Corridors in Space

Alien (1979)
Saturn 3 (1980)
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
2001: ASO (1968)
Outland (1981)
Dune (1984)
Moon (2009)
Forbidden Planet (1958)
Flash Gordon (1980)
MoonRaker (1979)
Solaris (2002)
Aliens (1986)
Logan's Run (1976)

Originally posted by Martin Anderson on Den of Geek here.

Corridors in science-fiction movies. I love them.

I wasted too much of my childhood and youth imitating and developing the superb production sketches of Ron Cobb, Syd Mead, Ralph McQuarrie and many others. I walked round Elstree studios collecting precious vacuum-formed sections of cloud-city corridor from The Empire Strikes Back, some months after principal photography stopped. I had reams of sci-fi corridors worked out.

Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature - really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand.

Here's what started me off...

The designs that Roger Christian synthesised from Ron Cobb's prolific and extraordinary conceptual sketches for Alien (1979) are lingered over lovingly at the start of the movie. Ridley Scott knows that corridors matter in a horror (or 'haunted house') movie, but these marvellous sets are also being showcased to sell the gritty and grimy, commercial and industrial reality of the Nostromo as well. The upper sections related to the command deck were dirtied down with gold and black paint after a reshuffle of sections in order to convey the grittier world inhabited and Parker and Brett on the engineering level.

There's a distinctly different look and feel to the different sections of the ship. The corridor leading to the hypersleep section remains horribly creepy, despite being padded literally from wall to wall in cushion-like material, presumably to minimise the risk of accidents during turbulence, or from sleepy space-people tripping up on the way to the canteen.

These sections are re-used for the corridor outside med-lab, and since the lab itself is another antiseptically white set, a truly spectacular and faithfully-rendered Ron Cobb design, the clean lines of the corridor make sense here as well. The medical context, as with the hypersleep chamber, disarmingly suggests the comfort and soft edges of the corridor.

What a contrast is to come, as we enter the bone-ridden and gruesome imagination of H.R. Giger, and the skeletal corridor leading to the space-jockey inside the alien derelict. Dank, dark and positively dripping, there's something quite Victorian about this section of set; with the cantilevered arches finishing off in boney protrusions, it's like being inside some dank and rotten musical instrument...

Anyway, returning to the human tech of Alien's production design, it certainly had an influence on many of its imitators...

What's mostly wrong with the corridors in Stanley Donen's Saturn 3 (1980) is that the floor-surfaces resemble the base floor of a movie studio, something which had plagued the corridors in the medium-budget Star Wars three years earlier (more on Star Wars corridors in a moment).

The garish colours of the pipes actually makes a great deal of sense, as exactly the kind of over-insured coding that occurs in order to make sure you don't tap into a pipe for a blast of air only to get zapped with Freon.

The other thing impressive about Stuart Craig's Saturn 3 corridors is the full curvature. Curves cost money in corridor-land - lots of money. Anyone familiar with the angular corridor sets of Buck Rogers In The 25th Century or classic Doctor Who (in both of which there was always a great deal of 'corridor business') can almost spot the chippies knocking out those hard edges with a jigsaw. But curves like these are class...

And if Saturn 3 took its cue from Alien (or just plain ripped it off), there's an interesting bit of visual cross-fertilisation going on between this box-office failure and one of 1980's biggest cinema hits...

Alien started the kind of corridor-fetishism in screen sci-fi that Kubrick had failed to start with 2001: A Space Oddyssey, since the latter film was so visionary and expensive that practically no-one could even attempt to imitate it.

Instead Roger Christian got inventive with his lower budget and strip-mined an aircraft graveyard, strewing Alien's Nostromo with sections and detailing from WWII bombers. This usage of full-sized 'nurnies' followed the long-established visual effects practice of cannibalising parts from model kits (most especially WWII tanks and destroyers) in order to provide ready-made detailing without resort to custom-crafting and vacuum-forming every last valve and pipe. By the time the 1980s set in, Alien's strip-mined tech was practically de rigeur for screen sci-fi...

Philip Harrison's superb prison set from Peter Hyams' Outland (1981) will be hard to beat in the pending remake, and unlike Saturn 3, the lighting really brings out the quality of the work.

By the mid-1980s, the hacked-together and post-industrial look of Alien was starting to seem a little too low-budget, and sci-fi movies began to demonstrate that they were willing to fabricate artifacts the old way, from scratch, and pay for the privilege too...

Anthony Masters' extraordinary work on House Atreides in David Lynch's Dune (1984) may use repeat templates, but no-one found this wonderful wooden detailing in a junkyard. The atavistic palace of the Atreides clan truly brings out the feudal feel of the scenario, and shares more DNA with Salvador Dali than the likes of Alien.

Repeat sections are what corridors are all about, and they're part of the iconography of pre-CGI sci-fi movie-making. For Alien, Roger Christian would have the production department mock up different sections of corridor for Ridley Scott's perusement, and whatever got the green light was fabricated multiple times to create the final corridor, often with the classic trick of placing an angled mirror at the end of the long set to suggest further recession and depth.

It's a trick lovingly employed by Duncan Jones in this year's Moon, wherein rather thin sections of strut support have been laid in to provide geometry on a pretty low-budget corridor...

Note the use of the 'Eurostile' typeface that pretty much typified movie and TV sci-fi typography in the 60s and 70s once everyone got over the ghastly computer-fonts that were sadly used in Space:1999 (in fact this was the typeface used in the earlier UFO, and in most of Gerry Anderson's late sixties SF TV shows). Moon is a retro-feast for the SF corridor nut!

The sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet (1956) uses the same 'layered' technique of struts to achieve depth in the corridors of the Krell...

Returning to the more opulent and luxurious sci-fi corridor, Danilo Donati's brightly-coloured work in Flash Gordon (1980), prefigured the grandeur of House Atreides in typically Italian opulence...

Later Donati tones down the colours, but not the budget, for this superb ante-corridor to Klytus's mind-lab - it even has a moving (and illuminated!) walkway...

These are fantastic and imaginative concepts for 5-star corridors, but a real corridor-head is most likely to appreciate the NASA sheen of verisimillitude on display in the likes of Moonraker (1979)...

Ken Adam has just gone totally out of his way to lend 'Canaveral' credence to this barmy 007 outing involving genocide from space, combining those luxurious and expensive curves with a prosaic sensibility that everything you're looking at was shipped up in sections perforce...

Another great example of NASA-porn is to be found in the first class mis-en-scene of the Steven Soderbergh remake of Tarkovsky's Solaris (2002)...

What luxury - a flat wall with a slight curve. It's antiseptic, unfriendly and really quite repellant, but a very convincing projection into the near-future from the current state-of-the-art in space stations.

Similarly impressive utilitarianism was found in the look of the corridors in Douglas Trumbull's cult eco-SF outing Silent Running (1972)...

The Valley Forge in Silent Running was actually a decommissioned naval destroyer called the Valley Forge, and its cramped confines provided a suitably hard-edged and rather submarine-like feel to the crew's living quarters.

It's hard to let the subject of corridors go without a mention of the steampunk-like trolley ride that the crew of the Palomino take in Disney's The Black Hole (1979)...

One can't help but feel that Disney was perhaps a little over-inspired by its own numerous and world-famous amusement rides. This one would have been a doozy...

The subway-style corridor also had a nice outing as the inter-suburb transport system of Logan's Run (1976)...

...although the film did have a little trouble seeing past the 1970s in certain parts:

The sci-fi corridor is always evolving, but in 1986, unbeknown to most of us, it was about to evolve entirely away from movies and into videogames...

James Cameron's Aliens practically set a template for corridors in the first-person shooter genre of video-gaming. In early gaming corridors were even more important than they are in movies, as the repeatable instances of corridor sections could make a significant saving on the processor overhead of earlier consoles. The dark, industrial and forbidding corridors of LV-426 were to haunt many an evening of terrified button-mashing...

Boston City Hall in 'The Departed'

Boston City Hall (1964)
Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles
Massachusetts State House (1978)
Charles Bulfinch
Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge (2003)
Christian Menn
South Boston


Martin Scorsese takes the helm for this tale of questionable loyalties and blurring identities set in the South Boston organized crime scene - Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

The blurring identities and questionable loyalties Jason is refering are not only those of the cops and robbers. Boston City Hall was built in 1964 by the firm of Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles. It took first place out of 256 entries because of its concept of creating a public and accessible character for the headquarters of the city's government.


In a 1976 poll of historians and architects, the City Hall gained universal praise from those in the profession and was voted the 6th best building in America. Chief architectural critic of the New York Times said of the building on her first time viewing it, "What has been gained is a notable achievement in the creation and control of urban space, and in the uses of monumentality and humanity in the best pattern of great city building. Old and New Boston are joined through an act of urban design that relates directly to the quality of the city and its life."

However, the citizens of Boston have been almost unanimous in their dislike of the building since day one.

*Then-Mayor John Collins reportedly gasped as the design was first unveiled, and someone in the room blurted out, "What the hell is that?" City Hall is unpopular with Bostonians, as it is with employees of the building, who see it as a dark and unfriendly eyesore. It is occasionally the butt of jokes in local magazines. The structure's complex interior spaces result in cavernous voids, a confusing floorplan, and make the building very expensive to heat.

The surrounding City Hall Plaza has long been cited as a failure in terms of design and urban planning. In 2004 the Project for Public Spaces identified it as the worst single public plaza worldwide, out of hundreds of contenders. Some efforts have been made to liven up City Hall Plaza, but these have been met with mixed reactions.*

This brings all brings us back to the film, The Departed. The whole movie makes generous use of all aspects of Boston, from the old State House to the new Zakim Bridge, from the old markets and the residential neighborhoods of South Boston and throwing in backdrops of the faraway downtown business districts and its modern skyscrapers for contrast. Even in the graphic design of the movie's logo, we forgo usual stars in favor of what the film is at its essence, Boston and Violence.

The contrast between good and evil, the mixed motives and blurred identities can be viewed most through Matt Damon's character Colin Sullivan. As the gangster-pretending-to-be-a-cop, Sullivan is a prisoner of his background. He goes through the motions of playing a cop, and although he plays informant for the mob, we do get a sense that he wants to leave that world behind, but can't. In one of his first scenes, while still at the police academy, we see him and a fellow trainee relaxing on a park bench, drinking a Budweiser. He is staring at the Golden Dome of the Massachusetts State House, obviously lost in day dreams, when he is interrupted by his friend who tells him more or less to 'forget about it'. A Southie kid could never make it that high in government, especially if he's a crook.

When he's finishing the State Police Program, being offered a plainclothes job right out of the academy, things are only looking up. Cut to the next scene, the whole screen is black save for a iris focusing on Sullivan. When the iris opens up, to our disappointment he is not assigned to work at the old Massachusetts State House, but instead is working in the Brutalist Boston City Hall.

Now, the irony of its use comes in. The building that was designed described by its own architects as, "an imagery which conveys the openness and dignity of civic governance," becomes the center of deception and secrecy. It is in this building that the police HQ is located. It is from this building that the special unit assigns Leo to go undercover, where two sides of the police force battle each other for release of the names of undercover officers and its where Sullivan starts his false campaign to find the mafia rat, himself.

Its notable that the entire inside of the City Hall was actually constructed on a soundstage in Brooklyn. The set of the HQ, while still in the Brutalist style, does not follow the plan directly. The HQ is divided into two areas, the above offices of Queenan, the man in charge of the undercover operations, is elevated above the lower open plan offices of the rest of the department and separated by storefront glass. While this does play into the expansive cinematography of the film, it also keeps with the movies theme that we can see everything, but also not know anything. It uses more direct lighting than the actual building in order to set up contrasting shades of dark and light.

Throughout all of this, Sullivan still pursues his dreams of the State House. He buys an apartment with a balcony view of the dome. He attends law school in hopes that one day he might be able to break free. At the end of the movie, with everyone who knows who he is either dead, or missing, it seems that he might be able to move on with his life and pursue the State House, until he's shot dead, staring at the Dome. The final shot of the movie ends with a view of the state house, as seen from Sullivan's balcony, as a rat runs across the shot.

*Text taken directly from Wikipedia.

25 Movie Locations

as seen from Google Streetview. Special thanks to Nathan Ditum and Total Film.
Poster to the right really has nothing to do with any of the locations, but it does contain the number 25, and as my month long hiatus post got its due with 30 days, i figured why not. CLICK HERE

One Month Hiatus

I apologize for not posting anything in the last month, but my computer died.
Now I'm back on track. However, with the summer approaching fast, I may spend more time outdoors than indoors watching movies....

Frank Ghery in 'The Simpsons'

Last night's episode of The Simpson's had Bart entering a model building contest with his model of the Westminster Abbey. He was pitted against Milhouse and Martin, who built OMA's CCTV Tower in Beijing, and Oscar Neimeyer's Brazilian Congress. I've been to one of these buildings, and I'll give you a hint *it hasn't caught on fire yet. I was really hoping that Milhouse's CCTV Model was going to catch fire as Super Intendant Chalmers walked by it, as in a reference to the MP Sketch as seen below.



In any case, this sighting of famous contemporary building reminded me that this isn't the first time that The Simpsons have lampooned modern architecture. In April of 2005 Frank Gehry stared as himself. This show made fun of the 'Bilbao Effect' with Marge trying to get Springfield on the map by constructing a new concert hall designed by the Canadian himself. I could right alot about this, but instead, I'm going to direct you to the posts that have already been written by A Daily Dose of Architecture, Veritas et Venustas, Architecture Enlightens Life, Mirage Studio 7, and DavidTeoh.com.

John Cleese in 'Monty Python'

John Cleese as Mr. Wiggin
of Ironside & Malone
Eric Idle as Mr. Leavy
of Wymus & Dibble






In this sketch, two architects makes very different pitches to real estate developers. One is absurd, and the other is just silly. Is it safe to say that sometimes we take ourselves to seriously? Now, I'm not advocating that we start designing buildings that look like giant picnic baskets or binoculars, but whats it hurt to step back and have a good laugh...

Art Vandelay in 'Seinfeld'

Jason Alexander as George Costanza as Art Vandelay







Importer, Exporter, Architect
Art Vandelay might be as much as a cultural phenomonom as the Bilbao Guggenheim. His presence has spawned numerous t-shirts as seen above, and with the words 'I'm an architect' and 'the new addition to the Guggenheim' printed on them. At Moe's Southwest Grill, a national burrito chain, a special burrito is named 'the Art Vandalay'. There is even a firm in the Netherlands thats named Import/Export Architecture.