10 great films about architects

Having clocked the parallels between construction and filmmaking – a small army of craftspeople labour months and perhaps years, at great cost, to realise an individual’s vision – filmmakers have long seen the architect as analogous to the movie director. However, the movie architect – often brilliant, independent-minded and more than a little self-involved – is rarely ever content to design anything as mundane as a mere habitable space. Rather, a building of theirs can be nothing less than a work of original, personal expression.

It takes money to bring the vision to life, of course. And as a director must work with financiers in order to get a film off the ground, so in films about architects the most crucial relationship – and the one with the most potential for conflict – is usually that between the architect and the patron funding the whole enterprise.

One such relationship is central to The Brutalist. Set in the aftermath of World War II, Brady Corbet’s novelistic, VistaVision-shot third feature follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who starts a new life on America’s East Coast. There, Tóth finds a benefactor in Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a Philadelphia tycoon who commissions Tóth to design a grand community centre but who, it emerges, has his own ideas about the project.

Like many a movie architect – from Henry Fonda’s thoroughly decent Juror 8 in 12 Angry Men (1957) to Adam Driver’s egocentric world-saviour in last year’s Megalopolis – Tóth is a man of sharp intellect and an unwavering certainty in what he believes to be right. More importantly, The Brutalist’s protagonist is, as with many of the movie architects featured below, an artist above all.

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

In Edgar G Ulmer’s pre-Code horror, the haunted house is a sleek and sterile steel villa, while the monster who stalks the halls happens to also be said house’s author. Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff), a Satan-worshipping Austrian architect and former officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, built his Bauhaus-style home upon the ruins of a fort that he commanded and ultimately betrayed to the Russians in the Great War. On a stormy night, the house looks like ideal shelter for a group in distress, including Bela Lugosi’s psychiatrist Dr Werdegast, but under Poelzig’s sturdily utilitarian facade Werdegast and co discover all manner of occultish secrets.

A set designer in the golden age of German cinema, the Austrian Jewish Ulmer relocated to North America following the Nazis’ rise to power, and for his first major picture as a Hollywood director he created a wholly original old dark house; and, as a spectacle of modernity which conceals at its heart an expressionistic chamber of human suffering, the house also can’t help but appear symbolic of the country Ulmer left behind.

Director: King Vidor

Ayn Rand’s Objectivist manifesto of a second novel gets the Hollywood treatment with King Vidor’s The Fountainhead, which casts Gary Cooper as Rand’s stubbornly individualistic architect hero Howard Roark. A man of principle and enormous self-belief, Roark refuses to compromise on his designs for the sake of the pay cheque, toiling in obscurity before his unique style starts to catch on with New York benefactors including news baron Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey).

Adapted for the screen by Rand herself, Vidor’s The Fountainhead retains all the blunt characterisations and philosophising of the novel, but is lent a monumental significance by Robert Burks’ (appropriately monochromatic) cinematography, all rigid geometric compositions and shots which present characters large and individual in the frame. Roark may be a modernist architect, his designs and character modelled after those of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, but Vidor’s film is pure brutalism: unsubtle, severe and entirely uncompromising.

Director: Howard Hawks

At the height of pyramid-building in Ancient Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty period, captive architect Vashtar (James Robertson Justice) is tasked with designing an impregnable great pyramid for the despotic Pharaoh Khufu (Jack Hawkins), who in exchange vows to free Vashtar’s enslaved countryfolk. Vashtar’s invention, a combination of labyrinthine puzzle and colossal self-sealing tomb, will ultimately be a final resting place for and horizon-hogging monument to Khufu. Construction, however, will take decades, and as the project rolls on, Vashtar and Khufu grow old, the men’s bodies begin to fail as the structure itself takes impressive shape.

One of the biggest films of its kind made in an era of massive Hollywood pictures set in the ancient world, Howard Hawks’ epic is a lavish production of bountiful extras, huge sets and real Egyptian desert scenery captured in wide-framed CinemaScope – all of it to serve a story about impermanence and decay, and the human urge in the face of that to grasp for immortality.

Director: Richard Quine

The comfortably middle-class malaise of 60s suburbia comes for California architect Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) in Strangers When We Meet, Richard Quine’s troubled peek under the hood of a supposedly model post-war American life. A designer mostly of commercial buildings, Larry longs to develop a structure that makes a personal statement, and which might nourish him in a way that a comfy life with his dutiful wife and two children seemingly can’t.

Given carte blanche to design a home for playboy author Roger Altar (Ernie Kovacs), Larry enjoys a newfound creative freedom that goes hand in hand with his blossoming affair with Kim Novak’s lonely housewife. On a plot of land atop a hill overlooking Bel Air, Larry envisions a house that’s almost all wood – a structure built especially for Quine’s film, and which can be seen throughout in various stages of construction. As Larry’s design is realised, the Altar home is gradually revealed to be a balanced ideal devised by a man struggling to find the same for his own life.

Director: John Guillermin

In the same year that action man Charles Bronson played an architectural planner going postal on New York City criminals in Michael Winner’s revenge thriller Death Wish, blockbuster The Towering Inferno pitched Paul Newman as the hotshot designer of a new San Francisco skyscraper. As it turns out, his creation happens to be extremely flammable.

In an ice-and-ice star pairing, Newman is teamed with fellow blue-eyed icon of cool Steve McQueen, who plays the Frisco fire chief who, alongside Newman’s Doug Roberts, must extinguish Roberts’ blazing tower. From the perspective of McQueen’s skyscraper-skeptic O’Hallorhan, Roberts like all architects is a Promethean figure so preoccupied with designing increasingly eye-popping structures he hasn’t stopped to think if he should. Beyond that we’re never given much of a sense of who Roberts is as a person, or indeed as an architect, but that’s beside the point: this is the best of the 70s disaster movie boom, a race-against-time thriller chock full of stars and vertigo-inducing peril.

Director: Barbara Sass

Often, women exist on the sidelines of films about architects, said architects being almost invariably male, and egocentric enough to dominate a film’s narrative. One exception can be found in Barbara Sass’s Debutante, which centres on young female engineer Ewa (Dorota Stalińska) and casts a critical eye on Jerzy (Andrzej Lapicki), the renowned senior architect whose world Ewa enters into when she’s hired to assist him in designing a riverside museum.

While in the background Poland’s ruling communist party and Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement argue over the direction of the country, Jerzy and Ewa debate the style of their building – monumental in marble or more welcoming to the masses in plain red brick? Meanwhile Jerzy’s wife, PA and mistresses all fruitlessly vie for Jerzy’s attention. Seen from the perspective of the women he considers secondary to his work, the genius architect isn’t so sympathetic here, with that all-important personal legacy less important-seeming when the film also considers the feelings of those the visionary is able to so thoughtlessly forget.

Director: Peter Greenaway

The Belly of an Architect’s Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy), a middle-aged designer of just “six-and-a-half” realised buildings across his career, comes to Rome to organise an exhibition on the similarly less-than-prolific but highly influential neoclassical 18th-century architect Étienne-Louis Boullée. Once work is underway, Kracklite proceeds to physically and mentally deteriorate, his gut beginning to ache and reject food and his mind developing unhealthy fixations: on Boullée, Roman Emperor Augustus and a suspicion that his young wife may be poisoning him.

Constructing his fourth full-length feature largely out of wide compositions, writer-director Peter Greenaway sets Kracklite in the frame against backdrops of Rome’s grandest architecture – the ancient Roman Pantheon, the baroque Piazza Navona, Mussolini’s fascist landmark the Colosseo Quadrato – and frequently has him dwarfed by it. Boullée inspired the imposingly largescale style of fascist architecture, Kracklite is told, and sure enough the enormity of Boullée, as well as the awesome Roman architecture that inspired him, seems to gradually overwhelm and consume Kracklite as his stay in Rome drags on.

Directors: Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

The word ‘genius’ is used to describe Frank Lloyd Wright often in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary on that foremost American architect, but it might be the only positive adjective anyone uses. Through the talking heads and cradle-to-grave narration of Burns and Novick’s portrait, the pioneer of organic architecture – a style developed by Wright that emphasises building in harmony with nature – is framed as a self-mythologising egoist who burned through money and relationships as he prioritised his work above all else.

In contrast to descriptions of the architect’s chaotic personality, Wright’s constructions are presented pristine and amber-lit, and lensed by Burns and Novick with a zen stillness. Among the mighty works on display there’s Unity Temple, the church with an exterior akin to a maximum security jail’s and an interior like that of an art deco lecture hall; the serene, waterfall-hugging country house Fallingwater; and the Johnson Wax Headquarters, an office building with internal columns like colossal concrete lilypads – inventions of a frustrating and frequently careless man, but genius works, no doubt.

Director: Nathaniel Kahn

Another documentary about one of America’s most influential architects is more concerned about the man’s emotional footprint. My Architect is a personal look at the legacy of monumentalist Louis Kahn by Nathaniel Kahn, a documentarian who also happens to be one of two children whom Louis fathered outside of his marriage.

Though he casts his camera in awe over his father’s famous works, in particular the monolithic structures that Louis built in India and Bangladesh – “modern buildings that had the presence and feel of ancient ruins” – the younger Kahn also makes ample room for vulnerable, confessional appearances by those who knew Louis personally: a fellow Philadelphia architect whose onscreen outburst disparaging Kahn’s ideas evidences a rivalry still active three decades after Louis’ death; the conductor of a Kahn-designed floating concert hall, who bursts into tears at the realisation he’s being interviewed by Louis’ son; and Nathaniel’s own mother, who remains convinced that Louis – who had a wife and child at home, and another lover living nearby with Louis’ third child – would have one day chosen her and Nathaniel over the others.

Director: Christopher Nolan

The restrictions that cinematic architects typically face are lifted in Inception, as dreamscape master builder Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his architectural student protege Ariadne (Elliot Page) construct whole worlds free of commercial constraints or even limitations traditionally imposed by the laws of physics. In Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic, the mind is a vast construction site where architects become wizards, their imaginations alone conjuring skyscraper-studded cities and Bondian adventure zones.

The world of Inception isn’t quite an architect’s utopian dream: it’s still a wealthy backer, the energy magnate Saito (Ken Watanabe), who ultimately pulls the strings, as Cobb orchestrates a mind-heist on Saito’s behalf, with the aim to steal corporate secrets from inside the brain of a business heir (Cillian Murphy). Beyond the obligations to their benefactor, though, Cobb and Ariadne are in a world of pure imagination, the pair concocting supervillain lairs, Escher-inspired trick architecture and whole city blocks that can fold in on themselves at the architect’s will.