Dario Argento could not imitate the British and the Americans, who until then had relied heavily on Gothic stories and therefore Gothic settings. Instead, he ventured into uncharted territory, creating a distinct Italian sense of fear with Art Nouveau elements. By infusing floral motifs, vibrant colors, stained glass windows, and buildings with overhangs with an unsettling aura, Argento transformed these features into something truly terrifying. He skillfully fashioned an imaginative fear-centric style from scratch. 

Suspiria stands as the culmination of this creative endeavor – a completely insane movie that is celebrated as a work of art in its own right, despite its seemingly unconventional plot involving a ballerina who studies at a dance school infested with witches. This cinematic masterpiece owes its greatness to the unbridled creativity of Luciano Tovoli, the director of photography, and Argento’s visionary madness, as he held sway over both the box office and the film’s production. Suspiria may be the only true Liberty movie ever made.

The film centers on the Recchi family and unfolds in the magnificent setting of Villa Necchi (the assonance is no coincidence), a rationalist masterpiece designed by Piero Portaluppi and commissioned by Italy’s educated industrial upper middle class in the 1930s. The villa was built with no spending limits. It boasts Milan’s second-ever swimming pool, following the municipal one. Despite the grandeur of the setting, the protagonist family is confronted with an unsettling element – a woman, portrayed by Tilda Swinton, who seems out of place and gradually begins to fall apart. 

The juxtaposition of her struggles against the backdrop of Villa Necchi’s marble staircases and luxurious rooms adds a touch of grandeur to the narrative. Although the story is set in modern times, the rationalist architecture of the villa seems to echo Italy’s past, suggesting a tale of constraint, violence, and overpowering forces.

The plot revolves around a young couple, the husband is an actor who may have done something to his pregnant wife, possibly with the involvement of their neighbors. Polanski allows us to easily imagine the layout of the couple’s apartment, familiarizing us with the location of each room, which becomes crucial as the story progresses. As the narrative delves into the interiors of neighboring apartments, the puzzle pieces fall into place and everything becomes clear.

Roman Polanski’s first American film is a masterful display of subtle interior design. Most, if not all, of the film takes place inside Manhattan’s iconic Dakota Building, which plays such a central role that the movie opens with an exterior view of the building. The neo-Gothic architecture of the Dakota Building foreshadows the neo-Gothic nature of the story that follows. The movie has the feel of a modern Poe story. 

A trip back in time. This delightful comedy starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor pays homage to the classic films featuring Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Inspired by these light-hearted stories set in upper-middle-class surroundings, filled with playful love skirmishes and battles of the sexes, the film captures the essence of these sophisticated settings. What truly sets it apart is its remarkable dedication to recreating 1960s American interiors, surpassing even the films that inspired it. 

By cleverly concentrating references, cues, styles, and gimmicks from various classic movies, it weaves together a seamless tapestry of colors, rounded shapes, and impeccably coordinated clothing and furniture. This unique blend of visual elements creates a delightful cinematic smoothie, a true celebration of the 1960s design aesthetic rarely achieved before.

Photo courtesy Villa Tasca

Photo courtesy Villa Tasca

Photo courtesy Villa Tasca

Photo courtesy Villa Tasca

Photo courtesy Villa Tasca

Photo courtesy Villa Tasca

Photo courtesy Villa Tasca

Photo courtesy Villa Tasca

Photo courtesy Villa Tasca

The Royal Tenenbaums was the first of Wes Anderson’s movies to focus so closely on costumes and locations in order to tell the story of a particular family. The aim was to show everyone that the protagonists are exceptional, and they all have excelled in their field. To immediately show that they are not like the others, Anderson places them in a maniacally furnished house. This is exactly the way cartoons work: the characters' objects resemble the characters and are a way of describing them.
There are elegant antiques, African artifacts, and bright '70s colours. The best thing in the movie, however, is the iconic Scalamandre zebra wallpaper in the ballroom.

The scenes inside the Belafonte, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou's research vessel, were filmed at Rome’s Cinecittà studios. Even the furnishing of the vessel follow a coherent pattern, with a precise colour palette and details (obviously from the 70s) such as red carpets or wooden panels. It's an incredible mix of industrial design and a toy, in which all the characters are required to wear the same specific clothing. It's a requirement of the movie that is also stated in the plot, when Steve Zissou makes sure that the newcomer is provided with a Speedo costume like everyone else.

The only one of Wes Anderson's movies to follow this approach also for the exteriors is Moonrise Kingdom. The escape of two young children in love to a kind of far-away Eden takes a grotesque and paradoxical turn: the fantastic world they reach seems to be furnished like a house, or rather like a world inhabited by dolls and puppets toys. Again, just like in a cartoon, each character of this very bizarre melodrama is characterized by a uniform, as if they were the characters of The Flintstones: everyone is defined by what they wear, and their clothes never change. The uniform is the character.

One of the best movies, however, is perhaps The Darjeeling Limited, in which we find ourselves in the Indian 1970s. In particular the interiors of the trains are designed as to resemble an illustration, at the same time realistic and impossible. To make it, a real Indian train was taken and redecorated with very strong colours, each wagon with a precise chromatic dominance and in several cases even adorned with portraits of the icons of the time.
And it is very interesting to see how Wes Anderson then recycled this experience for the short film Come Together created for H&M, all set on a train but clearly with H&M costumes.

Finally, when Wes Anderson started working on The Grand Budapest Hotel, his latest film with real-life actors, he ventured into one of the most ambitious and risky productions of his career. The protagonist of the film is an unknown actor, Tony Revolori, but all the rest of the cast, all the actors and even those who only appear for a few minutes, are famous actors. The exact opposite of what usually happens. In addition, the story of the movie takes place in two different times, with two different styles of decor but in any case, magnificent, majestic and of exceptional size. The views of the interior of The Grand Budapest Hotel are among the most complex compositions ever made (the movie was awarded an Oscar for best production design), all Art Nouveau with a red interior recreated in a former German warehouse. And after actually making an animated movie (Fantastic Mr. Fox) he also learned how to make the actors move as if they were characters from a cartoon: they peep their head through the door and run as if they were in an episode of The Looney Tunes.

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli for 2050+

“Almost forty years ago, this film dealt with very timely themes in a poetic and visionary way: the relationship with the other, the need to coexist and establish alliances with the non-human, to promote interspecies and intergenerational forms of inclusiveness, to accept, work with and theatricalize toxicity. In the face of the climate collapse we are experiencing, Nausicaä is almost a manifesto, as much as the writings of Donna Haraway from which it draws inspiration”. 

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli for 2050+

Dirk Somers for Bovenbouw Architectuur

“What I find so striking about architecture and film is how the evil is dominantly situated in modern and highly abstract architecture. Wether it’s Dr. No, North by Northwest, The Ghostwriter or Sleeping with the Enemy, slick architecture houses the bad guys who got disconnected from society and its values. Even more explicitly, in the movie Cube the evil is embodied by the abstract grid where the characters are trapped inside. Architectural historiography still equals modernist abstraction to the values of the free, modern world of late enlightenment. Cinema depicts modernist architecture as its opposite”.

Dirk Somers for Bovenbouw Architectuur

Carmelo Rodríguez for ENORME Studio

“We recommend the documentary on Paolo Soleri because the figure of the Italian architect is fundamental for architecture in particular and life in general. One of the last utopians ahead of his time by more than fifty years, founding a city and a way of life, that of Arcosanti, which still stand as symbols of ecology and well-being”.

Carmelo Rodríguez for ENORME Studio

Jean-Benoît Vétillard

“The more you explore this film, the more you get lost. You have to love slippage, vertigo and wandering. You have to accept Fellini’s delusions for what they are: reveries. In this film the architecture is gigantic, its aesthetics are made of fragments, the wandering is an exquisite corpse through spaces without transition. The strange property of Dr Xavier Katzone – whose wives demand its demolition – is an environment with a virile accent. Narrow galleries of portraits of women, high white marble walls highlighted by green neon, a huge dining room or gymnasium, a bedroom bathed in palm trees, a stormy night, a long slide full of childhood memories, a circus, a cage, a cellar, a courtroom, behind a wall a narrow corridor, a staircase... to finally get out into the open air and fly away in a hot-air balloon, an enormous inflatable doll”.

Jean-Benoît Vétillard

Yena Young for Plastique Fantastique

“I watched Gattaca in a movie theater more than 20 years ago and I am still impressed by its setting. The movie is about a despotic society where the Power of Control has overwhelmed all boundaries. A futuristic scenario is reproduced using an exquisite selection of elements from the 60s. The brilliant and unique use of artificial, vivid green light transforms the way we perceive this retro setting into a timeless surrounding. The director uses light saturation and architectural dislocation to enhance our perception and disturb our equilibrium”.

Yena Young for Plastique Fantastique

Ideatore Graeme Manson, USA, 2020, Netflix

Created by David Simon and George Pelecanos, USA, 2019, HBO

Created by Michaela Coel, UK, 2019, BBC ONE HBO

Created by Luca Guadagnino, Paolo Giordano, Francesca Manieri and Sean Conway, Italy/USA, 2020, HBO Sky Atlantic

Created by Sam Levinson, USA, 2019, HBO

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.

Inside a monolithic building reminiscent of an Inca temple set in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the office of Dr. Eldon Tyrell - head of the corporation that produces replicants with human bodies and thoughts - is a solemn and grandiose space bathed in the golden light of sunset that spreads across the walls and polished floors, and dotted with brass statues of birds and bronze busts, marble pedestals and obelisks. A dark environment with an almost deathly essentiality reminiscent of a mausoleum, perhaps sealing the rise of android life in place of human life. 

Spaces as impeccable as they are leaden (this is Gotham City, after all) are the boardroom and Applied Sciences Division of Wayne Enterprises, a multinational corporation owned by tycoon Bruce Wayne when he's not playing Batman. The meeting room is an icy environment with glass surfaces through which light hardly seems to filter, and where a disarming sense of emptiness creeps in from the tightly packed set of chairs around the presidential table and the cold neon lights. The Applied Sciences Division is an equally bleak and almost outsized space where the human dimension seems to be annihilated in a ruthless and hostile world. The real environments that lent themselves to the scene are located in Chicago: the meeting room is in the IBM Building at 330 North Wabash Avenue and the Applied Sciences Division in the Convention Hall of the West Building at McCormick Place.

A cult science fiction film, Metropolis depicts a not-so-far-fetched scenario because, as Ray Bradbury said, “science fiction pretends to look into the future but actually looks at the reflection of the truth that is right in front of us”. In a dystopian future, a metropolis with expressionist geometries is the scene of exacerbated class struggles between the privileged few who live in luxurious skyscrapers and the multitude of proletarians “devoured” by the machines of dehumanising production in the city's underground. The workplaces are forges puffing out vapours, fumes and exhaust oils in which individual identity disappears into the gears of the economy of profit (of the few). A little less than a hundred years have passed since the first projection but the foreshadowing of the future of that time is not so different from the current reality.

Despite the show’s rampant misogyny and the fact that working there is hell for a woman, the offices of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency on Madison Avenue in New York are an emblem of impeccable style. From the colour palettes, to the modernist furniture, artwork, spherical lights and upholstery, the rooms echo the elegant yet accessible retro feel of Joseph Eichler's homes and the architectural language of Mid-Century Modern.

The office of “M”, the code name given by Ian Fleming to the director of the Secret Intelligence Service, exudes composed authority. The solid wood desk is the physical and decisional epicentre of the room, which is entirely lined with wood panelling and shelving in deep, warm tones. Leather armchairs, paintings, antiques and vintage furniture complete an environment with an intellectual aura and a retro flavour, but perhaps it is not advisable to relax too much.

The office of Mr Burns, billionaire owner of the Springfield nuclear plant and despotic boss of Homer Simpson, is an icy, repelling place on a superhuman scale, covered in velvets, portraits and blazons that emphasise a desire for magniloquence and prestige. A stuffed bear placed in a corner – so as not to steal the spotlight from the space’s only real protagonist, the presidential table – seems to be silently shouting its disappointment. Outside this darkly coloured space, dominated by reds, greens and purples, the blue sky opens up (but with toxic fumes from the chimneys).

The ramshackle criminal lawyer with dubious morals Saul Goodman stands out for his characterisation among the secondary characters of the series “Breaking Bad” and as the absolute protagonist of the spin-off “Better call Saul”. His office is a trashy manifesto: a rubbery, unstable Statue of Liberty, which sways with the air currents on the roof of an anonymous building in an anonymous car park, welcomes the hilarious lawyer’s postmodern office. Columns, oculi, decorations and stylised Ionic capitals in faux marble lend a supposedly stately aura to the space. Wall writings taken from the constitution exalt the skills of the lawyer, while a prefabricated false ceiling and electric blue carpeting from a third-rate motel denounce the “cheap” nature of the place.

Working inside the Starship Enterprise would definitely be a cool experience: talented colleagues (even aliens), non-stop action, breathtaking views of space “where no man has gone before”, comfortable and cosy surroundings. The meeting room in particular is somewhere between Mid-Century Modern – in keeping with the original series’ 1960s release period – and futuristic, with round tables with wooden tops, tulip chairs and a colour palette of acid hues giving the room a retro and somewhat psychedelic aura.

The headquarters of the company in charge of interstellar affairs is a place where, amidst alien worms sipping a cappuccino and staff busy with matters of planetary interest, there is a pulsating and dynamic operational buzz. The spaces housing the activities are visibly in line with aerospace scenarios, with full-volume environments where suspended “cells” housing individual offices and overhead walkways float. High-tech materials (steel for structures and finishes and glass) dialogue with soft, organic furnishings in light tones that accentuate the diffuse luminosity of the rooms.

In the series of films and stories centred on the figure of the accountant Ugo Fantozzi, we can read all the tragicomic complexity of an anti-hero inert in the face of adverse destiny. Inexorably overwhelmed by events, Fantozzi clumsily moves in a working context that exasperates the split between the submissive (like him), the successful zealots and the "divinities" - like the director - who sit at the top of the company and embody almost otherworldly entities fed by the servility of the subordinates. The office of the galactic megadirector, which Fantozzi enters by crawling and with the prospect of acting as a decorative fish in the "human aquarium" on the wall, is an ascetic environment reminiscent of the architecture of Dom Hans Van Der Laan. Characterised by a disorienting emptiness and chromatic absence, the few furnishing elements such as the benches, the wooden desk and the chairs in human skin (in memory of the company's employees overwhelmed by the hierarchical mechanism) do not contribute to restoring even the idea of an "almost" human space.

If going to the office means breathing the air of the Ocean and being warmed by the sun of the beaches of Southern California, it is well worth facing daily stories of rescue and socio-existential problems even in a not so high-profile series like Baywatch. The watchtowers of the Baywatchers, located depending on the episode in California, Florida or Hawaii, are small cabins on wooden stilts that have the lightness and informality of a life lived in a swimming costume, where much more is not needed to be at peace with oneself and the world.