Building an empire: Exploring the architecture of ‘Star Wars’

In January 1973, George Lucas wrote his first treatment for “Star Wars.” Words did not come easily to the director, who always considered himself more a filmmaker than a screenwriter, but the universe in his mind was already bulging at the seams.

Having failed to secure the rights to science fiction serial “Flash Gordon,” Lucas set out to create his own galaxy, far, far away. Even then, it featured a spacefaring princess, dog fights, warrior monks, and a Manichean battle between good and evil.

But movie bosses were skeptical. “How could he realize this universe?” was the question asked by financers. The answer lay close to home.

“From the beginning, George and production illustrator Ralph McQuarrie really grounded the world of ‘Star Wars’ in an Earth-bound reality,” explains Phil Szostak, creative art manager at Lucasfilm and author of upcoming book “The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

The visual language of “Star Wars” and its sequels, prequels and spin-offs borrow symbols and landscapes from cultures and faiths around the world to carefully delineate an alien universe.

“They give you just enough mnemonic for you to go: ‘Oh, I recognize that,’” says David Reat, director of postgraduate studies in architecture at the University of Strathclyde. Providing an uncanny familiarity is “what Star Wars does better than any other film series.”

A foundation stone for this analogue is architecture. “Episodes I, II, and III were grounded in the (designs of the) ’20s and ‘30s … episodes IV, V, and VI were grounded in the heavy manufacturing of the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Lucasfilm executive creative director Doug Chiang has said. The current sequels, he adds, reflect our times.

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How do you build a "Star Wars" universe? The answer lies close to home. Lucas' galaxy far, far away might appear fantastical, but its carefully designed planets are home to myriad architectural styles sourced from here on Earth. Scroll through to discover the inspiration behind planets unknown, and how "Star Wars," in some cases, has gone on to inspire architecture in the real world.

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The royal palace of Theed, the capital of Naboo, utilizes a combination of Byzantine exteriors and Baroque/Rococo interiors, informed by the naturalistic style of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Marin County Civic Center, in California, with its blue domed roofs, partly inspired Naboo. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright's brief for the site, his final commission, was that it should complement its parkland environment.

Courtesy Jonathan Lin

Fallingwater, another Frank Lloyd Wright project in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, took this aesthetic even further.

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David Reat described Theed Palace as a "fusion between Marin, the Hagia Sophia and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul." The Hagia Sophia (pictured) was one of the Roman Empire's first Christian cathedrals, after St. John Lateran in Rome, and is among the best known Byzantine structures in the world.

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The Sultan Ahmet Mosque -- otherwise known as the "Blue Mosque" -- in Istanbul dates from the early 17th century and is a symbol of Ottoman might. Located across from the Hagia Sophia, it combines Byzantine and Islamic aesthetics. Doug Chiang's concept art for Theed's cliff-edge palace contains many of the same features, including a minaret-like tower.

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The Gungans living on Naboo were pilloried by fans, but their underwater home city of Otoh Gunga was one of the most sophisticated in the galaxy. The intricate metalwork echoes Art Nouveau, a school of architecture emphasizing natural forms.

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The Art Nouveau entrance to the Hotel Van Eetvelde, in Brussels, circa 1900, designed by Victor Horta.

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Hector Guimard's entrance to the Pasteur metro station in Paris, built in the early 20th century.

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The Palace of Fine Arts, a stone's throw from Lucasfilm's San Francisco HQ, is built in the neoclassic style with Corinthian columns, domes and water -- not unlike parts of Theed.

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Naboo seen during the funeral of Padme. The neoclassic pavilion on the left has shades of those nearby in San Francisco.

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Reat says the city planet Coruscant (Pictured in "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith") was inspired by Trantor, a planet from the "Foundation" series of sci-fi novels by Isaac Asimov, written in the 1940s.

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One of Ralph McQuarrie's original paintings of what would become Coruscant. Called Had Abbadon, in the background is the Imperial Palace, home to the Emperor. This vision of Coruscant would never come to pass by the time of the prequels. "Star Wars" lore says the Emperor re-purposed the Jedi Temple when he assumed power at the end of "Revenge of the Sith."

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When it came to conceptualizing Coruscant for the special edition version of "Return of the Jedi" in 1997 and later the prequels, George Lucas used the Empire State and the Chrysler Building in New York as two reference points. The metallic finish and curved appendages of the latter would give the capital planet its Art Deco feel.

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Much of the action on Coruscant -- if we can call it that -- takes place in the Senate. The Republic Executive Building building, a beehive of spacecraft coming and going, is topped with a dome that harks back to Oscar Niemeyer's domed senate chamber in Brasilia.

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Niemeyer's Brazilian National Congress, inaugurated in 1960, is one of many modern structures defining the capital Brasilia. The senate dome (left) may be an inspiration behind the senate in "Star Wars," but the link remains unconfirmed.

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The Senate's Grand Convocation Chamber held a galaxy's worth of politicians, laid out around a central pillar from which the chancellor mediates affairs. The design is double-edged. It appears similar to Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, an 18th century prison design providing an omniscient position for the chancellor.

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Cuba's now abandoned Presidio Modelo was a real-life example of a functioning panopticon prison, with a central, supposedly omniscient tower.

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The chamber also looks like a concentrated solar array (like this example in the Mojave Desert, California). With all eyes on you, you're at the whims of the body politic. And as Chancellor Valorum found out in "The Phantom Menace," it's easy to get burned.

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The Jedi Temple, seen in "The Phantom Menace." There's cross-pollination of religious architecture throughout: what Reat describes as a "Brutal interpretation of Aztec architecture," and minaret-like towers which "have an entasis, or a bulging," he says, "which reminds you of Southeast Asian towers."

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The Jedi Temple archives from "Attack of the Clones." Parts of the internal spaces of the temple were supposedly modeled on the Vatican, but the archives have one clear inspiration: The Long Room at Trinity College Dublin.

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The library Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin, pictured in 2007. Completed in 1732, the room is 213 feet long and contains over 200,000 books. There were stirrings in the Irish press that the college was seeking legal advice after the release of "Attack of the Clones" in 2002, but nothing came of it.

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The Death Star in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story." Not originally conceived as spherical, it took its shape after production designer John Barry added a curve to the lengthy corridors requested by Lucas.

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The second Death Star in "Return of the Jedi" was conspicuously incomplete, but its weapon was fully operational. The Imperial aesthetic, down to officer's uniforms, was heavily-indebted to Nazi Germany, all part of Lucas and McQuarrie's choice to easily signpost the galaxy's baddies.

Zaha Hadid Architects

Zaha Hadid's painting of the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hadid was inspired by the Russian avant-garde and Suprematism, creating abstract works that, like the second Death Star, broke down at their extremities.

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The fatal flaw within the second Death Star in "Return of the Jedi" was its reactor core. For a real-world likeness, seek out the photography of Reginald Van de Velde. His series capturing abandoned cooling towers, some as tall as 800 feet, are uncannily like the Death Star's vast interior.

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A still from "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" depicts a show of force from First Order troops on Starkiller Base. The visual language echoes the Nuremberg Rallies of the 1930s, when Nazi party members gathered annually in northern Bavaria. In the background, the base's weapon is fired, perhaps an allusion to the "Cathedral of Light."

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The "Cathedral of Light" was the name given to the practice of turning anti-aircraft searchlights to the sky en masse at the Zeppelin Field at Nuremberg. The visual spectacle was described as "both solemn and beautiful" by British ambassador Nevile Henderson. Pictured is one such instance in September 1937.

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Two Star Destroyers and the "Executor," Darth Vader's Super Star Destroyer, seen in "The Empire Strikes Back." The Imperial spaceships are, like the Death Star, Brutalist on close inspection, a mass of hard lines and boxy shapes. Originally conceived as a 36-inch model, the Star Destroyer silhouette would eventually show up in the real world.

Kyriakos Tsolakis Architects

A number of outlets noticed a distinctly Star Destroyer-esque shape to Kyriakos Tsolakis Architects' concept for a new astronomical center at the Troodos Observatory, in Cyprus. The company isn't shy about its inspiration: architect Nicodemos K. Tsolakis said in September: "I was a 'Star Wars' fan growing up. Of course, the client didn't know this when they hired us. They were pretty surprised with where we took it but they love the ideas."

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What if the Empire got to the ice planet Hoth first? The Kyoto International Conference Center certainly looks the picture under a blanket of snow. Designed by Sachio Otani and opened in 1966, it uses Brutalist concrete in a modern take on traditional Japanese architecture. Full of triangles and hexagons -- see Christoffer Rudquist's incredible photo series of the interiors -- the shapes also happen to mimic Imperial aesthetics almost perfectly.

Heerim Architects & Planners Co., Ltd.

The Full Moon Hotel by Heerim Architects drew instant comparisons with the Death Star when renders hit the internet in 2007. The hotel, planned for Baku, Azerbaijan, wouldn't have been out of step with the city -- it's home to a bevvy or intriguing architecture -- but to date the building sadly remains unrealized.

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Ralph McQuarrie's concept art of Cloud City, as seen in "The Empire Strikes Back." The floating metropolis was inspired by "Flash Gordon" and 1930s sci-fi/western serial "The Phantom Empire," says Reat.

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"George was actually one of the ultimate recyclers of concept art," says Szostak. This McQuarrie painting shows an early version of Alderaan, which was at one time imagined as an Imperial City. Another unused McQuarrie Imperial City looked a lot like Cloud City, and later on the two would be combined.

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When Cloud City received a revamp in 1997 with the release of the special editions, the architecture drew close resemblance to McQuarrie's early Alderaan concepts.

Courtesy SACD/NASA

Similar to Cloud City, in 2014 NASA proposed that "HAVOC" (High Altitude Venus Operational Concept), a floating settlement above the toxic, highly pressurized surface of Venus, might be one way to successfully explore our nearest solar neighbor.

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Stone clochans, as seen in "The Force Awakens." The 6th century structures on Skellig Michael, an outcrop off southwest Ireland, were once a Christian monastery, but in the "Star Wars" universe double as the site of the first Jedi temple.

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One of Ralph McQuarrie's early paintings of Mos Eisley, Tatooine. The city, "a hive of scum and villainy," was imagined to be constructed of mud, rammed earth and plaster in the North African vernacular.

Damien Slattery

The films famously shot scenes for Tatooine in Tunisia, utilizing grain storage containers called ghorfas and turning the Sisi el Driss Hotel in Matmata into Luke's subterranean home. Pictured is the entrance to Luke's homestead, which fans restored in 2012.

Luca Curci Architects

Tatooine, with its desert climate, relied on moisture farmers for water. The problems surrounding arid climates is a crucial design consideration for architects operating in parts of the Middle East. In 2015, Luca Curci Architects presented "Desert Cities," a proposal for sustainable living in the UAE's open desert, utilizing natural building materials and water recycling.

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The sandcrawler, a tracked vehicle from Tatooine, featured in the first "Star Wars" film. Not a building per se, it has an unlikely architectural legacy ...

Aedas

Architecture firm Aedas took the sandcrawler silhouette and successfully applied it to none other than the Lucasfilm Singapore HQ. Completed in 2013, the design went on to win a number of awards.

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Jabba the Hutt's palace on Tatooine, as painted by Ralph McQuarrie. A combination of Byzantine shapes and clean Brutalist surfaces, it's an example of the "Star Wars" universe's magpie approach to architecture.

A journey through Lucas’ galaxy takes in Mayan ziggurats, examples of Baroque, Art Nouveau, Modernist and Brutalist architecture, the Classical era and the early Middle Ages – and even the aesthetic of the Third Reich. After eight films and $7.7 billion in box office receipts, this bricolage is set to expand when “Episode VIII: The Last Jedi” lands on December 15.

With the help of experts, we unpick the architectural inspiration behind various Star Wars planets, and discover how their design has, in some cases, come to influence our own.

Naboo

Home to Luke and Leia’s mother Padme, the planet Naboo was first properly introduced in “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” (1999). The peaceful Earth-like idyll from space was a mishmash of European architectural styles on the ground, often informed by the sensibilities of Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Wright was a massive influence on Lucas,” says Reat. The American’s organic style, designing in harmony with his buildings’ surrounds, was a good match for the nature-loving people of Naboo.

One Wright project in particular inspired Naboo’s architecture. Marin County Civic Center, in San Rafael, California, was the last commission undertaken by the great architect. It was a building Lucas was familiar with; the Lucasfilm campus Skywalker Ranch is an 11-mile drive away, and the director used the center’s interiors in his 1971 directorial debut “THX 1138.” We see shades of Marin’s blue roofs in Naboo’s patina domes and semi-circular cut outs, combined with myriad Classical elements.

“There’s a real Byzantine flavor to (the Naboo capital of) Theed,” says Reat. “A real crossbreed of Italian, Baroque and Turkish mosque architecture.” The royal palace exterior is modeled on two great monuments: the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. Its Baroque and Rococo interiors were shot in the Royal Palace of Caserta, in southern Italy, home to 18th century Bourbon kings. But these imposing structures were toned down by concept artists like Chiang, who imagined the palace clinging to the side of a cliff, with waterfalls flowing through it.

Naboo’s non-human inhabitants, the reptilian Gungans, lived underwater in “a kind of Art Nouveau, Jules Verne bubble city,” says Reat. Its curvilinear forms and flourishes echo the metalwork of European architects Hector Guimard and Victor Horta, he adds.

“One of George’s original edicts was for the designs to not call too much attention to themselves,” says Szostak. Part of that was to make everything “completely relatable to 20th and 21st century humans.”

The idea was to evoke an age of innocence at the turn of the 20th century, before the First World War and the hyper-industrialization of the Western world – or in Star Wars parlance, before the robots of the Trade Federation invade.

Coruscant

Coruscant, the capital of the Galactic Republic, made its debut in 1997 in the special edition of “Episode VI: Return of the Jedi,” but like Naboo, it had a stronger presence in the prequels (1999-2005).

The city planet was partly inspired by 1940s science fiction, Reat explains, and the world of Trantor, dreamed-up by author Isaac Asimov. The concept was built on further by 20th century Greek city planner Constantinos Doxiadis: “He devised a term called ‘ecumeonpolis,’ a planet completely encrusted in cities,” Reat adds.

That idea has remained unchanged since Ralph McQuarrie’s first sketches. The buildings that populated it, however, have evolved drastically.

McQuarrie’s paintings from the time of “Return of the Jedi” (1983), when the planet went by the name of Had Abbadon, show pyramids dotting the landscape and the Imperial Palace rising above all in the distance. The Emperor’s domain features Gothic touches and a silhouette somewhere between the Prambanan Hindu temple, in Indonesia, and the facade of Milan cathedral – a radical departure from anything seen in the Star Wars universe. But technological limitations and plot changes meant the planet and the palace never featured in the theatrical cut, and Luke never got to duel his father in a throne room surrounded by a lake of lava (really).

Our first extensive look at Coruscant came in “The Phantom Menace,” by which point the cityscape was composed of supertall skyscrapers. “When Lucas was describing it (to concept artists) he was describing Manhattan,” says Reat. “He admired two skyscrapers in particular: the Empire State and the Chrysler Building.” The latter’s Art Deco metallic curves would inform much of Coruscant’s CGI vistas, transforming the planet into a “1930s New York on steroids.”

The Death Star (and derivatives)

“That’s no moon … it’s a space station.” Gray and spherical, it was an easy mistake to make. The roving destroyer of worlds was monumental in proportions and gave us our first glimpse of Imperial aesthetics – a look that “owed a massive amount to the Third Reich,” says Reat, including its color palette.

Intentionally or not, the Death Star embodied much of the credo of Suprematism, an abstract movement defined by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich in the 1910s. Malevich prized bold geometric forms and block color, leaving these shapes to float in space on the canvas (see: “Black Circle” [1915]). However, the Death Star didn’t always look this way.

“It was designed from the inside out,” says Reat. “Lucas had decided on these relentless corridors and John Barry – production designer and a trained architect – said: ‘Well, there’d be some sort of curvature to that.’ McQuarrie drew a set of concentric circles … and then they encapsulated it and made it into the big orb that you see now.”

The result was a thing of terrible beauty – but surprisingly easy to destroy.

Two films later in “Return of the Jedi” we got a second Death Star. With its unfinished curves and frayed extremities, it looked like the abstract urban landscapes painted by the late Zaha Hadid (who herself was influenced by the Russian avant-garde). This time the space station’s fatal flaw was its reactor core, in a capacious chamber looking like any number of nuclear cooling towers.

Finally, Starkiller Base, the planet-come-Death Star from “Episode VII: The Force Awakens” (2015). The First Order, made up of remnants of the Empire, took the same awesome ideology and terraformed it by burrowing into a commandeered ice planet.

On the surface, the First Order spelled out their fascist credentials with a Nuremberg-esque display of force. “It’s not subtle,” says Reat. But then it’s not supposed to be, argues Szostak: “Everything in ‘Star Wars’ needs to read at a glance.”

The focal point bunker fused Nazi architect Albert Speer’s “Zeppelinfeld” tribune from Nuremberg and the “beton brut” fortifications along Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall.” The firing of the base’s superweapon gave proceedings their own “Cathedral of Light” moment.

Cloud City, Bespin

The gas giant Bespin was unable to maintain life in all but one strata of its atmosphere, and it was there that Cloud City set up camp. The location of the third act of “Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back” was “amoral,” “run by a scoundrel” and “had no affiliation with either side of the conflict,” describes Reat. (Those anticipating “The Last Jedi” will have seen shades of Cloud City in new locale Canto Bight.)

Cloud City’s origins stretch back to the early 18th century, argues Reat, in the flying city of Laputa from Johnathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” That was “effectively a metaphor for British imperialism,” he says. “This thing cast a shadow over a city and it could fall and crush it at any moment.” The symbolism is more potent when one considers Ralph McQuarrie’s original 1975 sketches imagined the floating city as an Imperial base.

“McQuarrie has gone on record as saying that his biggest influence was ‘Flash Gordon,’” says Reat. Cloud City’s tightly clustered metropolis at its peak resembles Mingo City from the 1930s serial, while its overall levitating structure had shades of Sky City, home of the Hawkmen.

Cloud City is one example where reality has taken cues from science fiction. In 2014, NASA proposed that “HAVOC,” a floating settlement above the toxic, highly pressurized surface of Venus, might be one way to successfully explore our nearest solar neighbor.

Ahch-To

Ahch-To, Luke Skywalker’s hiding place in his later years, was a planet with more water than land. But its rocky outcrops are home to a real architectural curiosity. Star Wars lore suggests Ahch-To is home to the first Jedi temple – that’s why Luke ventured there, after all – and from what we’ve seen, it’s composed of drystone beehive huts.

This is more significant than it might sound, as there’s been criticism that the Star Wars universe has used indigenous and developing world architecture as a pejorative signifier of the primitiveness of its characters (see: the Ewoks and much of Tatooine). Reat, coming to Lucas’ defense, says “he has to try and differentiate between the hyper-dehumanized machinery” of the Empire and the naturalistic, adaptive architecture of others – which, Reat argues, is actually more sophisticated.

In reality, the drystone huts used in “The Force Awakens” are called clochans, and comprise a 6th-century Christian monastery on Skellig Michael, an outcrop off the southwest coast of Ireland. We’ll be seeing a lot more of them in “The Last Jedi,” although the exact nature of their architects remains undisclosed at this stage.

Whether they break this cycle or confirm Star Wars stereotypes hangs in the balance.

A gallery caption in an earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the Roman Empire’s first cathedral. It was St. John Lateran in Rome.

“The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (Abrams) by Phil Szostak with a foreword by Rian Johnson is released December 15.
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is released in the US on December 15.