Modern house on film: 10 films featuring modernist homes

“A house is a machine for living in.” – Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture

“Quite a pad ya got here, man, completely unspoiled.” – The Dude, The Big Lebowski (1998)

Back in the 1920s Le Corbusier and contemporaries such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus school’s Walter Gropius envisioned a new kind of architecture, one where form would follow function. Developments in steel, glass and concrete allowed innovative methods of construction, with an inherent beauty found in the materials themselves that led to a more minimal, open and neutral aesthetic. They were idealistic and believed good design could create better living for all.

Film ought to embrace such locations as symbols of utopian modernity, of glamour and possibility through living. Yet largely cinema takes a mixed view of modernism – appreciating the aesthetics but perceiving an ominous edge that provides perfect settings for a villain’s lair (John Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein Residence in The Big Lebowski or Richard Neutra’s Lovell House in L.A. Confidential); future dystopias (Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, Don’t Worry Darling); or alienated individuals (reflected in Antonioni’s blank facades or through The Ice Storm’s glass windows). In fact, filmmakers also seem keen on destroying architectural masterpieces, exploding them in Zabriskie Point (1970), pulling them down in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) and driving a car through their windows in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

Following recent trends to re-assess modernism, however, cinema has also begun to recognise the movement’s value. Directors such as Kogonada have made modernist architecture the star of the show, and there is now a growing body of documentaries on relevant architects, such as Eames: The Architect and the Painter (2011), or even architectural photographers, as in the Dustin Hoffman-narrated Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman (2008).

Whether you approach the movement with the seriousness of Le Corbusier or just appreciate a nice place to lay your rug, as per the Dude, here are 10 films that might whet your modernist appetite.

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

If your marriage absolutely must fall apart, it might as well be in a cliff-top red modernist masterwork perched 32 metres above a sparkling Tyrrhenian Sea on the island of Capri. Casa Malaparte, designed in the late 1930s by architect Adalberto Libera (though how much of his design was realised is debated), provides an impressive setting for the final part of Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave tale of disintegrating marriage, art versus commerce and moviemaking as subject itself.

Originally built for Curzio Malaparte, a controversial Italian writer with links to fascism, the house’s appeal for Godard is understandable – its most distinctive feature is the monumental inverse pyramidal steps ascending to a large flat roof terrace, an imposingly theatrical setting ripe for striking compositions. Inside, too, there are large picture windows neatly framing the vast sea and epic landscape beyond, all of which is expertly capitalised on by Raoul Coutard’s Technicolor cinematography. The film was partly sold on the basis of a naked Brigitte Bardot, but – for architecture nerds – Casa Malaparte proves the real draw.

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Hiram Hudson Benedict’s Boulder Reign, spectacularly perched atop a pile of desert boulders in Carefree, Arizona, provides an equally stunning location, in which real-estate developers discuss future exploitation of the land. But for Antonioni’s explosive finale, in which the house is repeatedly shown blowing up, Benedict – also employed as technical advisor on the film – created scale models, with 17 cameras capturing the director’s violent response to consumer culture.

A master at connecting landscape with his character’s inner states, Antonioni clearly favours a return to nature in Zabriskie Point. Yet it seems ironic that the modernist house he chooses to destroy is to an extent also attempting the same thing – albeit in luxurious, man-made fashion. As Daria enters the house via a boulder entranceway complete with waterfall, the scene highlights her despair at a recent tragedy as tears mingle with the flow, but in its muted desert echoes of Fallingwater, Benedict’s design feels as if it could offer a sense of peace as much as spurring radical detonation.

Director: Stanley Kubrick

For his provocative adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel, Kubrick turned to contemporary locations rather than sets, a decision partly driven by budget but one that exacerbated the sense of a menacing near-future England. Brutalist locations in Thamesmead and parts of Brunel University in Uxbridge provide gritty, utilitarian backdrops, but the film’s most controversial scene, in which Alex and his Droogs viciously assault a couple, features not one but two renowned modernist abodes.

The exterior shots of the couple’s residence are of New House in Shipton-Under-Wychwood, designed by Stout and Litchfield, and capture the building from its best angle, as the Droogs traverse stepping stones through a Japanese garden towards the house’s series of linked, sloped-roof pavilions. Interior shots are of Skybreak House in Radlett, with its terraced living space and dramatic slanted windows the work of Team 4 (Su Brumwell, Norman Foster, Wendy Cheesman and Richard Rogers). The locations feature again, towards the end of the film, when an illuminated ‘Home’ sign takes on an even more bitterly ironic significance.

Director: Guy Hamilton

When Bond production designer Ken Adam discovered the Palm Springs ridge house that would serve as Willard Whyte’s hideout, he felt as though he’d designed it himself, exclaiming: “I don’t have to do anything!” In fact, the Elrod House was designed by architect John Lautner, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose often organic style of modernism, with natural landscape elements incorporated into the structure of buildings, would prove particularly appealing to Hollywood filmmakers (hence his multiple appearances in this list).

In the Elrod House, such unusual organic elements include rocks running through the home’s walls and glass – in the famous scene where athletic bodyguards Bambi and Thumper give Sean Connery’s Bond a few bruises, Thumper is first seen dramatically lounging atop a large boulder in the concrete-canopied circular living area. And it’s not long before the glamorous duo make good use of Lautner’s merging of interior and exterior by chucking Bond out of the platformed living room directly into the swimming pool below.

Director: Brian De Palma

An even more extraordinary Lautner house, the octagonal UFO-like Chemosphere might still be the most restrained thing about Brian De Palma’s erotic, voyeurism-obsessed thriller. However, as with Body Double’s style in general, restraint is not a word immediately associated with a house perched atop a 30-foot concrete pole and reached by a funicular. Designed in 1960, this Hollywood Hills landmark provides the perfect house-sitting pad for struggling actor Jake Scully to spy on a female neighbour, but Jake soon witnesses more than he bargained for in De Palma’s outrageous re-working of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958).

The Chemosphere itself sadly has its own grisly history, as in 1976 its second owner, Dr Richard Kuhn, was stabbed to death in a robbery by his lover and an accomplice. Since 1998, however, the house has been owned by Benedikt Taschen of publishing group fame, who completely restored Lautner’s vision and added elements originally desired but then technically impossible. It has been declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

Director: Ang Lee

Nominated for the Palme d’Or, Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm is a melancholic adaptation of Rick Moody’s 1994 novel about two dysfunctional families, their disappointments, sexual experimentations and attempts to navigate the social changes of 1970s America. Set in New Canaan, Connecticut – a town with strong links to modernism via the Harvard Five – much of the key action takes place in houses: the 70s modernist home of Jim and Janey Carver (Spotts House), all glass and steel, cold white walls and up-to-the-minute designer furnishings, including a water bed; Ben and Elena Hood’s warmer feeling mid-century house; and the colonial mansion of the spouse-swapping key party.

Production designer Mark Friedberg has compared the process of finding the right locations as akin to casting. The houses say something of their occupants: the glass house in which the Carvers fail to see each other, the Hoods’ modern home that nevertheless retains a family feeling, and the old-style mansion which ironically hides the real debauchery.

Director: Luca Guadagnino

The first instalment of Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Desire’ trilogy, I Am Love stars Tilda Swinton as Emma, a wife and mother firmly ensconced within the bourgeois confines of an Italian industrialist family. Emma’s stirrings of illicit love with a talented chef form the narrative drive, but the real star is the Italian rationalist Villa Necchi Campiglio, which serves as the family home (and also featured in 2021’s House of Gucci).

While the film mostly uses the villa to convey a sense of buttoned-up restrained wealth and an emotional repression that Emma must escape, in reality the villa is unusually, and perhaps appropriately, a mix of the progressive and conservative. Milanese architect Piero Portaluppi’s original conception feels more related to modernism in its elegantly minimal yet spacious aesthetic, while Tomaso Buzzi’s later alterations were partly inspired by 18th-century art and veer towards the traditional. If you want to visit it yourself you can make up your own mind which you prefer.

Director: Tom Ford

Fashion designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut stars Colin Firth as George Falconer, a grieving, depressed college professor in southern California, 1962. George lives in a light-filled house, full of glass and redwood framing. Ford, who originally studied interior architecture at Parsons School of Design, takes advantage of the building’s openness, filming from the exterior in to emphasise George’s loneliness, and also from the interior out, as he watches a neighbouring family while sat on the toilet – a remarkable shot achieved by transforming a front bedroom to appear as a bathroom.

The Schaffer Residence was built in the late 1940s by (yes, him again) John Lautner for an employee’s parents, and the same art direction team that worked on Mad Men accentuate the home’s mid-century beauty. Even when highlighting George’s isolation and ‘invisibility’ as a gay man in society, the Schaffer Residence still feels like a remarkable place to live. When Ford employs a wide shot to minimise George in the frame, there’s also a sneaking suspicion that it’s as much about showing off the stunning architecture.

Director: Joanna Hogg

Although Joanna Hogg’s formally controlled film about an artist couple selling their house was made only 10 years ago, 60 Hornton Street is sadly now demolished. Designed by architect James Melvin (to whom the film is dedicated) for himself and his wife, this late 1960s modern movement residence provides a perfect backdrop for Hogg’s examination of tensions and anxieties in D (Viv Albertine) and H’s (Liam Gillick) relationship.

With intimacies often communicated via intercom, and the sounds of sliding doors, rolled back chairs or steps descending the central spiral staircase all heightened, D and H’s house feels at times claustrophobic; as a friend tactlessly comments, “It’s not really a family home is it? It’s an artist’s home.” And yet, it is full of memories and entirely bound up with the couple’s sense of being and work. As Hogg commented in an interview with Cinema Scope, “architecture can dictate behaviour. It actually shapes the relationship in a certain way … If they moved into a Georgian townhouse, would the whole dynamic shift?”

Director: Kogonada

After visiting the modernist mecca of Columbus, Indiana, director Kogonada knew it would form part of his debut feature. As local modernism obsessive Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) meets Jin (John Cho), the son of a hospitalised Korean architecture scholar, a poignant brief encounter ensues, and the architecture – framed through Elisha Christian’s exquisite Ozu-influenced cinematography – proves as much a character as the main leads.

It’s invigorating to find a film so interested in modernism’s capacity to stir and inspire. Buildings such as Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church, his son Eero Saarinen’s Irwin Union Bank and magnificent Miller House, as well as James Stewart Polshek’s mental health centre, all offer inspiration and even solace to those around and within them. When Jin says to Casey, “I’m interested in what moves you, particularly about a building,” he’s touching on that indefinable quality of architecture to profoundly affect our experience of the world, something that Columbus’s main patron of modernist works, J. Irwin Miller, clearly recognised.

The Open House Festival runs 14 to 22 September 2024.