Film architecture and design has existed almost as long as cinema itself. In 1976, Leon Barsacq argued in Caligari’s Cabinet And Other Grand Illusions that the fantasist sets developed by Georges Melies at the beginning of the 20th century were a considerable improvement over anything that had been done previously in that they created a deeper reality and gave the image a more substantial meaning. He further added that cinema escaped its primitive phase once it moved away from simple backdrops to three-dimensional sets, thereby creating an architectural space within cinema[1].

Following fairly closely the emergence of production values in the history of cinema has been the rise and acceptance of science fiction cinema. It is indisputable that the two are interconnected and that a process exists where both feed off from one another. Cinema learns from architecture and architecture learns from cinema. As far back as 1926, many architects were said to have been impressed and influenced by Metropolis (1926). Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) also apparently became a source of inspiration for the world of architecture, with the director himself having sourced a lot of his inspiration from several existing architectural and design trends and concepts. Today, terms like ’science fiction architecture’, ‘high-tech architecture’ or ‘cyber architecture’ are commonly used to refer to a new and ‘modern’ style of architecture that draws heavily on science fiction and new technologies. For many architects, ’science fiction is an imaginative form of design’[2], making its visualizations worth studying.

Yet, if science fiction literature and cinema have always been closely monitored by the design and architecture world, as a genre, it has spent most of its ‘life’ trying to defend itself from claims of infantile and childish entertainment with little to offer in terms of serious literature or filmmaking. Science fiction carries with it a strong negative reputation, a perception that most current science fiction films do little to change. In 1965, Susan Sontag declared in The Imagination of Disaster, that the escapist and entertainment-based nature of science fiction and of the ‘disaster’ film is incompatible with an ability for this type of cinema to develop a solid, effective and coherent social critique[3]. And in the past twenty years, Hollywood’s ever-increasing contribution to the genre has only reinforced the stereotype of the science fiction film existing for the sake of production values only, a parade of visual effects and ever more absurd and grandiose sets where character development and solid narrative barely or no longer exist. The beginning of this downward spiral into a cinematic overdose of superficial stimulation at the expense of realism (at the core of production design is the paradox of achieving both stylization and realism, of ‘exceeding the anthropomorphic limits of the human imagination while still attempting to remain comprehensible’[4]) and solid filmmaking is often traced back to 1977 and the rise of the blockbuster. But, rather than solely blaming George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, two men whose respect for science fiction can not be contested, it is perhaps more appropriate to try to understand the development of the cinematic cheap thrill in the context of several other sociological and technological factors that have had an impact not only on production designers’ abilities to influence the cinematic experience, but also on how audiences have come to perceive this experience over the years.

Before Hollywood realized the money making potential of the science fiction film and its ability to draw large audiences in search of pure escapism, the genre was able to attract talented directors (and still does, occasionally) who had a true interest in exploring the future of humankind or in using it as a means to express contemporary fears and problems. Like many of their literary counterparts, these directors were engaged in a process of discovery and showed a curiosity and thirst for knowledge which, in spite of a lack of a universally accepted definition for science fiction, form an essential characteristic of the genre. Drawing on the works of utopian science fiction literature, which has been in existence more or less officially since Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516, these directors saw architecture and set design as a way to provide a realistic and accurate depiction of the future. As such, they also relied heavily on past or contemporary architectural and urban planning movements and visionaries. Like utopic science fiction, architecture is often concerned with the search for a better way of living, for ways that Man can improve himself and his environment. Since the industrial revolution and the emergence of the metropolitan city in the mid to late 19th century, the country vs. city discourse has largely defined man’s relationship to his environment and the city has proven a rich source of inspiration for both sociologists and architects. Its emergence has radically altered the landscape of our lands as well as the landscape of the human mind. It has and continues to have ramifications on the evolution of Man and how he perceives and structures his life and experiences. The city has become the perfect outlet for Man’s imagination, his fears, his anxieties and his creativity. And it is also an ideal method to foretell the future, a laboratory where human experiments can take place and can be studied. Cinema fell in love with architecture and the city, and the city fell in love with cinema. Like the connection between science fiction and production design, cinema and the architecture of the city have a long history of interdependence and of relying on one another for inspiration and commentary.

Throughout the twentieth century, architecture, the most public of the arts and film, the most popular, have done much to enhance and reinforce each other’s image.[5]

It is thus not surprising that the city would play such a prominent role in science fiction cinema. The city is the microcosm of humanity. If one wants to try to understand society in the present, it can look to its cities for guidance and examples. If one wants to attempt to understand the future and what our society will be like, the city of the future is a good place to start. Like the human zoo concept central to Dark City (1998), the city of the future can encapsulate all facets of human interactions and sociological mechanisms. It enables us to project forward our desires and worst fears, to visualize what is and what could be and the science fiction genre allows the relationship between a society and the buildings it creates and destroys to be conveyed vividly[6].

This essay is concerned with how science fiction cinema has used the city to architecturally represent the dreams and anxieties of the times during which these representations were filmed. Very distant visions of the future such as Star Wars (1977) and comic book representations such Dick Tracy (1990) or Sin City (2004), while offering a plenitude of possibilities and exciting representations of the city, and potentially, a greater flexibility of architecture, shall be excluded from the remit of this paper, in order for the discussion to remain within the realm of what could be considered the ‘actually plausible’, at least by today’s architectural standards.

Paul Citroen’s Metropolis (1923), while a photomontage, captured through images the beauty and anxieties of the modern metropolis. A visual representation of the ideas and concerns central to the work of the sociologists Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, it showed a mix of admiration and apprehension towards the rise of the city, an ambivalence that was quite common at a time when Modernism was being embraced by architects and urban planners both in Europe and America. Simmel spent most of his life in Berlin during a period when the city had started to fully and wholeheartedly embrace the forces of Modernism, and was able to witness first hand the sociological impact of the city on the previously mostly rural nature of the human mind. Among several theories he developed, many of which we today take for granted regarding life in the city, he argued that this new city lifestyle consisted of such fast-paced series of stimuli that it was in some ways no different from the cinematic experience, thereby providing an early and interesting link between cinema and city architecture.

Not surprisingly therefore, the rise of the city became a topic of much interest and fascination for the film industry. Films like King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) and Murnau’s Sunrise, a Song of Two Humans (1927) explored what was ‘a gradual shift from rural to urban existence in the industrializing world’[7], at the core of the city vs. country debate, offering mixed statements on the impact of this rise of the urban realm. Others and less ambivalent films, such as Berlin, Symphony of a Big City (1927) and Rien que les Heures (1926), were powerful odes to the magnificent beauty of the city. While Modernism as an architectural and urban planning movement had been in progress since the mid 19th century (potentially even earlier depending on the definition of Modernism one uses), marked along the way by the birth of Art Nouveau and of the Modern Style in 1880, the city started feeling the full force of the movement towards the turn of the century. Thanks to the inventions of the steel frame and of the elevator, men could now build effigies that were as high as their ambitions. After its birth in Chicago, the skyscraper found the perfect setting in New York City and New York City found its raison d’etre in Modernism. With the city arose the concepts of the ‘flaneur’, the stranger, and the city boy[8]. Society as we knew it was changing rapidly. The concept of Flanerie came into full existence thanks to Modernism but seems to have reached already into postmodernism in its reliance on the non-linear and discontinuous nature of the experience. It is in a way reminiscent of modern-day cyber browsing in its reliance on a fragmented and random approach to exploration and discovery. And while some sociologists started expressing their fears over the potential consequences of the rise of the new city, others embraced its potential. Urban planners, architects, designers, saw in Modernism the opportunity to shape the future and to improve current lifestyle standards. The work of Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius signalled the beginning not only of a new architecture but also of a new way of living, one based on rationality, efficiency, hygiene, and more importantly, on hope for the future. German Neues Baues and Bauhaus, American Streamline, Soviet Constructivism, Italian Futurism, and the International Style, all embraced the future as a source of hope, a way to improve living conditions and society as a whole. Most architects of that period therefore believed that the moralities of Modernism should imply some vision of human betterment and demonstrated an optimism for the future and a grandeur of vision reminiscent of the ideas of Etienne-Louis Boullee, the 18th century French architect whose ambitious designs ‘reflected the glory of Man, Nature and God’[9].

It can be said that, on the whole, science fiction cinema embraced the city and the possibilities it could bring for a better future. Cities of hope dominated the representations of the city in the science fiction texts of the 1920s and 1930s, reflecting a belief that the future was not the enemy but rather a potential saviour for many of society’s problems. For example, the Italian Futurists’ belief in motion and velocity, reflected in high-speed transportation networks and machines, can be felt in High Treason (1928), Britain’s response to Metropolis (1926). Hoping to replicate the ambitious vision and scope of Fritz Lang’s film, while focusing on the more straightforward and positive concept of peace, High Treason embraced modernity through an emphasis on transportation and ‘connections’ available within the city and to the outside world (a tunnel links England to the continent, an idea that dates back to the beginning of the 19th century[10]). Perhaps drawing on Simmel’s research on bridges as well as on the designs of El Lissitzky, the Russian avant-guardist who influenced several of the constructivists and who ’saw strong parallels between evolution of Man’s transport systems and architecture’[11], the London of the future is a city reliant on a myriad of transportation methods and machines constantly buzzing at various height levels in the city. Sea, ground, air and every space in between seem to be occupied by a transport of some kind, a metaphor for the machine age and future city that will later become common place in science fiction cinematic representations. Interestingly, High Treason does not rely on skyscrapers for its vision of modernity. Instead, the London landscape, realised through an elaborate use of models and miniatures, is largely preserved, with only the occasional ‘medium height’ building incorporated to add a sense of the future. With its white tones and low buildings, the city gives out a feeling of equality, hope and optimism which is in direct contrast to the visualization of Metropolis.

Just Imagine (1930), strongly influenced by Hugh Ferriss’s book, Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), takes the archetype vision of the future city as defined by a Manhattan-like skyline, and portrays it in all its beauty and majesty. Ferris was America’s most celebrated architectural conjurer of ideal cities of the future[12] and saw in the skyscraper city the ideal form of utopic betterment. As with High Treason, the city of Just Imagine is buzzing with activity, lights and motion. Cars are everywhere and walkways and bridges saturate the entire skyline. Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies states that ‘where Metropolis seems inspired by lower Manhattan, with its angular streets and closely packed towers, Just Imagine’s city suggests midtown, its layout of buildings and avenues more regular and widely spaced’[13]. Indeed, while its skyscrapers, some of which seem to grow on top of existing structures and buildings, reach high in the sky, the space and airy feel that exists inside the city reminds us that this film (also inspired by the work of the Italian Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia) is overall quite positive and optimistic in its outlook.

Things to Come (1936) marks a major milestone in the history of science fiction cinema in that it provides its first true and sincere utopia (even if the destruction of society has to take place for it to be reborn into a better one). Unfortunately, it is perhaps also the last time that we would see such unencumbered and affirmative outlook for the future. From then on, aside for a couple of exceptions such as Buck Rogers (1939) and Star Trek (1979), the genre would come to be dominated by dystopic or strongly anti-utopic visions. Based on H.G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come, the film is the writer’s bold vision for a better future, one based on scientific planning and rationalism and on a rejection of the type of capitalism depicted in Metropolis, a film which Wells found to be particularly foolish[14]. Wells society is ruled by an elite of scientists and philosophers who have implemented systems for the good of the entire world population. In this structure, work is efficient, clean, automatic but not without individuality (echoing the beliefs of many contemporary architects and urban planners). This was an important point for Wells who insisted that in spite of the mechanical aspects of many aspects of life, Man will retain his individuality and personal happiness. He wanted to see a happy worker (not a robot worker), with plenty of leisure time, individuality and satisfaction, working in a clean, calm and airy environment. The existence of a ruling elite made up of rational scientists did not strike him as paradoxical, or even dangerous. Nor did the idea of living indoors, bathed in constant artificial light, with no access to diversity or the influence of non-conformism. He saw the giving up of certain rights as essential in achieving collective happiness. And it is within this state of collective satisfaction that individual contentment could be reached[15].

A remarkable aspect of Things to Come, the most expensive British film until that time, and a substantial contributor to its success (in the context of film history only since it achieved relatively poor commercial success), is the number of personalities and ‘experts’ from the fields of architecture and design who contributed to the film. William Cameron Menzies was brought on board to direct. A master visualizer, the recipient of the first Academy Award for ‘Interior Decoration’ and practically the father of the storyboard, Menzies had become famous in Hollywood for his abilities to translate scripts into powerful visual realizations. Menzies would go on to become Hollywood’s first ‘Production Designer’. Vincent Korda, Alexander Korda’s brother, was hired as set designer, and is responsible for the majority of the visual language of the film. A major aspect of his strength as set designer was his ability to collect and compile design and architectural styles and influences and merge them together to create an outstanding final product.

As such, one can detect in the many facets of the design of Things to Come various influences, and in some cases, direct contributions, from several masters of that time: Bel Geddes’ streamline concepts influenced the designs of the bombers and tanks as well as various shapes in the interior decoration; Fernand Leger, who had also worked on L’inhumaine (1926), provided ideas for some of the costumes and concepts; much of the furniture and overall design style came from Oliver Hill; and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian-born designer who would go on to head the Bauhaus school of Architecture in Chicago, brought his skills to the design of some of the machinery and of various aspects of the underground city. But it is Le Corbusier’s influence that provides the strongest link between the film and urban and architectural concepts of that time. Le Corbusier’s ideas for the city of the future, his Ville Radieuse and Ville Contemporaine, while not directly represented, can nevertheless be felt in the abundance of glass, light and open space that is essential to the architecture of the city in Things to Come. In addition, every floor of the city (made possible through the use of pilotis) possesses hanging gardens, and each ‘residence’ appears to have a view to the outside since the city is built directly into a hill, allowing for the merging of the city with nature. Le Corbusier had used these concepts considerably in his own designs to ensure that the inhabitant of this efficient, minimalist, clean and automated city can therefore feel ’suffused with ‘L’Esprit Nouveau’ as he looks out past pure white walls to the essential joys of light, space and greenery’.[16]

This ideology and faith in a clean, organized and rational future was shared by many modernist architects of the time and would go on to dominate global architecture until the 1960s. But, increasingly, these visions of the future in both architecture and science fiction also began to be looked upon as naive, and in some cases, as dangerous fantasies whose fascist (in its various forms, whether Nazi Germany’s National Socialism or Wells’ Global economical-socialism) undertones could no longer hide within the established and dominant paradigms and ideologies of the early decades of the 20th century. So much that, in 1940, George Orwell declared about Wells that ‘the same qualities that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now’, adding that ‘Wells is too sane to understand the modern world.’[17]

Cities of hope made way for dystopic visions, closer to that envisioned by Fritz Lang already in 1926 with Metropolis. But while Lang was fascinated and saw beauty in the skyscraper and in its adopted home of Manhattan, his ultra modernist city of Metropolis was represented in truly expressionist style as dark, monstrous, rising to a sky where the elite lives while the people slave away in underground cave-like residence. The message was one of confusion, a mix of pro-capitalism and socialism, of pro-urban ideas but with a strong message of concern. The city definitively appeared grandiose but with the potential to annihilate the good in Man. New York, ‘the most old-fashioned city in the world’[18], which had started as the emblem of the city of hope, would become the epitome of the dystopic future city, the symbol of a crowded, unhealthy, chaotic future, the emblem of urban dread, and, as it often became the norm throughout the 1950s, the ideal setting for destruction.

It is interesting to note that few significant representations of the city appear in 1950s’ science fiction cinema, despite that decade’s reputation as the first Golden Age of science fiction. Indeed, while science fiction literature was experiencing a significant rise in popularity and credibility thanks to, among others, John W. Campbell and his Astounding Science Fiction magazine, and while Werner Von Braun was doing his best to make America fall in love with the idea of spaceships and of creating ‘a new frontier’[19] in space for America, post World War II science fiction cinema, mostly the realm of the American and British film industries, was in fact dominated mainly by invasion narratives, by the birth of the horror-science fiction hybrid and, last but not least, by the creature film. These narratives seem to have existed primarily as a means to express concerns about issues that were prevalent in the US and England at the time. And while not every American science fiction film of that time reflected of fear of communism as is often claimed, many of them were an attempt to explore the small town closed-mindedness and lack of tolerance that was spreading throughout America, as well as the fear of the Other which, among other possibilities, could indeed be applied to communism. Other central themes that were prevalent in the science fiction cinema of the 1950s are the role of women in society and the threat that it posed to an established patriarchal system, racial tensions and, by extension, the act of thinking and acting differently, and finally, a fear of nuclear power. As with other cinematic genres, not every science fiction film was successful in developing a solid socio-economical critique but many attempted to provide more than just cheap entertainment.

While modernism as an architectural movement continued to influence the development and design of cities throughout the world (among many projects was the development of Brazilia in 1956, following Lucio Costa’s highly modernist designs), it barely figured in the science fiction cinema of that time, which preferred, instead, to focus on small town America or England, where the problems of dehumanization, conformism and lack of free-will seemed to be more prevalent than in the city. In 1950’s science fiction cinema, the city tends to be seen as a rational and open-minded alternative to the backwardness and intolerance of the suburbs and countryside. Ironically, it is during that decade that urban planning lost much of the drive that had carried it throughout the 1930s and 1940s and that had allowed Lewis Mumford to state in 1938 in The Culture of Cities that ‘This new age builds a better kind of city, the new city is organized to make cooperation possible between machines and man and nature.’[20] Concepts such as the ‘Green Cities’ and ‘New Towns’, so popular in the aftermath of World War II, having slowly faded away from popular interest, the 1950s thus became a decade of ambivalence towards both the city and the suburbs. Both offered ground for critique, with science fiction cinema preferring to use suburbia as its main socio-cultural battlefield.

But when the city did appear in science fiction cinema, it was most often in the creature films, offering the perfect backdrop for destruction, for a ‘visual subversion of a familiar landscape’[21], subverting our idea of power and stability into a playground for oversized monsters. These films made extensive use of the long shot, turning humans and the city into fragile and ephemeral entities. ‘The creature films of the 1950’s (and early 1960’s as well) are less about horror and science than they are about the preservation of social order.’[22] In these films, the city, in addition to playing an important aesthetic and visual role, is thus aligned with a safeguarding of the status quo, a stronghold of order and civilization. It represents everything that man has been able to achieve until now, an ode to his power and genius, as well as what Robert Park saw as the promise of human growth and the possibility of non-conformity[23]. The destruction of our cities, whether New York in The Beast from 20000 Fathoms (1953), Las Vegas in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) or San Francisco in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), by various types of monsters and creatures, is a humbling and awesome experience. The aesthetics of destruction operate on several levels, from pure entertainment to sociological statements about a society’s ability to deal with contemporary changes.

Forbidden Planet (1956), while not a representation of the city, draws heavily from contemporary design and architectural trends, particularly in its depiction of the ideal home. In the aftermath of World War II, the concept of the ideal home had become extremely popular in America and England, and the 1956 Ideal Home Exhibition, which presented the ‘House of the Future’, focused around convenience and new materials that had become available since the war. A celebration of these contemporary design ideals, the house of Forbidden Planet is described by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska in the following terms:

Framed within what is presented as an everyday, contemporary setting, the house of Morbius on Altair IV is a celebration of 1950s design ideal. Glass and steel form the main structural components in conjunction with clean lined utilitarian furniture and exotic plants. The utopian aspect of the 1950s ideal home in Forbidden Planet is completed by its setting in an edenic garden complete with limpid pool[24]

On the flip side of this is Jacques Tati’s take on the modernist home in Mon Oncle (1958). The film offers a satirical view of the benefits of automation and modern architecture and design. In this house supposedly designed for functionality and for the improvement of its occupant’s lifestyle, ‘nothing takes account of human habits, needs, and activities’[25], resulting instead in a monotonous existence devoid of humanity.

Ambivalence towards the city grew throughout the 1950s. Perhaps still unsure as to whether the city was a friend or an enemy, or perhaps taking side in favour of urban development, many filmmakers shied away from powerful representations and preferred instead to direct their critique towards rural anaemia and parochialism. As the 1960s approached, a clear shift occurred, or rather, a development, in how the city would be viewed. Cities of destruction made way to cities of lies as the naive belief in modernist ideology and in the city as an emblem of a better future crumbled under mounting evidence that science and technology not only seemed to be incapable of curing many of society’s problems, but, also, were often responsible for them in the first place.

Rarely do social and economical changes come about rapidly. Instead, they brew and develop over years, decades sometimes, until the time is right for a series of event to trigger a noticeable change. Just like Modernism wasn’t born in the 1910s or 1920s, Post Modernism clearly didn’t appear for the first time in the 1960s. Yet, it is during this period that changes in society and in the manner in which human beings began to define and to interact with their environment started being loosely grouped under the ever-slippery term of Post Modernism. As with many other fields and disciplines, the 1960s brought about major changes in science fiction cinema, architecture and our view of the city.

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) took the genre to a level of ambition (and financing) not seen in science fiction cinema since the 1920s and 1930s by insisting on an intensity of detail and ‘realism’ rarely seen before in the genre. With his usual resolve towards perfection, Kubrick brought in experts from various fields to ensure that every aspect of the space adventure would be as close to reality as possible. With NASA having been engaged in a space race since the 1950s and about to land a man on the moon, Kubrick injected the science fiction genre with a much-needed dose of seriousness and status. A few years later, the subsequent failure of the Apollo programme which ironically followed the success of the moon landing, brought about serious changes in NASA’s ambitions, funding, and ultimately, in the way people would look at space and science fiction. The naive idealism of earlier decades made way to a more pessimistic outlook and the desire to expand America’s frontier into space was replaced by a concern with more pressing problems facing society such as overpopulation and the increasingly deteriorating state of the environment. An Orwellian concern for the future became commonplace in literature and cinema, and dystopic and anti-utopic visions started to dominate both outlets for science fiction. And if dystopias still managed to incorporate what Lyman Tower Sargent has described as ’social dreaming’[26], thereby allowing hope to exist, anti-utopias, which became increasingly popular throughout the 1970s and continued into the early 1980s, were dedicated to destroying any utopic pretensions.

Halfway through the decade, and in a manner consistent with the wave of rebellion that they helped bring about in the world of cinema, both Godard and Truffaut, visionaries in their own rights, felt the need to express visually their anxieties about the future. Their city is one filled with lies and deception where the idealism and fanatism of its rulers, scientists or politicians, have served to convince the population of something that does not exist and to enslave it into a false reality. This dystopic vision of the future, the city of lies and smoke and mirrors, dominates the narratives of 1960s and 1970s science fiction cinema and has also remained consistently prominent since.

Godard’s Alphaville (1965), shot on a very low budget in 1965 Paris, is the director’s take on Orwell’s 1984, capitalism, modernism and the eradication of free will through rationality and efficiency. The city, beautifully shot by Raoul Coultard, is turned into a cold, modernist island where buildings of glass and concrete stand as an effigy to science and dehumanization. Most of the scenes are shot in modernist interiors and exteriors, which could have been designed by Le Corbusier himself. But Godard’s vision turns the modernist dream upside down and associates the architecture with the end of free will and the disappearance of non-conformity. Unlike Lang’s vision of an ultra-modernist city of the future, with its skyscrapers reaching for the sky, Godard’s Alphaville is more spread out and few very tall buildings emerge. The elite continues to live in different areas of the city from the ‘little’ people, but the boundaries are less clearly defined and the sense of height as an association of power seems to dominate less than in Metropolis or even Things to Come. A man of his time, Godard seems to have been able to anticipate post-modernist concerns towards architecture and the city. Truffaut’s Farhenheit 451 (1966), based on Bradburry’s novel of the same name, seems to exist outside of the standard city space. More reminiscent of a modern city’s inner suburbs, the architecture on display is eclectic and often cold and lacking humanity. As with Alphaville, the low budget of Farhenheit 451 meant that all exterior scenes were shot on location (Maidenhead, UK). Truffaut evidently selected buildings that epitomized 1950s and 1960s urban planning gone wrong. The apartment block or tower no longer carries hope of an urban renaissance and as a solver of society’s problems. Instead, it is portrayed as lacking beauty and humanity, a vertical cage in which to house the less privileged, and, in the context of the film, the non-conformists and dissidents.

As with cinema, architecture had its share of rebels. ‘Anti-establishment fantasy architects’[27] and groups such as Superstudio and Archigram led the way towards a reconsideration of modernist ideals and concepts in architecture, which they saw as obsolete, not attuned to the needs of modern society, and more importantly, as a symbol of a totalitarian and inhumane way of thinking about urban planning. Increasingly, the ideas that had been at the core of the modernist architectural philosophy started being seen as exactly the type of urban planning that would make the future an unhealthy and inhumane place. Even Kubrick’s visualization in 2001 was attacked for being too sanitised and for dwelling on an outmoded, clinical and sterile view of the future. This questioning led to a new type of architecture, a post-modernist approach to building, materials, and, inherently, to the handling of space.

If space continued to influence some aspects of design in the 1960s, and modernist ideals continued until the end of that decade, the turn to the 1970s marked a definitive move away from the modernist city ideal. The Ronan Point disaster in London in 1968 brought about a reconsideration of the safety of the high-rise, lending weight to an already increasing critique of the modernist ideals upon which the high-rise was based. At the conference Utopia and/or Revolution in Turin in 1970, ‘Utopie, a Marxist collective of architects, urban theorists and sociologists including Jean Baudrillard, condemned megastructures as ‘chimera of utopia’[28], thereby damaging further what little left there was of optimism in utopian architects in the 1960s.

America’s great cities were no longer lands of opportunity; instead, they embodied the failure of the American dream with their poverty, civic corruption, racial unrest, civil disobedience, and violence[29]

This description could very well apply to the London of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). Even though the film takes place in a not-too-distant future, London has been stripped of its identity and its iconography (in spite of actual locations having been used for the film), removing in the process any sense of history that we may attribute to the place. Here the alienation of the familiar makes way for a familiarization of an urban landscape of decay, the new reality of the darker side of cities. What is left is a cement-based post-modern pastiche of architectural fragmentation, subject to violence, anonymity, and coldness. Like Godard and Truffaut before, Kubrick’s take on the ‘modern’ city is a much less romantised one than that of many of his contemporaries, who chose instead to focus on more ’sensational’ depictions. In these depictions, the disintegration of the symbol of the city, in America and elsewhere, materialized itself in representations of the city in ruin (the Planet of the Apes series), in a state of decrepitude (The Omega Man 1971) or as having gone ‘inside’. The environment and overpopulation, as illustrated by the publishing of the extremely influential book Limits to Growth in 1972 with its ‘critique of the ideology of progress in so far as that ideology rests on a thesis of endless growth and limitless accumulation’[30], became topics of increasing relevance for sociologists and directors alike. Films like Doomwatch (1972), Silent Running (1973) and Soylent Green (1973) took this environmental concern at heart and attempted to make serious statements about these pressing problems. In Soylent Green, 2022 New York is presented as polluted, overpopulated and extremely violent. The elite lives in barricaded buildings and compounds that seem to exist outside of the standard topography of the city of New York. Indeed, the empty canals that divide the decayed buildings in which the populace lives from the clean and modern hotel-like residence of the elite remind us more of Los Angeles than New York. This mixing of topographic and geographical elements can be characterised as a post-modern concern, something which Blade Runner (1982) would later exploit successfully. Once again, the population is tricked into believing in something that isn’t, in a fake reality which only hides a more terrifying truth. The problem of overpopulation is dealt with by encouraging and making the process of dying easier and ‘enjoyable’ so that humans can be turned into food for the rest of the population.

A similar system is portrayed in Logan’s Run (1976), where the size of the population is controlled through a death ritual, akin to a religious experience. The design of the city in Logan’s Run relies, among other concepts, on the idea of the Geodesic dome, invented by Buckminster Fuller in 1957. The dome had captured the imagination of architects since its invention, with Fuller himself proposing in 1968 a design for a dome covering part of New York City. The idea also caught the attention of NASA, as they conducted extensive research into the city of the future and ‘the feasibility of developing large-scale human settlements in space’[31]. For science fiction writers and directors, the dome was the ideal metaphor for a world blind to the realities of the outside (as well as, in some case, a viable solution for future living). Inside the dome, the city becomes a giant, multi-levelled American-style mall bathed in constant artificial light, with vast gardens and a network of tube-style monorails. If this depiction, so reminiscent of 1920s and 1930s ideals and of the design of Things to Come, and the association of space, nature, cleanliness and order that it conjures, was a powerful theme and concept until the 1950s and mid 1960s, by the 1970s, it had started to become a favourite method of dystopic representation, the epitome of close-mindedness and brainwashed suburban mall ideology. Even Gerard K. O’Neill’s proposals at NASA for the city in space in the early 1970s were in fact exactly what Robert Fishman described as a ‘bourgeois utopia’[32], an extension of American suburbia in space, an Epcot type vision of city planning that relies on now clearly naive and disturbing ideology.

In a similar vein, THX 1138 (1971), depicts a world that has gone inside. Aside for the occasional glimpse of a city outside (most of these city shots are CGI shots and were added in the 2004 re-mastered version), life, at least for the workers and the ‘common’ people, takes place in an underground world of blinding white tunnels and rooms. This sterile and faceless architecture, with the help of a compulsory drug taking programme, helps rid this society of all traces of individuality and free-will. While the design is clearly different, the idea is a similar one to that used by the Nazis in the 1930s. By stripping the architecture and buildings of individuality, the statement is made that the good of the group is more important than that of the individual. Under such circumstances, the notion of individuality itself becomes questionable.

The changes that started developing throughout the 1960s and 1970s came into full effect in the 1980s. Post-modernism, as defined by Jameson in The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), culminated in the 1980s in an ‘aesthetic populism’[33], and a visual ‘fragmentation’ that helped turn the science fiction film into an accepted mode of general and popular entertainment. It is naive to blame the birth of this type of spectacle on Lucas and Spielberg, even though their films Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) do mark the official birth of the blockbuster. It is instead fair to state that the world was ready to embrace these two films and that the type of visual stimulation they provided adequately fulfilled an increasing need for intensity and artificial stimulation. The post-modern populace of Reagan’s America, Thatcher’s England and of most of the rest of the industrial world became ‘a society of the image of the simulacrum’[34], heavily influenced by the growing presence of technology and by the triumph of capitalism as the global mode of production. The new simulated experience relied on an abolition of the continuation of time and focused instead on its fragmentation, exploration, on dissecting and reassembling to arrive at a product which was neither new nor old, a product that sometimes lacked depth and that stimulated the senses on a different (and more superficial, possibly) level than was previously possible (or accepted). If we follow Jameson, or Fukuyama or even Baudrillard, the 1980s was the decade when history came to an end and when the traditional workings of space and time came to a halt. The impact of this ‘weakening of historicity’[35] was felt in many fields and disciplines, and perhaps most of all, in the arts. Architects talked about post-modernism with the same intensity as they did about modernism. For some, it marked the end of ambition, of beauty, of stability, of coherence, of unity. For others, it freed the profession from its shackles, from an over reliance on traditional methods and concepts, and from an outmoded way of thinking. Jameson himself has credited changes in architectural representations as the trigger to his thoughts on post modernism. A rejection of High-Modernism’s ideals of elitism and authoritarianism, and of its ‘destruction of the fabric of the traditional city’, Post-Modernism marks ‘the effacement of the frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture’[36]. But most of all, the ‘hyperreal’[37] in architecture brought about an originality and a flexibility that enabled it (and continues to do so) to reinvent itself. This new eclecticism of creation as well as the technological tools which surfaced in the 1980’s, namely the computer and various CAD and 3D applications, enabled and empowered architects to explore new ideas and new concepts, and to envision structures that would have previously been much more difficult to realize. Buildings such as Frank Gehry’s Loyola University Law School and Vitra Design Museum (and of course later, the Guggenheim in Bilbao), Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, Richard Roger’s Lloyds Building in London and Foster’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, or even Peter Cook’s Design for Solar City, all relied on the power of the computer to assist in the deconstruction and reconstruction of established structures and forms. It is also during this decade that science fiction cinema heavily began to influence the thinking and vision of architects, who started relying on these films and the visualization they provided for their own ideas and creation. As stated in Fantasy Architecture, ‘Film alone can simulate the experience of walking through architectural space, and architecture Ðreal or virtual- can enhance any narrative’.[38] The term Fantasy Architecture, which had emerged in the 1960s, began in the 1980s to be used interchangeably with science fiction architecture. The line between architecture, cinema and simulation became blurred and harder to distinguish, with cinema and architecture feeding off one another more than ever.

If hardware and software helped architects dream up new structures and visions, it certainly also propelled science fiction cinema to a new level of visualization and entertainment. Special effects have now come to dominate the filmmaking process, at least in Hollywood, and many films, and not only science fiction films, rely on them for impact or merely for polishing and changes which would be too costly to make through re-shooting. But visual effects also enabled the film industry to add a new level of ‘realism’ to some of the science fiction representations, and in some cases, to tackle certain subject matters that couldn’t have been properly dealt with without these tools. At the core of science fiction cinema has always existed the dilemma that Vivian Sobchack refers to as ‘a tension between those images which strive to totally remove us from a comprehensible and known world into romantic poetry and those images which strive to bring us back into a familiar and prosaic context’.[39] While in the wrong hands, visual effects can lead to exaggerated, artificial images devoid of meaning and substance, if used appropriately, they can now also help to resolve this tension by providing visualizations of the less familiar and of the what-could-be, in the same manner that new programs can help architects dream up fresh and novel urban concepts. Interestingly, the Star Wars series offers an example for both sides of the argument, succeeding in the early films in creating believable depictions of new worlds while, more recently, being guilty of an over-indulgence of computer graphics that result in an exaggerated level of artificiality that produces too much distance between the audience and the worlds represented. Yet, because ‘the design of filmic space is never simply a copy of reality’ and that ‘it always means creating an artificial world’[40], the increase in design resources has been synonymous with an increase in the representation of these artificial worlds. The new ‘heterotopia’[41] of the 1980s is characterized by an eclecticism of forms and representations, with no single one truly dominating the texts from that period. Cities of lies still have a place as demonstrated by 1984 (1984) and Brazil (1985), while a genre reminiscent of the 1950s starts to re-emerge in the form of cities as a battlefield, as illustrated for example by Terminator (1984) and Robocop (1987). Comedy also begins to be merged with science fiction in Back to the Future (1985), Ghostbuster (1984), Electric Dreams (1984), UFOria (1980), Heartbeeps (1981) and Repo Man (1984), indicating a shift in the audiences’ willingness and ability to confront issues such as race and the fear of the Other. In the end, with few new themes and visualizations of the city dominating, this rehashing of the past leads to a newfound curiosity and sense of acceptance towards old topics and themes. Liquid Sky (1982) depicts a New York where drugs and sexual promiscuity are the norm. But this point is taken further through the glamorizing of the act and the blurring of the differences between genders. The city becomes a playground, a source of possibilities and pleasure for all genders and races. The fear of the Other has turned into an embrace of its difference and the city plays a pivotal role in making this shift in attitude possible. Humanity is no longer defined by its strict adherence to norms and values but rather by an open-mindedness and tolerance towards the robot, the alien, the black, the woman and the homosexual. And while science fiction cinema embraces this new future, it also at times continues to explore the nostalgia that comes with it, fully aware that this nostalgia longs for a past that was in many ways no better than this present. Overall then, what ensues from these texts in the 1980s is perhaps a sense of confusion and a lack of a coherent and unified direction, truly post-modernistic symptoms.

Another characteristic of the representations of the city in the 1980s is the proliferation of waste. If decay and decrepitude were present already in certain texts of the 1970s, waste, as a direct result of a society’s levels of consumption and symptomatic of a capitalism gone wrong, permeates the streets of several city representations in the 1980s, such as Los Angeles in Terminator (1984), Detroit in Robocop (1987), New York in Liquid Sky and Escape from New York (1981), the NY-Los Angeles hybrid of Blade Runner (1982) or the retro-futuristic and gothic metropolis of Brazil (1985). In all cases, waste is portrayed as an inescapable fact of modern life, a consequence of the future having reached the present, a proof that the modernist ideology of a sterile and hygienic future is obsolete. Yet, if previously the presence of waste carried with it fear and loathing, in the 1980s, it becomes associated with a new type of beauty, once again a post-modern acceptance of a new condition and heterogeneity.

The metropolis of Blade Runner (1982), a film that has often been described as a celebration of the post-modern, is in fact post-modern in its embrace and realistic depiction of a near future based on heterogeneity, eclecticism, and of a reconsideration of the meaning of what it is to be human. Yet, its architectural pastiche, even though clearly an ‘implosion of historicity’[42], is often more reminiscent of modernist ideals in its depiction of buildings reaching for the sky where the elite lives while the ‘little’ people spend time in the ‘gut’ of the city (the post-modern city attempts to give back control to the commoner). In addition, a sense of beauty, of resigned understanding, permeates the film and its depiction of the city. While we witness and understand the more negative and darker sides of the city, its depiction of monumental and modernist structures of lights and LCD screens on a perpetual background of night and rain manages to be visually very alluring and to appeal to a sense of splendor reminiscent of Modernists ideals and of Louis-Etienne Boulle’s belief in monstrosity as the acceptable (or even desirable) side effect of all monumentality. ‘The image of size has such power over our senses that even the idea that it is terrible still arouses a feeling of admiration in us’.[43] Thus, a certain coherence remains, a type of romance and nostalgia in the way the city is structured and depicted. The city in Brazil (1985), on the other hand, has taken the modernist and post-modernist ideals to such extreme that the overload of styles and visual statements it creates removes any sense of identification with the city, an effect undoubtedly intended by the director. Brazil is not a post-modernist film in the sense that it does not attempt to generate a connection between the city and the viewer, or rather, that it does not offer any escape from its parody of the modern world. The city of Brazil is not real, nor is it ‘hyper-real’. It only exists as a caricature of a retro-future that could have been.

The 1990’s, on the other hand, are clearly marked by the dominance of the cities of simulation. A trend that began in the 1980s with films such as Tron (1982), Videodrome (1983), Electric Dreams (1984), Brainstorm (1983), Dreamscape (1984), and Wargames (1983), it realized its full potential in the 1990’s, taking the post-modern patterns one step further and capitalizing on the acceptance of cyberpunk and virtual reality. William Gibson’s influential novel Neuromancer, published in 1984, marked the birth of Cyberpunk and offered a bleak and dark view of an urban neon-lit future dominated by technology and simulation. Human relationships and connections as we knew them have mostly disappeared, humans preferring instead to interact through cyber networks and the use of avatars or personas. Reality no longer exists, or rather, has made way for a new type of reality or realities. In this sense, Gibson’s masterly work was so prescient because it did not necessarily condemn the future it portrayed. Like many works since, Neuromancer showed a degree of acceptance towards an inevitable future, one that would be pointless to fight. In the absence of adequate means or reasons to fight, the best course of action is to embrace it and to learn to live with it. The experience of the breakdown of space and of a flexible, adaptable reality where ‘the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary'’[44] is threatened, is illustrated, among others, in the cities of The Matrix (1999), Dark City (1998), and The 13th Floor (1999). In these cases, the city becomes a simulation, a construct, a replica of itself, a false reality that pretends to be real. In that sense, the city of simulation is an extension of and draws on the city of lies. But what differentiates these cities from many portrayed in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Alphaville and Logan’s Run, is the fact that reality is even more sinister than the simulation, thereby questioning our sense of normality and offering the acceptance of different realities as the way forward. Learning to live with it, as does the character in the gothic, retro-futurist, and Piranesi-like zoo city of Dark City, is not only the only available escape, but a positive one at that. The constant re-organization of the structure of the city with its clocks stopping at midnight every night is an appropriate metaphor for the post-modern fragmentation of space and time. The Truman Show (1998) is only somewhat of an exception in that it shows the character played by Jim Carrey determined to escape his controlled and simulated world. Yet we are left uninformed as to what that reality outside of the dome might look like. While we are happy for the character to escape his 1950s American suburban nightmare, we suspect that the reality outside might not be much better.

The new millennium has so far provided very few new ideas in science fiction cinema and even less in terms of interesting representations of the city. Most of the film industry’s energy seems to be directed towards adaptations of comic books (Sin City (2005), Spider Man (2002), X Men (2000), Sky Captain (2004), Hellboy (2004)) or remakes of ‘classics’ (Solaris (2002), Planet of the Apes (2001), The Time Machine (2002), War of the Worlds (2005), King Kong (2005)). In addition, the overload of visual effects continues, resulting in a plethora of effects-driven, destruction-focused films with little substance or character (The Day after Tomorrow (2004), The 6th Day (2000), Terminator 3 (2003)). Very few films manage to escape this mass of uniformity and lack of originality.

Equilibrium (2002), for instance, can only rehash themes already explored in 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and THX 1138. It portrays a future where knowledge and individual thinking are forbidden and are controlled through brainwashing propaganda and drug taking. What is interesting about this film however, is its representation of the authoritarian and totalitarian city. Shot in various locations in Berlin (Olympic Stadium, Postdamer Platz) as well as in Rome, the film’s production design is clearly heavily influenced by Nazi and Fascist architecture. The city of Equilibrium is one that is dominated by order, symmetry (seen throughout the ages as an indication of harmony), and monumental, bare and functional buildings, in the Rohbau style that was so favoured by Hitler and his architect Albert Speer. The bland, smooth, and characterless surfaces of these buildings relies on brick and granite for their effect, echoing Hilter’s words in 1937 that ‘only the great cultural documents of humanity made of granite and marble’ offer stability and certainty’ [45], and result in effigies whose main purpose it is to lower Man’s sense of individuality. In addition, the citizens of the city tend to gather in open plazas and squares (of rather classicists designs) for worship and meditation, an architectural, urban planning and propaganda stratagem that was at the core of the design of the city of Berlin in the 1930s.

In Code 46 (2003), Michael Winterbottom sends mixed messages about the city of the very near future. On the one hand, the effective cinematography captures beautiful images of Shanghai, London and Dubai to create a post-modernist and exotic view of the city that blends concerns for overpopulation and the impact of technology on individual freedom with a sense of acceptance and beauty towards the alienation created by the modern city. And on the other hand, the lead protagonists are shown to escape to a more ‘rural’ and primitive lifestyle, filling the narrative with a sense of nostalgia for a past when less was available but men were more free. In the process, the film distorts space completely by mixing shots of various cities to give the impression of another (Hong Kong is Seattle) and by inserting spaces of desert where there should be none, portraying Shanghai as an overcrowded, fenced-in island surrounding by a sea of waste lands. The end result, which feels at times like a music video, portrays the city in a fragmented and ephemeral way, but with enough respect that the problems discussed in the film and the blame associated seem to somehow be shifted away from the city. The city is no longer responsible, simply the place where man’s experiments and the inevitable journey of progress occur.

After 150 years of urbanization and city planning, it seems that we have made little progress when it comes to improving living conditions for the inhabitants of our cities and their suburbs. The rapid rate of urbanization that we witnessed at the turn of the 20th century brought with it most of the ideas and concepts that we still rely on today for much of our thinking. We witness everyday in our cities the fears and anxieties that were already discussed and studied back then. The modernist hope and optimism disappeared relatively quickly, and while it may still continue in some quarters, it could not outweigh the accusations of radicalism, naivety and even fanaticism that it became associated with throughout the decades. And with it disappeared the idea of a utopic future. A lack of enthusiasm and an overwhelming fear of the future overtook our society, progressively, but in a more assured manner in the 1960s. Since that time, the dreaming of new and grand visions for our planet and for our cities has become a difficult and a dangerous undertaking. And more recently, ‘pluralism and postmodernity have made it difficult to articulate committed alternatives’.[46] The loss of naivety in which we pride ourselves so much, and which allows most people to today look at modernist and Wellsian ideals of the future with derision and contempt (Canary Wharf as monument to ruthless laissez-faire gigantism[47]), has resulted in a global suspicion of architectural and design schemes that offer to better our lives. Urban and city planning clearly continues to take place, but it usually has to be combined with ‘a better excuse’ such as the turn of the century, or the Olympics and the financial opportunities it brings to restore impoverished areas of the cities in which the games will take place. Despite the contribution of Frank Gehry’s, the post-modern architect par excellence, Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao towards the trend by many cities to rely on iconic buildings to encourage an urban renaissance[48], in a post-modernist world, the balance between dreaming up new visions and realizing these visions in a profitable manner with a result that is egalitarian while still individualistic and not overly sterile or faceless, is indeed a difficult one to achieve.

The architect at the end of the 20th century ‘faces the problem of reconciling the opposing goals of conflict and contradiction (of Postmodernism) and (Modernism’s goal) of unity and reconstruction.[49]

Science-fiction cinema has also been plagued over the years by the inability to dream up new dreams. Aside for the occasional independent or low-budget production, for the past thirty years or so, science-fiction cinema has been the property of Hollywood, resulting in the genre being used as a cash cow, studio research indicating that dystopia sells better than utopia and that destruction and explosions are more profitable than drama and reflection. But as long as audiences themselves continue to suffer from a ‘historical amnesia’ and a lack of dreaming and optimism for the future, it will be difficult for science-fiction cinema to break its reputation as a provider of cheap entertainment. ‘For it is precisely a society without utopias that has reached the Òend of historyÓ’.[50] The city thus no longer dreams and hopes in contemporary science fiction cinema. Instead, it lies, oppresses, destructs, simulates and provides its inhabitants with a variety of realities from which to choose.

But there are reasons to think that architects, audiences and the film industry might soon again regain an interest in positive depictions of the future city. This positivism need not be in the modernist fashion. New breakthroughs in the sciences of nanotechnology and bio-technology for instance, have architects hoping for new ways and methods of creating new structures and applying these to the city of the future. For architects such as Greg Lynn, and for many science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson, the way out of post-modernism is not through a revisiting of modernism, nor is it through ignoring what we have learned. The way out of the end of history is not to make the past disappear, but to use the past to create something new which has little or no resemblance to the past, and to move towards ‘an acceleration of history’. Through this new embrace of the future, new representations of the city might just be possible again, whether on film or in ‘reality’.

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