Concrete Futures: Science Fiction Cinema and Modernist Architecture at the Dawn of Postmodernity

Since its inception in the Nineteenth Century, science fiction---particularly science fiction cinema---has been regarded a significant interlocutor with the field of architecture for the importance it places upon the process of "world building." Particularly during the first several decades of the twentieth century, science fiction cinema drew on and promoted the utopian designs of architects like Le Corbusier in order to imagine futuristic urban environments in which conflict and poverty had been solved in large part through the rationalization of space. However, spatially-concerned media studies scholarship has typically ignored science fiction cinema production between this earlier moment and the 1982 release of Blade Runner, a film universally hailed as the chief exemplar of an increasingly disorganized postmodern space and society. The impact of such scholarship has stretched outside the bounds of the field of media studies, as Blade Runner's architectural imagination has been used repeatedly to underline a narrative of rupture from a modern historical regime to a postmodern one.;This dissertation seeks to interrogate the sharpness of such a break through its examination of a historically overlooked cycle of science fiction films from the 1970s that, due to both industrial factors within Hollywood and the increasingly ubiquitous presence of modernist architecture throughout the Western world, were shot on location in existing architecture in order to produce a dystopian sense of space that anticipates that found in Blade Runner. I examine six such films in this project: Colossus: The Forbin Project (Joseph Sargent, 1970), A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971), Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973), Logan's Run (Michael Anderson, 1976), and Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979). Over the course of the decade charted in this dissertation, these producers of these films utilized location shooting to create critical works of cinematic architecture that alternately critiqued the celebratory monumentality of sculptural concrete modernist buildings, explored the detritus of modernism's unfinished large-scale projects, and warned of the unsustainable nature of emergent forms of consumption-oriented postindustrial urban architectures. This project blends analysis of film texts with archival research into both the records of architects and planners who designed the shooting locations for these films and the papers of science fiction cinema directors and producers. This methodological approach both historically grounds my understanding of the particular ideologies underlying midcentury modernist architecture and substantiates the my claim that the diegetic spaces of location-shot science fiction films constitute a kind of critical architectural practice produced through the choices made by their filmmakers when scouting, selecting, and filming these locations. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and critical geographers like Doreen Massey and Edward Soja, I contend that these films, in concert with the everyday use and utopian planning and promotion of their shooting locations, produce a transitional kind of space that has heretofore remained relatively unexamined in accounts of a postmodern "turn."...