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Chairs in Space: When Design History Inspires Science Fiction

Films like Poor Things and Blade Runner rely on design icons and architectural references to imagine different realities.

Science fiction is everywhere. What once were visions solely to be found in mass-market paperbacks now populate our everyday. After all, the opening scene in the 2023 blockbuster Barbie wouldn’t have been instantly recognizable to so many without the widespread cultural impact of 2001: A Space Odyssey. From students crafting spaces in the metaverse to world-renowned firm Zaha Hadid Architects’ Science Fiction Museum in Chengdu, China, it’s clear that designers have always been, and will continue to be, fascinated by visions of the future. 

“Science fiction describes a way of thinking and perceiving, a toolbox of methods for conceptualizing, intervening in, and living through rapid and widespread socio-technical change,” explains media and cultural studies scholar Sherryl Vint in her book Science Fiction (MIT Press, 2021). “The struggle to shape the future is not only material: it is equally affective and imaginative.” It should come as no surprise that science fiction, with its ability to envision the future and explore alternative realities, has significantly influenced architectural thinking and practice. But speculative films and television often come full circle, drawing upon real avant-garde architecture and arcane historical references to depict buildings and places of another time and reality. 

Zaha Hadid Architects completed the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum in Chengdu, China in late 2023. The city is a leader in Chinese science fiction writing and showcases the genre’s evolution and popularity across the world. COURTESY LAN DONGJIE/ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS
Poor Things’ sets were built in Budapest and constructed on vast soundstages. The Lisbon set in particular was a marvelous feat for production design, featuring full-scale steel-frame buildings, cobblestone streets, and a 60-foot-high painted backdrop. POOR THINGS. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

INTERIOR WORLDS: FUTURE SCENARIOS IN PAST SPACES

Take Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film Poor Things, for example. Within its sets, the creative team collaged together cities and interior worlds that take viewers on a tour of the decorative arts in fin de siècle Europe as seen through a steampunk lens. The retro-futuristic, Frankensteinian film is gorgeously grotesque, and the creative time drew from sources ranging from the eclectic decor of John Soane to the visceral paintings of Egon Schiele. The baroque interiors of the film’s brothel evoke Claude Nicolas Ledoux’s phallic fantasies for his French neoclassical pleasure palaces combined with Antoni Gaudí’s Modernisme and the Secessionists’ sinuous decoration. The designers also cite architect Ricardo Bofill’s Postmodern megastructure Espaces d’Abraxas as a point of inspiration. The designers’ interest in Bofill may not be the most obvious visual reference, but its inclusion points to one of dystopian fiction’s most beloved motifs: the megastructure. 

In movies such as Blade Runner, the megastructure takes the form of an evil, monumental megacorporation that holds power over the dystopian Los Angeles society. It can also take the form of artificial planets, fortresses, domed cities, or spaceships. Take the self-sufficient domed city found in Logan’s Run (1976) for example. Because of overpopulation and environmental destruction, the film’s residents live in a hedonistic domed city complete with high-speed trains zipping around in translucent tubes, metallic interiors finished with a mirrored, neon-lit room called the Love Shop, and colorful gemstone implants in their palms that indicate age (because here no one is allowed to live past 30, and the “runners” who try to escape their fate of dying in a public ritual face a different set of consequences). 

The Tyrell Corporation Towers from Ridley Scott’s 1983 Blade Runner is a prime example of the dystopian Modernist megastructure. Historian and theorist Aaron Betsky describes the megastructure as: “symbols of a hopeful modernity in which technology would solve all our problems.” However, “Such dreams never lasted. Instead, the ultimate megastructure became the prison-like environment depicted in science fiction films.”

While it may appear hokey by today’s standards, the Logan’s Run interior world was not only a marvelous feat of 1960s-era production design, model-making, and special effects but a direct reflection of the rise of American mega-malls and the massive interior spaces that architects were able to achieve through glass-and-steel structures. The exterior shots of the domed city were achieved through intricate small-scale miniatures. Many of the “interiors” were largely filmed at Dallas’s Market Center, a 4.8-million-square-foot complex consisting of six ultramodern structures that form the largest single wholesale merchandise mart in the world as well as Philip Johnson’s 1974 Fort Worth Water Gardens. 

According to the science fiction blogger and “nostalgia curator” David Weiner, Logan’s Run star Michael York once said in an interview: “It’s identifiable. It prefigured many things, like the malling of America, these great, giant indoor spaces that were soon anywhere, and plastic surgery on demand. There was a certain prophetic truth to what it was positing about the future.”

In Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film Poor Things, production designers James Price and Shona Heath created intricately designed sets from a variety of influences—from John Soane to Egon Schiele.
Poor Things’ critics have referred to the movie’s aesthetic as “Antoni Gaudí on acid” and even, “Gaudí on DALL-E.” We see it, and we’re here for it.

TASK CHAIRS IN SPACE: THE OBJECTS OF SCIENCE FICTION

Midcentury Modernism has undoubtedly shaped our present-day view of the future. From Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center and Tulip furniture to Googie coffee shops and Oscar Niemeyer’s master plan for the city of Brasília, the sleek interfaces, sterile surfaces, and ergonomic modular design of space-age furniture and interiors demonstrate the late 20th century’s fascination with technologically advanced and user-efficient design. 

Nothing illustrates this better than the celestial sets of films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and series such as Star Trek: The Original Series and The Next Generation. In 2001’s Hilton Hotel scene, design-savvy viewers might recognize the array of bright red Djinn Chairs by Olivier Mourgue, designed in 1965. As for the Trekkies, Saarinen’s Tulip Chairs may come to mind as “the Star Trek Chair”; however, set designers actually employed a cheaper knockoff version of the chair designed by Maurice Burke owing to a low budget. 

HILTON HOTEL SCENE, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, 1968

“I think one of the main things that sets Star Trek apart from other science fiction is how aspirational it is,” says devoted Trekkie and design enthusiast Eno Farley. In March 2020, Farley turned a COVID-19 pandemic hobby into an Instagram account that posts all the design objects he has identified in the Star Trek enterprise. His Instagram account @startrekdesign has over 13,000 followers, and he has since launched a web page to keep an even more thorough catalog complete with designer information, episode details, etc. Farley has identified more than 300 objects, including tables, lamps, glasses, and over 130 chairs from The Original Series and beyond. 

“The genre is saturated with futures or alien worlds where the earth reaps the inevitable consequences of unchecked capitalism, technological hubris, investment in surveillance and militarization, and environmental devastation. Star Trek, by comparison, offers, ‘What if we made the right choices now?’ and shows us a future where Earth has already solved the climate crisis, ended capitalism and scarcity, moved beyond racism and sexism, and helped found an interplanetary democracy of hundreds of alien species.” 

So what does that mean for design? For Farley, “Well, the inclusion of designer furniture on Starfleet ships and Federation planets makes sense—nice things are available to all in a post-scarcity society.” He points to French designer Pierre Paulin’s Ribbon Chair (1966), which has been featured not only in Star Trek: The Original Series but also in the sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 (1975–77) and the film Blade Runner: 2049 (2017). “Paulin chairs are always used to denote luxury,” Farley notes. “The Ribbon Chair first appears in the Original Series episode ‘The Cloud Minders,’ in the cloud city of Stratos. On Stratos the Ribbon chair becomes a symbol of unearned privilege and highlights the hypocrisy of a ‘progressive’ society maintained through the exploitation of a dispossessed underclass.” However, he adds, “the chairs are also used extensively in The Next Generation, but no longer represent exclusivity, but the comfort and luxury accessible to all Federation citizens. To use an internet cliché, it’s ‘Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism.’”

Ribbon Chair by Pierre Paulin. Featured in Star Trek, Blade Runner 2049, and Space: 1999 (Artifort)
Djinn Chair by Olivier Mourgue (1965), seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey

This past May, Vitra put on an entire show about the relationship between science fiction and design, highlighting its relevance today by placing iconic retro-futuristic furniture in conversation with design objects that have been conceived exclusively for virtual environments. Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse showcases over 100 objects from the Vitra Design Museum’s collection, from Joe Colombo’s Sella Chair to NFT designs by Andrés Reisinger. 

Studying the relationship between architecture, design, and science fiction shows us that sci-fi isn’t just a genre, it’s a practice—a tool for rethinking our surroundings, from how we live with artificial intelligence to how we reflect on the catastrophic implications of climate change. Just as the dominant narrative of science fiction is to show us what it means to be human, the built environments and objects found within these imaginative worlds can help us speculate on new forms of social structures and new ways of being. 

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