House in the Movie: Tropical Modernism on Screen

# The House in the Movie: Famous Tropical Modernist Houses on Film — An Ongoing Series *By TropMod Editorial* --- Some houses are content to shelter their inhabitants. Others demand a larger canvas, and none more so than the tropical modernist house. A building defined by transparency, by the dissolution of the boundary between interior and landscape, by the confidence to stand half-open to the world — such a building was never going to remain merely domestic. It was always going to end up on screen. The relationship between modernist architecture and cinema is one of the most productive in twentieth-century culture. Directors understood, almost from the moment the technology permitted it, that a certain kind of house could do what a set could not. It could supply atmosphere as a fact rather than a fabrication. It could communicate wealth, isolation, sophistication, or menace before a single line of dialogue was spoken. It could function as character — and, in the best cases, as argument. This series — 'The House in the Movie' — will trace the cinematic career of the tropical modernist house across continents and decades. It is not a list of locations. It is an inquiry into what happens when architecture designed for living meets a medium designed for looking, and what that collision reveals about both. For the launch instalment, we profile eight houses that starred in films, examining in each case what the architecture contributed to the director's vision and what the director's vision reveals about the architecture. --- ## 1. Elrod House — Diamonds Are Forever (1971) **Architect:** John Lautner **Year:** 1968 **Location:** Palm Springs, California The Elrod House did not merely appear in *Diamonds Are Forever*. It supplied the film with its most coherent architectural argument. In Guy Hamilton's 1971 Bond instalment — Sean Connery's return to the role after the George Lazenby interlude — the house serves as the Palm Springs residence of reclusive billionaire Willard Whyte, a Howard Hughes analogue whose empire has been hijacked by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The choice of Lautner's masterpiece for this role was not incidental. It was casting. The house is carved into a rocky promontory in the Southridge enclave, its primary living space sheltered beneath a circular concrete dome sixty feet in diameter. Curved glass openings follow the dome's radial geometry, meeting at the apex in a star-shaped skylight. The living space opens onto a cantilevered terrace and an infinity-edge pool, beyond which the Coachella Valley floor drops away to the distant San Jacinto Mountains. When Bond arrives — stepping through those monumental glass doors into a room in which a boulder protrudes through the floor, the desert visible in every direction — the architecture does the work that exposition cannot. It tells us, with unanswerable authority, that we have entered a world in which money has been deployed not for comfort but for control. The house is not decorated. It is commanded. The Elrod House's most famous cinematic moment is not, strictly speaking, architectural. It involves two female assassins, Bambi and Thumper, attempting to drown Bond in the swimming pool. But the scene gains its charge from the house. The curved glass wall, the dome's implacable geometry, the way the interior extends without interruption into the pool terrace — all of it contributes to a sense that the architecture is complicit in whatever happens within it. The house is too beautiful to be innocent. Lautner, who trained under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, understood something that few architects have grasped with equal clarity: that a building in a dramatic landscape must compete with that landscape or be consumed by it. The Elrod House competes. It imposes geometry on geology, precision on the raw desert rock. It is a building that refuses to apologise for its own extravagance. And in doing so, it became the template for every cinematic villain's lair that would follow — not because it was villainous, but because it demonstrated that modernism's open plan, its glass walls, its erasure of the boundary between inside and out, could be read as vulnerability or as power, depending on who was doing the reading. The house remains privately owned and is occasionally available for select events. It has not been significantly altered from Lautner's original design, a preservation decision that confirms what the Bond people understood in 1971: you do not improve upon a building that was already cinema before a camera ever entered it. --- ## 2. Sheats-Goldstein Residence — The Big Lebowski (1998) **Architect:** John Lautner **Year:** 1963 (with subsequent additions) **Location:** Beverly Hills, California When Joel and Ethan Coen needed a house for Jackie Treehorn — the pornographer, philanthropist, and Malibu nihilist who drugged Jeff Bridges's Dude in *The Big Lebowski* — they chose the Sheats-Goldstein Residence. The choice was so perfect that it is difficult to imagine the character inhabiting any other space. Treehorn, played with feline insinuation by Ben Gazzara, is a man whose immense wealth coexists with a complete absence of moral friction. He needs a house that communicates sophistication without signalling any particular ethical commitment. Lautner's building — a concrete-and-glass composition built into a sandstone shelf overlooking Los Angeles — supplies exactly that. The house's architecture is practically a monograph on the theme of controlled transparency. The living space is a vast glass-walled room beneath a coffered concrete ceiling punctuated by what appear to be hundreds of small drinking glasses set into the concrete, filtering daylight into a constellation of points. The swimming pool extends from the interior to the exterior beneath a glass panel, creating the illusion that one could swim directly from the living room into the Los Angeles basin. The famous 'James Bond' leather chair — a floor-mounted lounger designed by Lautner himself — sits in the corner like an architectural punchline, waiting for the villain to recline. In the film, Treehorn receives the Dude in this room, offering him a drink and declining, with the practised smoothness of a man who has ruined many people, to involve himself in the Dude's problems. The scene's tension derives from the contrast between the architecture's openness — every wall is glass, every surface reflects light — and Treehorn's opacity. The house tells us everything about his taste and nothing about his intentions. It is a machine for appearing transparent while remaining completely unknowable. The Sheats-Goldstein Residence has appeared elsewhere — in *Charlie's Angels*, in countless music videos, in *Architectural Digest* spreads that treat it less as a house than as an aspirational condition — but its Lebowski cameo remains definitive. It demonstrated that a modernist house could be more than a location. It could be a personality test. The way a character inhabits such a space reveals them. Treehorn moves through it with the confidence of ownership. The Dude moves through it like a man who has wandered into a museum after closing time. The architecture judges them both. --- ## 3. Stahl House (Case Study House No. 22) — Multiple **Architect:** Pierre Koenig **Year:** 1960 **Location:** Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, California The Stahl House occupies a position in the architectural imagination that borders on the mythological. Built as part of Arts & Architecture magazine's Case Study House programme — which sought to demonstrate the possibilities of affordable, industrially produced modern housing — Pierre Koenig's design for C.H. 'Buck' Stahl and his family transcended its programme to become one of the most recognisable houses ever built. Its definitive image, Julius Shulman's 1960 photograph of two women seated in a glass-walled living room with the illuminated grid of Los Angeles stretching to the horizon beneath them, has been called the most famous architectural photograph ever taken. The house was cinematic before any film crew arrived. Its screen career has been extensive and varied. It appeared in *Smog* (1962), an early Italian film that introduced the American modernist house to European audiences. It served as the Los Angeles residence of a jazz musician in *Why Do Fools Fall in Love* (1998). It provided the earthly home of Tim Allen's television-star-turned-intergalactic-hero in *Galaxy Quest* (1999), a casting choice that acknowledged the house's science-fiction quality — its glass-walled transparency, its apparent defiance of gravity, its suggestion that the twentieth century's future had arrived and looked exactly like this. It has been used in countless fashion shoots, car advertisements, and music videos, to the point where the Stahl House has become less a specific building than a visual shorthand for mid-century Californian aspiration. What makes the Stahl House so cinematic is not merely its appearance but its structural relationship to the city. The house is an L-shaped steel-framed pavilion cantilevered over a precipice above Sunset Boulevard. Its glass walls offer an unobstructed panorama from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. The flat roof extends beyond the glazing to provide the minimal shade needed in Southern California's climate. The reflecting pool surrounding the house on two sides creates the illusion that the building floats above the city — an illusion that cinema's ability to control the frame amplifies to near-magical effect. Directors return to the Stahl House for the same reason photographers do: because it makes any human figure within it appear simultaneously exposed and elevated. To stand in that living room is to be presented to the city as if on a stage. The house is a viewing platform disguised as a home — which may explain why so many films have cast it as the residence of characters who have, in some sense, already won. It is not a house for striving. It is a house for surveying what you have already acquired. --- ## 4. Ennis House — Blade Runner (1982) **Architect:** Frank Lloyd Wright **Year:** 1924 **Location:** Los Feliz, Los Angeles, California The inclusion of the Ennis House in this series requires a brief justification, because it is not, in any conventional sense, tropical modernist. Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan Revival masterpiece — the last and largest of his four Los Angeles 'textile block' houses — was completed in 1924, decades before the tropical modernist movement coalesced. Its climate is Mediterranean, not tropical. Its architecture is expressionist, not rationalist. Yet the Ennis House belongs in this account because Wright's textile block system — precast concrete blocks woven together with steel reinforcement, their patterned faces creating a sculptural surface that was simultaneously structural and ornamental — influenced tropical modernism more than the movement has been willing to admit. The perforated block screens that became a signature of Fry and Drew's West African buildings, the *cobogó* breeze blocks of Brazilian modernism, the decorative concrete screens of Geoffrey Bawa's Sri Lanka — all of these descend, in part, from Wright's textile block experiments. The Ennis House is the ancestor that tropical modernism forgot to acknowledge. And then there is *Blade Runner*. Ridley Scott's 1982 masterpiece of dystopian noir used the Ennis House as the exterior of Rick Deckard's apartment — a choice that has become one of the most analysed architectural decisions in cinema history. The house's textile block facade, its Mayan-inspired relief patterns, its monumental scale and brooding presence, supplied exactly the atmosphere that Scott required: a future that had not progressed beyond the architectural imagination of the past but had instead layered new technologies over old forms. Deckard's apartment, in the film's internal logic, is a relic — a surviving fragment of a more optimistic era, now occupied by a man whose job is to hunt and kill replicants. The architecture reinforces the film's central question: what is authentic, what is manufactured, and does the difference matter? The Ennis House had appeared on screen before *Blade Runner* — in *House on Haunted Hill* (1959), among others — and it has appeared many times since. But Scott's use of it remains definitive because it was the first to understand that the house was not merely a backdrop but a philosophical proposition. Wright believed that his textile block houses demonstrated a new way of building — modular, industrial, democratic. *Blade Runner* asked what happens when that democratic promise curdles into something else. The house endures. The future it was meant to inaugurate does not. That tension is the film's deepest insight, and it is inscribed in every block of Wright's facade. --- ## 5. Villa Balbiano — House of Gucci (2021) **Architect:** Original construction late 16th century; interior design by Jacques Garcia **Location:** Ossuccio, Lake Como, Italy The Villa Balbiano is not a modernist building. It is a palazzo, built at the end of the sixteenth century for Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio, perched on the western shore of Lake Como with all the accumulated grandeur that the term implies. Its frescoed halls, its formal gardens, its boathouse and terraces descending to the water belong to an architectural tradition that predates modernism by three centuries. Yet its inclusion in this series is justified by its function in Ridley Scott's *House of Gucci* (2021), where it serves as the Italian residence of Aldo Gucci, played by Al Pacino — and by the light it casts on the relationship between architecture, fashion, and the cinematic construction of wealth. The Gucci family's actual residences were, by most accounts, considerably less operatic than the film suggests. But verisimilitude was never the point. The point was to construct a visual world in which the family's dysfunction could play out at the appropriate scale — which is to say, at the scale of a palazzo. The Villa Balbiano, with its succession of grand rooms, its views across the lake, and its atmosphere of accumulated European inheritance, supplied a kind of architectural counterweight to the family's commercial origins. The Guccis began as leather craftsmen in Florence. By the time the film catches up with them, they have acquired the trappings of an older aristocracy — the palazzo, the servants, the assumption that the world will arrange itself to their convenience. The architecture is the evidence. What connects the Villa Balbiano to the tropical modernist tradition is the way both deploy the relationship between interior and water. The villa's terraces descend to Lake Como in a carefully calibrated sequence that parallels the tropical modernist pavilion's extension toward the sea or pool. The difference is one of degree and climate, not of principle. Both traditions understand that water, architecture, and the human figure form a triangle of meaning that cinema instinctively exploits. A character framed against water becomes, in some sense, a character exposed — their pretensions, their vulnerabilities, their relationship to the natural world all rendered visible. Lady Gaga's Patrizia Reggiani, scheming her way through the villa's grand rooms, is no exception. --- ## 6. The National Art Schools — Unfinished Spaces (2011) **Architects:** Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti, Roberto Gottardi **Years:** 1961–1965 **Location:** Cubanacán, Havana, Cuba The National Art Schools of Cuba — the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte — represent one of the most extraordinary and least-known chapters in the global history of tropical modernism. Commissioned by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the euphoric aftermath of the 1959 Revolution, the schools were conceived as the architectural expression of a new Cuba: a campus of five institutions — modern dance, plastic arts, dramatic arts, music, and ballet — built on the grounds of a former country club in the Havana suburb of Cubanacán. The architects, led by Cuban modernist Ricardo Porro and joined by Italians Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti, produced buildings that had no precedent in the twentieth-century canon. The materials were radically local: terracotta brick, Catalan-vaulted ceilings, hand-laid tile. The forms were organic — the School of Modern Dance, Porro's contribution, flows across its site like a geological formation; the School of Ballet, Garatti's, rises in a series of brick domes whose geometry suggests both African vernacular building and the Catalan modernism of Gaudí. The spaces were designed for the tropical climate: deep shade, cross-ventilation, courtyards that created microclimates of their own. The architecture was, in the most literal sense possible, revolutionary. And then it was abandoned. By 1965, the political climate had shifted. The schools were denounced as bourgeois, as ideologically incompatible with the Soviet-aligned direction of the Revolution. Construction halted. The unfinished buildings were left to the jungle, and for three decades they decayed, occupied intermittently by students and artists who understood that a ruin can sometimes be more useful than a completed monument. Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray's documentary *Unfinished Spaces* (2011) brought this extraordinary chapter to international attention. The film follows the three architects — Porro and Garatti, both exiled for years, and Gottardi, who remained in Havana — as they return to the site in their old age and confront what has become of their masterwork. The documentary is not merely a record of architecture; it is an inquiry into what happens when a building's political context outruns its aesthetic ambition, and whether architecture can be rescued from history, or must always be consumed by it. The National Art Schools have since been listed on the World Monuments Watch, and restoration efforts — supported by the Getty Foundation, among others — are underway. But their cinematic significance lies elsewhere. *Unfinished Spaces* demonstrated that architecture does not need to be completed to be powerful. Sometimes the unfinished building speaks more clearly than the finished one ever could. The tropical modernist dream — of buildings that would liberate their inhabitants through light, air, and spatial generosity — was always inseparable from the political conditions that made it possible. The National Art Schools are that truth made visible, and the film is its definitive document. --- ## 7. Chemosphere (Malin House) — Body Double (1984) **Architect:** John Lautner **Year:** 1960 **Location:** Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, California If the Elrod House represents Lautner at his most geological — architecture carved into rock, competing with the desert — the Chemosphere represents him at his most aeronautical: a flying saucer perched on a single concrete column above a near-vertical hillside. The site, a steep slope off Mulholland Drive that had been rejected as unbuildable by every developer who examined it, was gifted to a young aircraft engineer named Leonard Malin by his father-in-law. Malin approached Lautner with a problem that only a certain kind of architect would recognise as an opportunity: build a house on a hillside that cannot support one. Lautner's solution was radical. He buried a reinforced concrete pedestal, twenty feet in diameter, deep in the earth. From it rose a single column, five feet wide and twenty-nine feet high. Atop the column sat an octagonal pavilion — the Chemosphere — accessible by a funicular railway. The house appeared to have landed rather than been built, and the *Encyclopaedia Britannica* eventually named it 'the most modern home built in the world'. Brian De Palma understood what Lautner had made. In *Body Double* (1984), his neo-noir thriller about voyeurism, murder, and the film industry's appetite for both, the Chemosphere serves as a temporary residence for the protagonist, Jake Scully. The choice was pointed. A house that is essentially a glass-walled observation platform, elevated above the city on a single stalk, is the architectural equivalent of a camera — a device for looking without being seen. De Palma, whose career has been a sustained inquiry into the ethics of looking, could not have found a more appropriate location. The Chemosphere has appeared elsewhere — in *Charlie's Angels*, in an episode of *The Outer Limits*, as Troy McClure's fictional mansion in *The Simpsons* — but its *Body Double* appearance remains the most revealing. It confirmed what Lautner's clients already knew: that his houses were not merely places to live but machines for seeing, frameworks that organised the gaze. To inhabit a Lautner house is to be placed in a specific relationship to the world outside — a relationship that cinema, whose own relationship to looking is endlessly self-interrogating, has found irresistible. --- ## 8. Schaffer Residence — A Single Man (2009) **Architect:** John Lautner **Year:** 1949 **Location:** Glendale, California Lautner appears four times in this opening instalment — a lopsided representation that reflects not editorial bias but a simple architectural fact: no twentieth-century architect designed houses that cinema wanted more urgently than John Lautner. The Schaffer Residence, completed in 1949 when Lautner was still establishing his independent practice after leaving Frank Lloyd Wright's office, is one of his earliest mature works. It is a modest house by Lautner's subsequent standards — a single-storey volume of redwood, glass, and stone, embedded in a hillside in Glendale. But its modesty is its power, and Tom Ford recognised this immediately. Ford's *A Single Man* (2009), adapted from Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel, follows a day in the life of George Falconer, a gay English professor living in Los Angeles in the aftermath of his partner's sudden death. The film is an exercise in controlled aesthetic intensity — every frame composed, every colour graded, every surface considered. The Schaffer Residence, which serves as George's home, is not merely a location. It is the visual expression of George's interior condition: restrained, elegant, built around a wound. The house is organised around a central living space whose glass walls open onto a densely planted garden. The redwood panels, the stone fireplace, the built-in seating — all of it speaks a language of mid-century American modernism that is simultaneously warm and melancholy. The architecture does not console George; it frames his grief, holds it at the correct distance, allows him to move through it without being consumed. The house is a container for solitude — and, by the film's end, for the possibility that solitude might not be permanent. Lautner, whose later work would grow increasingly spectacular, never built another house quite like the Schaffer Residence. Its modesty was a product of its budget and its site, not of any limitation in his imagination. But the house's modesty is what made it right for Ford's film. Not every cinematic house needs to overwhelm. Sometimes the architecture's job is simply to be present — to hold the space in which a human being confronts the question of how to continue living. --- ## The Light on the Lens: What Cinema Reveals About Modernism The eight houses profiled here belong to different architectural traditions, different decades, different climates. What unites them is their capacity to function as more than backdrop. In each case, the director has understood that the house is not merely a container for action but a participant in it — that architecture can supply meaning, atmosphere, and even moral judgment. The tropical modernist house is particularly suited to this role because its defining characteristics — transparency, the dissolution of the boundary between interior and landscape, the creation of spaces that are simultaneously shelter and exposure — map directly onto cinema's fundamental concern with looking and being looked at. A glass-walled pavilion is a stage. A house open to the landscape is a house vulnerable to the camera. The architecture that tropical modernists developed to respond to climate turns out to be architecture that responds equally to cinema. The two were made for each other. This is not a coincidence. Modernism and cinema matured together in the twentieth century, and each informed the other in ways that we are only beginning to understand. The modernist house taught directors how to use space as meaning. Directors taught architects how a building looks from the outside — not the facade, but the view from the camera position that the architect never anticipated. The result has been a cross-fertilisation that continues to produce extraordinary images, and extraordinary houses, to this day. --- *Next in this series: 'The House in the Movie' continues with profiles of Oscar Niemeyer's Casa das Canoas (as seen in Brazilian cinema), the Acapulco villas of Mexican modernism on film, and the distinctive screen career of Geoffrey Bawa's Sri Lankan houses. Also forthcoming: a special instalment on production designers who built fictional tropical modernist houses — the architecture that never existed, until it did.* *TropMod Editorial explores the intersection of tropical modernism, design, and culture.*