Architecture in Pop Culture

How Films & TV Shape Our Design Thinking

f.y.i.arch

Sep 01, 2025

Edition #33

Hello Musies,
When was the last time you paused a movie or TV show—not for the dialogue, but for the space in the background?

We’ve all done it.
The office in Suits. The unsettling home in Parasite. The concrete vaults of John Wick. The pink dreamscapes of Barbie. Even the comforting chaos of Friends.

Pop culture isn’t just entertainment—it trains how society imagines space. Clients, students, and even non-designers now come with screenshots, Pinterest boards, or movie stills as their “brief.” And whether we like it or not, this changes how we draw, present, and even justify design choices.

This edition explores what pop culture spaces really teach us about design practice—and why we can’t afford to ignore them.

🏢 Suits — The Glass Office Dream

Harvey Specter’s law firm made corporate offices aspirational for an entire generation. Endless glass partitions, skyline views, bold corner offices—symbols of power and transparency.

In reality, few firms can afford that kind of space. But the visual language of Suits reset expectations: clients began to ask for “that office look,” where openness meant ambition.

Lesson for designers: When a client references a show, they’re rarely asking for the literal set—they’re asking for the feeling. Here, it’s authority, openness, and control. Our job is to translate that into buildable details: proportions, partitions, and lighting strategies that echo confidence.

🎬 Parasite — Sectional Design as Social Commentary

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is architectural storytelling at its sharpest. The Park family lives in an expansive house, sitting above ground, open to daylight and lawns. The Kim family lives in a semi-basement, half-sunk, with glimpses of light but never full exposure.

Levels, thresholds, and light quality are not decorative—they are metaphors for class. Architecture becomes a tool to show hierarchy and inequality without a single line of dialogue.

Lesson for designers: Clients often focus on finishes, but hierarchy is experienced through section. Where the stairs rise, how light is borrowed, who gets the view, who lives in shadow—these choices carry more weight than any chandelier.

🎥 John Wick — Brutalism as Mood

The Wick films turned raw concrete, colossal lobbies, and monumental vaults into silent characters. Brutalism here wasn’t nostalgia—it was permanence, intimidation, and mystery.

Notice how the architecture reinforces the narrative: Wick moves through spaces that are as unforgiving as the world he inhabits. The scale dwarfs him, the material feels ruthless, and every shadow deepens the tension.

Lesson for designers: Materials are never neutral. Concrete is not just durable—it signals permanence. Glass signals transparency. Wood signals warmth. Every material palette sets the emotional temperature of space.

🎀 Barbie — Color as Spatial Identity

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was a global pink explosion, but the architecture behind it was more than pastel play. Every wall, stair, and prop was consistent in grammar. The result: a world so coherent that it became immersive.

The design worked because it refused dilution. No grey walls “to balance it out,” no inconsistent details. The courage of visual coherence made the world believable—even in its surrealism.

Lesson for designers: Identity doesn’t come from scale alone. It comes from consistency. A boutique, café, or co-living space feels “Instagrammable” only when the palette, rhythm, and detail align to tell one story.

🏠 Friends — Comfort in Imperfection

Monica’s apartment is everyone’s dream home, despite being wildly unrealistic in New York rent terms. Why? Because it felt lived-in.

The central kitchen table, mismatched chairs, slightly cluttered shelves—it wasn’t a curated catalog, it was a home with history. That sense of imperfection made it universal. Viewers saw themselves there, not as guests, but as residents.

Lesson for designers: In our obsession with clean visuals, we sometimes over-curate. Real comfort comes from traces of life—slight asymmetry, mixed textures, human messiness. Pop culture reminds us: imperfection can be design.

🎞️ Inception — The Imagination of Impossible Cities

Christopher Nolan bent streets on themselves, folded skylines, and invented staircases that defied gravity. None of it was realistic, but all of it was inspiring.

The film reminded a generation of designers that architecture is not just problem-solving—it’s imagination. Before construction documents, there must be dreams. Inception gave permission to think beyond physics, to test scale, form, and space in ways reality might later refine.

Lesson for designers: Concept design should be free enough to explore the impossible. The execution can be rational, but imagination must first be unbound.

🎬 India on the Global Screen: When Architecture Becomes a Character

Indian architecture has played starring roles in global films—not just as exotic backdrops, but as narrative devices carrying weight and meaning.

🏰 The Dark Knight Rises (2012) — Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur

Nolan used Mehrangarh Fort for the prison sequences. The massive stone walls and vertical climb turned the fort into a metaphor for struggle and rebirth.

Lesson: Scale and permanence are emotional tools. Heritage sites have a gravitas no set can replicate.

🌸 The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) — Ravla Khempur Haveli, Jaipur

A haveli became the Marigold Hotel, showing the world warmth, chaos, and community through Indian heritage. Suddenly, the haveli typology was seen not just as relic, but as potential for adaptive reuse.

Lesson: Adaptive reuse can shift perception—heritage can be lived, not just preserved.

🎶 Slumdog Millionaire (2008) — Mumbai’s Urban Density

Boyle’s Oscar-winner showcased Mumbai’s informal settlements not as background noise, but as living organisms—chaotic, improvised, alive. For global audiences, this became the defining image of Mumbai.

Lesson: Urban fabric tells stories beyond monuments. Density, improvisation, and human scale can be as cinematic as any palace.

👑 Eat Pray Love (2010) — Pataudi Palace

Rebranded as an “ashram,” this colonial-era palace projected serenity and spiritual grandeur. For global audiences, it reinforced a cinematic India—peaceful, palatial, otherworldly.

Lesson: Architecture in cinema often reshapes identity. It can dignify, stereotype, or mythologize—depending on how it’s framed.

👉 I’ve explored this further in my video on Indian locations in global cinema: Watch here.

Final Thought

Pop culture is not trivial—it’s the collective imagination of space. It defines what luxury looks like (Suits), what inequality feels like (Parasite), what ruthlessness is (John Wick), what comfort means (Friends), what identity is (Barbie), and what imagination could be (Inception).

Clients don’t always arrive with design vocabulary. They arrive with feelings borrowed from cinema, TV, or games. Our role is to decode those references—not dismiss them. Was it the light? The section? The color story? The material honesty?

That’s how pop culture meets practice. And that’s how we design spaces that resonate—not just as structures, but as lived emotions.

Until next week,
Keep Musing,

Ar. Sagar Saoji
Founder - f.y.i.arch
Architect turned Content Creator

Find me here: Instagram | Linkedin | Website

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