Mayhem and the City: How Architecture Powers Lady Gaga’s Stardom

IN 2008, LADY GAGA emerged as a counter argument to mainstream popular culture and the video of her first hit “Just Dance” was emblematic of her message: Lady Gaga arrives at a suburban, modernist house in a white limousine from the 1980s and wakes up the attendants of last night’s party who have passed out in a house with interiors from the 1970s. Her message was simple—“Just Dance”—but she built her stardom upon a multi-layered argument against the mainstream of the late 2000s delivered via quality music and well-choreographed dance along with provocative lyrics, bold fashion choices, and hard-to-miss references to film and contemporary art. Cultural institutions and commentators have tried to make sense of how anyone could be in love with Judas, what the meat dress meant, or what her collaboration with Jeff Koons said about pop culture’s involvement in high art (and vice versa). However, although less attention has been paid to architecture and design details in her music videos and stage performances, these elements have also bolstered her counter-culture argument. On the eve of Mayhem, her seventh solo album, it may be a good idea to look closer at Gaga’s use of architecture and design, not only to make sense of one of the biggest pop stars in the world, but also to appreciate the integrity of architecture and interiors to popular culture. 

Architecture and Design in Lady Gaga’s Visual World

Most of Lady Gaga’s videos use architecture as a part of their storytelling. For example, the video of “Poker Face” takes place at a villa where, as we understand from the product placement, professionals convene and play, well, poker. Or when she is singing about the “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” kids that she hung out with before getting famous, she lays on money on a table in a mansion where the library has leather-bound books and the fireplace is laden with wood carvings. Direct and simple visual messaging, nothing elaborate enough to necessitate an opinion piece in METROPOLIS.  

Lady Gaga’s visual world gets a little bit more complicated with the next three megahits that carried her to real stardom. Each video became an instant classic with interrelated references to film, fashion, and architecture and design. The video of “Paparazzi,” filmed in the Villa de Leon in Malibu (designed by architect Kenneth A. MacDonald Jr. in 1926) and Chateau d’Or in Bel Air, tells a story of betrayal with visual cues from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The “Bad Romance” video marries a futuristic space travel aesthetic, as imagined in sci-fi films, with lavish period interior details such as elaborately carved wooden armchairs and taxidermy deer heads mounted on the wall. In “Telephone”, Beyoncé picks Gaga up from prison in Pussy Wagon (from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies) and they go on a crime rampage at an all-American diner. In the first instance, these videos may look like a patchwork of references, designed for grabbing audiences’ attention. However, popular culture products make references to well-known touchpoints in order to build a bridge between the past and the present. Gaga uses architecture and design elements in the same way, deploying their visual components to build bridges between fantasy and real life.

New York City in Lady Gaga’s artistry

In all three videos, there is one real-life design detail that resurfaces over and over: casement windows, or “NYC Artist’s Loft Windows,” as I call them, are large gridded industrial-style windows with iron details and perfect little rectangular panes. These windows have shown up as panels, windows, backgrounds, or even floors in her most famous videos. They can be seen in the most incongruous settings, such as in her latest “Abracadabra”—despite the fact that it takes place in brutalist interiors—as well as in the stage design of her tours (The Monster Ball) and live performances (SuperBowl). I consider the artist’s loft window both a true testament to Gaga’s attention to detail, and a way that she pledges her loyalty to her NYC roots over and over again in her visuals.  

As the “Born This Way” singer’s unapologetic self flourishes in the city, her counterargument to mainstream culture is shaped by NYC. She goes back to her Lower East Side studio apartment for the “Marry the Night” video while NYC exteriors and streets are the backdrop for the “Edge of Glory” video. City elements such as neon signs or subway cars were also a part of “The Monster Ball Tour” stage design. 

She champions urban life inversely, too. When Gaga is outside the city in her videos, nothing great happens: In “Yoü and I” she is a mermaid inside a tub at an Americana barn, in “Perfect Illusion” she is left unconscious in the desert, in “Disease” the walls of suburbia close in on her while she is being chased by monsters and there is no one around to help. Gaga’s counterculture argument is certainly connected to the urban-rural divide, and she demonstrates it while she sings praises to the city she grew up in. After all, “New York City is not just a tan that you’ll never lose,” as she sings in “Marry the Night.”