Skyscrapers in Film - Fictional Skyscrapers

Fictional Skyscrapers

This is a list of named fictional skyscrapers that have a noticeable role in films (including notable science-fiction and fantasy), sorted by chronological filming order. In some cases, an actual building stands for the fictional one; in others, they are created using elaborate miniature models.

• New Tower of Babel (Metropolis) - chief among the gothic skyscrapers of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). The cityscape of Metropolis was inspired from Lang's trip to Manhattan and was, in turn, an inspiration for several dystopian science-fiction films including Blade Runner and Dark City.

• Seacoast National Bank Building (New York City) - this 100-story, Empire State Building-inspired tower is the center of a power struggle in Skyscraper Souls (1932), as ruthless banker David Dwight attempts to gain full control of the skyscraper.

• Wynand Building (New York City) - the creation of the uncompromising, objectivist architect Howard Roark, it features in the film adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1949). The world's tallest, it is the culmination of Roark's ambition, "the will of man made visible."

• Glass Tower and Peerless Building (San Francisco) - this 138-story office/residential tower, the new "tallest building in the world", is the setting of The Towering Inferno (1974). In the film, the guests of the top-floor opening ceremony are trapped by a fire that broke out due to faulty wiring. The idea of the "world's tallest" was featured in both novels on which the film was based, and was inspired, ironically, by New York's World Trade Center which was completed the year before the movie's release. Filmed prior to the widespread use of Digital CGI, the Glass Tower was actually a series of half inch and inch scale models. The miniatures cost $1,110,000 and the tallest of these was 70 feet high and was guyed off in all four directions and filmed against a blue screen on the concrete floor of Sersen Lake at the Twentieth Century Fox Ranch in Malibu, California. Similarly, five floors of the building were built in full scale at the same facility for close up shooting of action scenes.

• Tyrell Corporation Headquarters (Los Angeles) - the immense truncated pyramid-shaped structure, flanked by inwardly-slanted towers, dominates the cityscape of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). The futuristic city has been described as a place where the height of the World Trade Center had become the norm, filled with buildings hundreds of stories tall, with Tyrell's pyramid being six or seven times the height of the WTC and at least a hundred times more massive . Main protagonist Deckard himself lives on the 97th floor of a generic building.
• Nakatomi Plaza (Los Angeles) - taken over by terrorists in the classic action film Die Hard (1988). The building is actually Fox Plaza, 20th Century Fox's Los Angeles headquarters. The Japanese name of this and other fictional buildings (such as Nakamoto Tower in 1993's Rising Sun) provides an interesting window on the 1980s mindset that Japanese corporations would take over the world's economy and real estate, especially after the real-life acquisition of Rockefeller Center by a Mitsubishi subsidiary (completed in 1989). In fact there have been relatively few such takeovers, and few if any U.S. skyscrapers were ever actually named after Japanese corporations.

• Art Land's Galaxy Hotel - A fictional futuristic hotel/casino in Las Vegas, Nevada from the 1996 film Mars Attacks! The hotel was destroyed by a UFO during a martian invasion. In reality the building was the Landmark Hotel and Casino which was imploded in 1995.

• Galactic Senate Building (Coruscant) - one of the innumerable towers covering the fictional city-planet of Coruscant from the Star Wars universe, first seen on film in the Special Edition of Return of the Jedi (1997), then in the Star Wars prequels. On Coruscant, buildings are used as the foundations for new buildings that actually pierce the cloud layer. The fifty lower levels form a dangerous underworld where ordinary citizens never go. The city-planet was inspired by Trantor in Isaac Asimov's Foundation saga.

• Scolex Industries is the corporate headquarters of the main villain Sanford Scolex (Dr. Claw) in the 1999 film, Inspector Gadget. In reality, the building is the PPG Place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

• MNU Building (Johannesburg) - A building used in the 2009 film District 9.

• Clamp Centre, the building that Gremlins 2: The New Batch takes place in.

• The Zitex building, the titular tower of the film Skyscraper.

• Stark Tower in The Avengers.

• OCP Tower in RoboCop.