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.