Great filmmaking depends on more than actors and dialogue. Architecture can establish a period, reveal something about a character, or transform a real location into an imagined future. The British Film Institute (BFI) highlights this relationship in Modern House on Film: 10 Films Featuring Modernist Homes, explaining how filmmakers have used modern architecture to represent everything from glamour and utopian possibility to isolation and dystopia. The BFI even notes that directors such as Kogonada have effectively made modern architecture a star of their films.
Curved glass is particularly cinematic. Sweeping curved windows produce reflections, capture changing daylight, and allow filmmakers to frame characters against dramatic landscapes. Curves can also suggest movement and futurism, explaining why this architecture frequently appears in science fiction, thrillers, and films depicting wealth or technological power.
How Is Curved Glass Made?
The spectacular forms seen in modern architecture are possible because glass can be manufactured to highly specific shapes. Typically, flat glass is heated until it becomes sufficiently pliable to conform to a specially designed mold. Controlled cooling then allows it to retain the required curvature. As a result, modern fabrication offers considerable opportunities to customize curved windows. Manufacturers can create glass with different radii, dimensions, thicknesses, tints, and finishes, while curved panels can also form part of laminated or insulated glazing systems. Architects can therefore commission glass for everything from gently rounded windows to dramatic façades.
This freedom helps explain why curved glass works so well in cinematic architecture. Instead of designing buildings around standardized rectangular panes, architects can use custom glazing to realize unusual shapes that give a location an instantly recognizable identity.
1. City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia – Tomorrowland
Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela’s City of Arts and Sciences already resembles a science-fiction film set, making Valencia’s cultural complex a natural choice for Disney’s Tomorrowland (2015).
Its sweeping white structures, enormous areas of glass, and reflective pools were used to represent the film’s technologically advanced alternative world. Rather than constructing the entire futuristic environment in a studio, the filmmakers could capitalize on architecture that already communicated the necessary sense of technological optimism.
For travelers, the complex offers an opportunity to walk through the same futuristic environment seen on screen while appreciating how glass, water, and dramatic curves interact under the Spanish sun.
2. TWA Flight Center, New York – Catch Me If You Can
Roland Arhelger, Ehemaliges TWA-Terminal am John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, CC BY-SA 4.0
Few buildings capture the optimism of the Jet Age as effectively as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center at New York’s JFK Airport.
Completed in 1962, its flowing architecture features sweeping concrete forms accompanied by expansive glazing. Steven Spielberg used the real terminal during production of Catch Me If You Can (2002), a film set partly during the glamorous era of 1960s air travel.
Its curves help make the building feel almost permanently in motion—appropriate for both an airport terminal and a movie centered on a protagonist constantly moving between identities and destinations. Today, the landmark has been incorporated into the TWA Hotel, allowing visitors to experience Saarinen’s architecture themselves.
3. SIS Building, London – James Bond
SIS Building, Vauxhall Cross by Richard Cooke, SIS Building, Vauxhall Cross – geograph.org.uk – 4541871, CC BY-SA 2.0
James Bond is known for his suits, fast cars, and famous quotes. Yet, among the unsung heroes of the franchise, there has recently been a certain iconic building in London that has played an important role.
The SIS Building at Vauxhall Cross, the real headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, has become an established part of the James Bond universe. It first appeared as MI6 headquarters in GoldenEye (1995) and subsequently featured in The World Is Not Enough, Skyfall and Spectre.
Its monumental riverside design combines glass, terraces, and distinctive geometric forms to create architecture appropriate for the technologically sophisticated world of Bond. The building demonstrates how filmmakers can use distinctive real architecture to establish a location instantly without needing lengthy exposition.
4. Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles – Demolition Man
Los Angeles naturally provides some of the best examples of architecture crossing into cinema, and César Pelli’s Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood is particularly recognizable because of its enormous geometric forms and colored glass façades.
The complex provided filmmakers with a suitably futuristic location for Demolition Man (1993), starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, and Sandra Bullock. The Pacific Design Center was used as the exterior of Sunrise Court, the apartment building of Bullock’s character Lenina Huxley, helping establish the movie’s vision of 2032 “San Angeles.” Its angular forms, vast expanses of colored and reflective glass, and monumental scale required little imagination to transform into architecture from the future.
Its appearance in Demolition Man illustrates an important advantage of distinctive architectural glass in cinema: a memorable façade can immediately communicate modernity and technological advancement before viewers know anything about what supposedly exists inside.
5. Getty Center, Los Angeles – Star Trek Into Darkness
High above Los Angeles, Richard Meier’s Getty Center offers another highly cinematic combination of architecture and landscape. The complex was inspired by both the urban and natural characteristics of Los Angeles and combines modern architecture, gardens, open spaces, extensive glazing, and panoramic views across the city.
Those qualities helped the Getty Center step into the future in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). The location was used to represent Starfleet Headquarters, providing an appropriately sophisticated setting for the organization at the center of the Star Trek universe. Its pale surfaces, glass, open plazas, and carefully arranged geometric and curved architectural elements create a clean, technologically advanced appearance without relying entirely on purpose-built movie sets.
The Getty’s appearance demonstrates why distinctive modern architecture is so valuable to filmmakers. Through the combination of glass, stone, natural light, and dramatic views, a real Los Angeles museum can convincingly become part of a fictional twenty-third-century world.
When Buildings Become Characters
The BFI’s discussion of modern architecture on film demonstrates that buildings can do much more than provide attractive backgrounds. In The Ice Storm, for example, production designer Mark Friedberg compared finding the appropriate architectural location to casting, because the houses communicate information about the people occupying them.
Curved glass strengthens this relationship between architecture and cinema. Its ability to reflect surroundings, manipulate daylight, frame views, and create unusual forms gives filmmakers a visually expressive tool before cameras even begin rolling.
From the Jet Age curves of the TWA Flight Center to the futuristic City of Arts and Sciences, these buildings demonstrate what happens when ambitious architecture meets cinema: sometimes the location becomes as memorable as the people on screen.