Archinect - News

Filmmaker Kevin Siyuan releases final ‘A Wes Anderson-ish Singapore’ update

2023-08-11T18:15:00-04:00

The second and final update to architecturally-inspired filmmaker Kevin Siyuan’s documentation of Singapore has been released, offering his follow-up to a popular 2021 video that compared many of the city’s iconic landmarks to structures and interiors included in the cinema of fellow design lover Wes Anderson.

In the 19-plus minutes of ‘A Wes Anderson-ish Singapore Vol.2’, Siyuan weaves a narrative about the aesthetic qualities latent in the city and related to Anderson’s films. Siyuan said he was particularly inspired by the recently-released ‘Asteroid City’ and ever-popular ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’, adding that it offers an equally concise portrait of the various aspects of land use – a component that has helped Singapore earn a reputation as the greenest city in Asia.

As he tells it: “The year is 2023, as we embrace the new normal, have a breath of the refreshing Singapore Air, and welcome back to our island, the tropical getaway and the City in Nature. Change happens very quickly...

Wes Anderson-inspired short film explores Singapore's diverse built environment

2021-10-26T18:07:00-04:00

A short film by architectural photographer and filmmaker Kevin Siyuan explores the built environment of Singapore through the unique style and lens of Wes Anderson.

Titled “A Wes Anderson-ish Singapore,” the film is a culmination of a year of exploration around the Asian city-state. Made with zero budget, the film focuses on the diverse architecture, urban planning, places, and people of a post-pandemic Singapore. Iconic structures, such as the Apple Marina Bay Sands, Singapore Changi Airport, and Golden Mile Complex, along with the country’s green spaces and street art are displayed in the peculiar cinematographic style and direction of Wes Anderson films.

As described by Siyuan in the video’s description: “The scenes were framed using mostly flattened symmetrical perspective with focus on architecture but contextualized and told with elements that are uniquely Singapore.”

Signature Wes Anderson films such as “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “The Life Aquatic by Steve Zissou,” “Moonri...

All aboard this Wes Anderson-designed train carriage in the English countryside

2021-10-13T11:28:00-04:00

Ahead of his hotly-anticipated feature release, The French Dispatch, director and design savant Wes Anderson is lending his hand to the transportation sector thanks to a unique collaboration between Anderson and Belmond British Pullman.

Anderson, whose 2007 epic The Darjeeling Limited was famously based on a family of eccentric train-savvy travelers in India, worked with the luxury train service to restore an old first-class carriage called Cygnus that had served in Winston Churchill’s funeral procession and been in use since 1951.

Courtesy of Belmond

The converted car comes well-appointed with Anderson's signature straight-line symmetry, a pink-and-green dining room motif, brilliant marquetry, two private coupes, and references to the Greek god of balance from which the car takes its name.

Courtesy of Belmond

Anderson said he was “eager to make something new while also participating in the process of preservation” offered by the train service. Riders can take part in the director’s p...

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.

Pyongyang's inner Wes Anderson shines through in its architecture, then and now

2015-11-03T13:24:00-05:00

'Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland,'...Throughout the city, you now encounter the recurring colour schemes of salmon and teal, or pink and baby blue...These new spaces look like they have been assembled from crisp, unreal planes of colour and exude an anaesthetising aesthetic, candy-coloured decoys that distract from a reality of mass poverty across the country.

This Wes Anderson-designed bar is retro with a capital R

2015-05-08T13:53:00-04:00

Filmmaker Wes Anderson has a knack for creating fictional spaces with attention paid to the last excruciating detail. His latest space is real, though, and even better, you can get a drink there. [...] Three new buildings, which were part of a century-old distillery and transformed by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, will now house art rather than alcohol. But for the thirsty there’s also a new bar, called Bar Luce, that Anderson designed himself.

Building Wes Anderson's "Grand Budapest Hotel" out of 50,000 Legos

2014-06-27T15:02:00-04:00

Hardcore Wes Anderson fan and Lego model designer Ryan Ziegelbauer, in reverence to the director's most recent film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, has made a miniature replica of the Hotel completely out of Legos.

Over the course of 575 hours, Ryan and a team of eight model builders designed and built the hotel, using more than 50,000 Lego bricks sourced from Lithuana, Poland, Latvia, Germany, Italy, and 14 U.S. states. Sadly, the film's cast was not replicated in the model.

Watch Ryan and his team put the model together in blazing stop-motion below:

The Miniature Model Behind ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’

2014-03-03T00:34:00-05:00

To get a sense of the kind of hotel they wanted, Mr. Stockhausen did extensive research with Mr. Anderson. This included looking at vintage images at the Library of Congress of hotels and European vacation spots. They also looked through hotel archives and studied the architecture of locales like the Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic.