Archinect - News

Is Tim Burton's Beetlejuice the best Halloween movie for design students to watch?

2022-10-29T09:00:00-04:00

Every season has its own set of iconic movies, and within that set, there are those that stick out for their portrayal and elevation of architectural issues. Tim Burton’s 1988 classic, Beetlejuice, is perhaps the fall’s best example — an ever-trendy classic Halloween tale that showcases and offers some critique of the period’s salient design trends. Even the scale model of the town has some architectural qualities, and its central star — a shopworn Victorian-style home — has become an inspiration to aspiring designers around the world.

The conceit of Beetlejuice has essential elements that design students would be well-served to evaluate. Two families fighting for the creative control of a structure with radically different agendas. Its conflict is based on a disagreement about preferences in residential architecture: The “good, sturdy country craftsmanship” of a rural Victorian run up against a vacuous amalgam of 80s high design.

Opening title sequence from the film. Image courtes...

The Sicilian mansion from Godfather III is up for sale

2022-01-13T19:16:00-05:00

The opulent Sicilian castle featured in the third installment of The Godfather franchise has just gone on the market. For a cool €6m prospective buyers can expect 22 bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a wine cellar, an artist’s studio, a library, a private chapel and 2.1 acres of parkland.

The fate of the sizable art collection located inside the house remains an important (and much more valuable) question as so far only the in situ works that exist in the house have been confirmed included in the sale. The manse was commissioned as a collector’s de facto private museum by a Baron at the end of the 19th century. The collection reportedly includes lots of Byzantine artifacts and several paintings by the Baron’s grandson Paul, who was a post-War artist of some repute within the country.

The 43,000-square-foot Neo-Gothic residence has 22 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms, a library, small chapel, and wine cellar brought together by a central marble staircase. The property includes a two-acre park and is set amongst a small coastal town overlooking the Ionian Sea.

"It is a property that expresses a strong character and enjoys enormous potential, for its history, its location, its architecture and its spaces," the head of Residential Italy Diletta Giorgolo wrote in an email to Travel...

The imposing Bertrand Goldberg-designed Marina City Towers star in Jordan Peele's 'spiritual' Candyman remake

2021-11-04T19:22:00-04:00

The new film, co-written and produced by Jordan Peele and directed by Nia DaCosta, needed a backdrop for the home of one of the characters (played by Rebecca Spence). Production designer Cara Brower knew the perfect place where a design-obsessed art critic would live: the modernist masterpiece that is Marina City on the Chicago River.

Like the original, the movie is set in the notorious Cabrini-Green housing project that has become synonymous with both the city’s South Side and the inhumane forms of low-income housing that dominated the era. Candyman creator Clive Barker said he selected Chicago for the adaptation in part because of his interest in disparate architecture as a symbol of inequality. Director Jordan Peele was able to recreate the demolished structures through a series of 3D replicas created by an Australian VFX studio called Rising Sun Pictures.

Peele picked Bertrand Goldberg's 1960s residential towers in a possible homage to the blaxploitation period classic Three the Hard Way (1974). The new film features a biting critique of commercial art galleries’ long-established role in gentrification as well as a few nice wide-angle shots of Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) and some of The Loop’s more important architectural landmarks.

Wes Anderson remade a small French city into the perfect setting for his latest film

2021-09-13T18:30:00-04:00

“While the film’s cast is a long list of recognizable names (Tilda Swinton, Benicio Del Toro, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright) one of its biggest stars is the city, showcased in a tour that makes up one of the segments. Rather than creating multiple town exteriors on a backlot, the filmmakers found a real French town, Angoulême, and used it as the movie’s beating heart, dressing it up or down as needed.”

Wes Anderson and his crew for "The French Dispatch" transformed the city of 42,000 into 125 different individual sets including a former knitting factory, which it was able to successfully reshape into a multipurpose studio space complete with a carpentry mill and three stages.

Anderson’s movies are well known for their bespoke and inspirational designs. The 52-year-old Francophile has also teamed with none other than Rem Koolhaas on the design of a bar featured in OMA’s plan for the Fondazione Prada that was completed in 2015.

The film, set to be released on October 22, was in part inspired by the work of cultural journalists like Rosamond Bernier. The New York Times has a view of the overhauled town here.

The designer that Columbus, a film featuring numerous Modernist icons, forgot about

2017-08-25T16:11:00-04:00

The Miller House and Garden, now owned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, is acknowledged as one of the greatest Modernist collaborations. This thirteen-acre property was developed between 1953 and 1957 as a unified design through the close teamwork of Kiley, architects Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche, interior designer Alexander Girard (who is acknowledged in the film), and clients J. Irwin and Xenia Miller.

The recent film Columbus is centered around a love story of a son of a renowned architecture critic stuck in a small Midwestern town and a 'young architecture enthusiast' who works at the local library. Taking place in mid-century Modernism mecca, Columbus, IN, the motion picture spares plenty of spectacular views of iconic Modernist sites: the Miller House, North Christian Church (1964), Cummins Inc. Irwin Office Building (1954), First Christian Church (1942), and Columbus Regional Hospital Mental Health Center (1972). The characters, surprisingly, do not fail to acknowledge the architects at each location—there are mentions of Eero and Eliel Saarinen, James Polshek... However, Dan Kiley, whose landscapes are often the movie's pivotal settings, got left out and never once credited.

Kiley designed more projects in Columbus than any architect—over thirty landscapes which among many others include the Art Institute of Chicago, South Garden (1962), Jefferson National Expansion Expansio...

Christopher Hawthorne reflects on the spatial design in "Citizenfour" and other Oscar nominees

2015-02-23T13:12:00-05:00

"Citizenfour," in fact, enlarges and underlines ideas about architecture, privacy and culture that run more subtly through a number of Oscar nominees. Several [...] movies exploit the dramatic appeal of the constricted, labyrinthine, tightly packed, claustrophobic or paranoid space: the crowded backstage corridors of "Birdman" by Alejandro G. Iñárritu; the tunnels, hallways and dollhouse-like spaces of Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel"; the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Ava DuVernay's "Selma."

Related: Julia Ingalls' Material Witness series on Archinect

The Architecture Of Filmmaking: See Your Favorite Movie Scenes As Floor Plans

2013-12-06T13:03:00-05:00

Interiors is a magazine devoted to investigating the architectural designs of film settings. Creators Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian explain how they deconstruct these fictional spaces down to a blueprint level. [...] It starts out with a detailed essay on how space is used in a setting--perhaps the house from Up or the spaceship from 2001: A Space Odyssey--and continues with blueprints from specific scenes [...].