Metropolis (1927, dir. Fritz Lang)
“This film marks the beginning of an intensive interplay between cinema and architecture. In its most grandiose moments the two fuse to become cinematic architecture, an independent art form.”
-Wolfgang Jacobsen, Metropolis: A Cinematic Laboratory for Modern Architecture
Art director Erich Kettelhut & crew create the futuristic city set of Metropolis (1927, dir. Fritz Lang) (via)
1930s vision of 2036 via Things To Come (1936, dir. William Cameron Menzies, screenplay by H.G. Wells, who also wrote the book on which the film is based)
“What will the next hundred years bring to mankind?
The world of tomorrow, an underground city with its glass enclosed, compressed air elevators, overhead streets, overhead tracks for cigar-shaped ‘street cars’, apartments in tiers like the homes of the Pueblo Indians, its people getting the news of the day by television, is vividly portrayed in Things to Come, H.G. Wells’ motion picture of the ‘Next War’ and a rebuilt world.”
-excerpted from original press materials for Things to Come
Entire film online at Internet Archive.
Aelita (1924, dir. Yakov Protazanov, set/costume designer Aleksandra Ekster)
Pictured above is the Martian royal palace set from Aelita, one of the earliest science fiction films and among the first films to come out of revolutionary Russia.
Intended as an ideologically correct counterweight to Hollywood films, Aelita tells the story of Earthling visitors to Mars who stir up a proletarian rebellion among Martian slaves, overthrow the monarchy, and establish the “Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”
(photo via)
1930s imagining of 1980s New York in the sci-fi musical Just Imagine (1930, dir. David Butler) (via)
Designed by art director Stephen Goosson, the city set was an elaborate miniature model that covered a ground area of 75 x 225 feet and whose tallest tower measured 40 feet.
Just Imagine’s New York was primarily inspired by architect Harvey Corbett’s prediction that 1970’s New York would resemble a “very modernized Venice” and by the futuristic urban designs presented in Hugh Ferriss’s 1929 book, The Metropolis of Tomorrow.
Ferriss’s drawings of the ”business center of the future” (pictures #3-5) provided the most direct inspiration for Goosson’s sets. Broad superhighways establish a geometric ground plan that extends upward through overlapping levels of bridges, streets, and terraced walkways. The grid of streets and bridges is pierced by huge freestanding skyscrapers surrounded by lower setback buildings, a design Ferriss created as an analogy to the natural world of “towering mountain peaks… surrounded by foothills”
The opening scenes of the (otherwise mediocre) film, which feature this cityscape, can be seen here.
More on the building of the Just Imagine set. Collection of Hugh Ferriss’s futuristic city sketches here.
