The architecture shown on the screen needs of several operations prior to its filming, and that process can be divided in two clearly differenced stages, both material and structural. First of all, elements picked from real architecture must be transformed to become representable. This means that a number of manipulations are needed to fit real architecture to the filmmaker’s ideas about what is to appear on the screen. The architecture pictured in movies must be translated to cinematic language in each of them, having to adequate to a certain environment established by the author. That environment has lots of predefined variables, to which the architecture must adapt in order to the correct operation of the finished work. Secondly, it must be decided what part of a specific architecture should appear in each shot. When using studio sets, the decision involves what should be built and what digitally added, completely or partially.
In any motion picture, the age and place in which stories take place are providing data about the environment. Historical framework does exist and can be used, while in movies that depict the future there is a question different to any other cinema proposals: the architecture to be used, transformed or imitated doesn’t exist. So an extra stage it’s added to the ones yet described, that consists of imagining and projecting the appearance of an architecture that belongs to a time not yet arrived.
In genre movies, as classic fantasy takes its references from legendary and mythological elements and its imaginary from the medieval landscape and architecture, the representation of future is facing an essential handicap that is the absence of those references. Since science fiction oughts to develop a non-existent environment, transformation of known elements on unknown ones becomes an additional task to regular work of directors and set designers. Future provides to its own description a sort of unforeseeability that makes it instantly a source of infinite settings. Then, not only the stories to be told are unlimited, but so are the places and times in which those stories take part. Therefore, when architecture becomes a character in science fiction films, the representation of the future is its primary task.
Foresight science fiction is based on projecting plausible forecastings of the future, and seeks to gain scientific credibility by its set designs. That will be the main trend until the 1960s, and from then on, different approaches to the portrait of the future will appear in sci-fi movies. The original foresight will give way to more complex treatments of genre stories, that will handle other different methods to represent that future.
So the thesis proposes a functional classification of the architecture in science fiction, and analyzes the role that architectural elements play in that film genre. On the one hand, the simplest division consists on splitting the real architecture from the sets built at the studios. While the sets imply architecture specifically created for films, and that it exists only through them, the real one wants to show, albeit beyond the real, continuity and familiarity; architecture typologically recognizable.
Furthermore, inside this difference between reality and set, the process of recognizing film architecture and its performance are yet more complex if we consider not only its material quality, but the tone which is provided with by transforming it in the filming process. The second classification to be applied comes from this way of looking at the film architecture, from the filter used to show it on the screen, that will depend on the objective or subjective character of the portrait to be made. So, the architecture that will appear on screen, whether it’s real or imagined, will perform a function related to that character; either a practical function if it is objective or a rhetorical one if subjective. A descriptive and instrumental behavior in one case, and another one that will be fundamentally related to allegory, metaphor and symbolism. The combination of both classifications will result in the four types of architecture analyzed, which comprises the ways the science fiction architecture works.