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| Stuyvesant Avenue, New York in Do the Right Thing Do the Right Thing (1989) was shot on Stuyvesant Avenue in Brooklyn. Photograph: Allstar/MCA/Universal Sometimes, it’s a whole street, rather than an individual building that sets the stage for the action. A stretch of brownstones on Brooklyn’s Stuyvesant Avenue see all neighbourhood life play out in Spike Lee’s great 1980s time capsule. The movie barely needs to leave the block. Its kerbs, stoops and open windows provide ample opportunity for encounter, friendly and fraught. The uniformity of the buildings is at odds with the ethnic mix: neighbours of African, Italian and Korean descent get along and occasionally rub each other the wrong way. Last year Spike Lee railed against the area’s recent gentrification, noting how public services had improved in Bed-Stuy now that it was predominantly white. |
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| Burj Khalifa, Dubai in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) climbing the Burj Khalifa, Dubai. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures/Sportsphoto Ltd Cinema and skyscrapers were made for each other, as a thousand elevator-shaft scenes and rooftop climaxes attest. Tom Cruise dangling off the 160-storey Burj Khalifa was just the thing to distract from Dubai’s recent financial troubles. It rebranded the emirate as a place of excitement, adventure and celebrity, rather than, say, an air-conditioned purgatory where there’s nothing to do except shop. Dubai had to co-finance the movie to get him there, but Cruise’s human-fly antics did the trick. |
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| The Hermitage, St Petersburg in Russian Ark The Hermitage Museum as seen in Russian Ark, by Alexander Sokhurov. Photograph: Artificial Eye As the title suggests, St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, formerly the Winter Palace, is a grand repository of civic and national history in Alexander Sokhurov’s astonishing film. This is no dry architectural tour. As we’re guided seamlessly through the building’s baroque halls, its back staircases and its stupendous art collection, we come across “ghosts” from St Petersburg’s past: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Tsar Nicholas II dining with his family, a soldier at the Siege of Leningrad, a full-on state ball, not to mention modern-day tourists. The film’s single, continuous take is a technical feat in a film that makes history a theatrical, spatial experience. |
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| 339 Convent Avenue, New York in The Royal Tenenbaums The Hamilton Heights mansion in Harlem that played home to Wes Anderson’s Tenenbaums. Photograph: Frank Tozier/Alamy Wes Anderson actually found the Tenenbaum family house (at 339 Convent Avenue in Harlem) before he wrote the script for his huge breakthrough film. It sets the tone for a fantasy New York setting of old money and grand institutions that’s like the real thing – only better designed. The differences between the three high-achieving Tenenbaum children are made clear through their separate floors of the house (as seen in an early crane shot down the house’s exterior), and the decor oozes privileged sophistication. Anderson is surely the most architectural film-maker out there: his movies are full of plans, cut-aways and diagrams, and invariably revolve around a dominant structure. |
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| The Bradbury Building, Los Angeles in Blade Runner Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982) in a scene filmed in LA’s Bradbury Building. Photograph: Warner Bros/Allstar In the 1960s and 70s, many sci-fi movies envisaged the future as a sterile utopia. Blade Runner’s vision of 21st-century Los Angeles, however, took what was there already and added neon, grime, gloom and the odd corporate megastructure. No brave new world, just an extra layer of crap on the old one. Just look at the way it transformed the Bradbury Building: in reality a glorious, light-filled 19th-century office building; in the movie a leaky, litter-strewn ruin. Ridley Scott and co did a similar makeover on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House (Deckard’s apartment), shrouding it in film noir shadows. |
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| Hook & Ladder No 8 Firehouse, New York in Ghostbusters The Ghostbusters fire station in New York City. Photograph: Eli Duke/flickr Back in the days when Manhattan loft conversions were still a new trend and Tribeca was, as Harold Ramis puts it in the film, “like a demilitarised zone”, the Ghostbusters were ahead of the curve in locating their live/work space in a disused fire station. Adaptable as the turn-of-the century building appears, in real life it is still a working fire station (though its real-estate value has been estimated at some $16m). For this reason, as every Ghostbusters fan knows, the HQ interiors were actually shot in another fire station, in Los Angeles – but that hasn’t stopped this one becoming a popular tourist site. |
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| Dakota Building, New York in Rosemary’s Baby The Dakota apartment building at West 72nd Street and Central Park West in New York City, 1960. Photograph: Authenticated News/Getty Supernatural forces traditionally prefer country houses and cabins in the woods. Roman Polanski found plenty of gothic dread right in the middle of Manhattan. The Dakota, or the “Bramford” as it is known in the film, feels more like a spooky European castle than an apartment block. Its turrets and gables loom over the city in the opening credits. Once inside, you’re in another world. Polanski was a master of indoor anxiety (see Repulsion, The Tenant, The Ghost Writer, Carnage...), and picked a good spot here. The Dakota has its own folkore: resident John Lennon was shot outside it in 1980, and the building has been home to everyone from Judy Garland to Boris Karloff to Lauren Bacall, whose former apartment went on the market last year for $26m. |
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| Elrod House, Palm Springs in Diamonds Are Forever Elrod House, Palm Springs, in Diamonds Are Forever. Photograph: Alan Weintraub/ Arcaid/ Corbis James Bond has done more than anyone to cement the link between modern architecture and evil masterminds – Ian Fleming even named one of his baddies after his architect neighbour, Erno Goldfinger – but Hollywood in general has done the same. They’ve got it in for John Lautner in particular. A protegé of Frank Lloyd Wright, Lautner designed scores of fabulously alluring houses around California, perfectly suited to rich, reclusive criminals with no respect for tradition. At Palm Springs’ Elrod House, Sean Connery gets a violent tour courtesy of bikini-clad bodyguards Bambi and Thumper – just the sort of thing you’d expect to go on a deluxe mid-century shag pad. At least Bond doesn’t blow this one up in revenge. |
Source: Step into my evil modernist lair, Mr Bond: the best urban buildings in film
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