The facade of Londons famous Battersea Power station was used to represent Victory Mansions in the film version of 1984. The combination of neo-classical and power making it an obvious choice.

When Dickens visited America, he said there were two things worth seeing, this building and Niagara Falls.<p /><p />Just as modernist architecture was built with the best intentions to sweep people up from the slums into pristine but ultimately alienating boxes, the ESP was built under the auspices of Quaker reformist ideas. <p /><p />It was built to scoop prisoners out of squalid places of violent interaction with other prisoners, to clean monastic solitary confinement with a bible, where no interaction with human beings would return people to a pure state.<p />Instead it turned people insane. <p /><p />In 12 Monkeys the main protagonist is locked up here and deemed crazy, which he begins to be, unable to communicate an unbelievable story to others.

Frank Lloyd Wrights decorative modern LA house with its distinctive Bismuth crystal like blocks is the background for the interior of Decker's apartment. Elsewhere in the film famous modern buildings such as Chicago's Hancock Tower are the influence for sets.<p /><p />The Ennis house is both modern and timeless, inventing a genuinely new decorative style - and its in LA, making it highly appropriate for Blade Runner which mixed old and new to create a vision of the future which wouldnt date quite as obviously as yesterdays interpretation of modern.

Frank Lloyd Wrights Marin Civic Center was the headquarters for the Gattaca corporation in Gattaca and also featured in George Lucas' THX-1138.<p /><p />In THX-1138, this was merely a conveniently local piece of architecture that looked like a contemporary vision of the future, rather like the Texas modernism in Logans Run.<p /><p />In Gattaca, this building fitted the overall consciously retro-futuristic style.

The house in Woody Allen's Sleeper is the Sculptured House in Colorado, by Charles Deaton, which was recently listed for sale.<p /><p />The sheer absurdity of the massive organic concrete structure, although magnificent, is at the same time an overblown caricature, perfect for the parody of modernism in Woody Allen's science fiction comedy.

This Mayan site in Guatemala was the setting for the rebel base on Yavin in the original Star Wars.<p /><p />So little is known about the Mayans that their architecture makes a suitable substitute for something genuinely other worldly.

The Diva scene was shot in the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London.<p /><p />The Fifth Element, with its Gaultier clothing and cartoon like sets, mixed high camp with sci-fi, and there is nothing quite as high camp as the wedding cake like interior of an Opera House.

Herzog and de Meuron's Tate Modern art gallery in a renovated power station serves as the Ministry of Arts in Children of Men. It is a giant personal apartment filled with the most valuable art, ultimately rendered worthless, in a world with no future.<p /><p />The ministry is owned in its entirety by Theo's cousin Nigel who is the very epitome of a prosperous Blairite, just as the building itself is a monument to Londons recent wealth. You can't help but feel that the choice of this building is deliberate and satirical.

Both the BMW HQ and the Munich Olympic Village were used as locations for Rollerball, however the Olympic Stadium, engineered by Frei Otto might have been a better stand in for modernity.

A variety of star modern architects like Steven Holl and Aldo Rossi worked on the model town of Seaside in Florida. Like the name, the result is bland and derivative, the perfect example of how aiming for just &quot;nice&quot; is not always a good thing. <p /><p />The very mediocrity of Seaside made it the perfect setting for the flawed utopia of the Truman show.

Most of a Clockwork Orange is set in concrete late 60s British architecture, such as Brunel University, which formed part of the brutalist movement, highly appropriate for a film about mechanized brutality.<p /><p />Rich people in the film inhabit more traditional buildings, except for this one example of more sensitive modernism. The interior of the writers house in Clockwork Orange is a particularly obscure but notable piece of architecture, being designed by both Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, when they were together in Team 4.

The modernist Corbusier inspired Alton estate (Corbusier never built anything in England) was used as the setting for Fahrenheit 451<p /><p />These were hailed as great buildings, at the time, raised on piloti and allowing an expensive West London landscape to flow underneath them. The film makers seem to have known better, in hindsight.<p /><p /><p />

This classic American house was used for the interior of Dr. Emmett's house in Back to the Future and for the house of the grandfather of the character played by Bruce Willis in Armageddon.<p /><p />Interestingly, although Greene and Greene were groundbreaking architects, their stye has become so emblematic of America that this house was used in these films not to represent a mildly quirky take on the future or modern, but the comfort of the present and of home.

The irony of the hugely expensive taxpayer paid center in Washington, named after the president who championed small government, Ronald Reagan, is matched only by its striking resemblance to 1930's, femininity stripped, neo-classicism produced by the Nazis.<p /><p />The Orwellian police agency in Minority Report, used this building as its appropriate setting.