TRON: Architectural Inspiration

I just recently watched the movie and although it was mediacore, the building design was brilliant. I started to think about the architectural fantasy I was thinking about, design concepts that seems unrealistic brought to life through CGI, Photoshop etc. In my head, these people are brilliant, an imaginative group of selected designers to work on the set. After a quick shower and surfing through the internet for Tron's building, I came across a very interesting interview with the director. It was a short interview but nonetheless intriguing from my point of view. I was only interested where he mention about how the movie was inspired by some world class architects. Here are the couple of Q and A that interest me.


We recently had the chance to talk with Tron Legacy director Joe Kosinski. Kosinski, who originally trained as an architect at Columbia, told us about constructing the brand new Tron City and updating the Tron aesthetic for the 21st century.

You have a background in architecture. In Tron Legacy, you're building this virtual cityscape from scratch. Were there any architects or designers who informed the building of Tron City?

The architects who come to mind are Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Albert Speer — Speer was an architect for the Nazis, and you can see his influence in the designs for CLU's game arenas. You can see the influence of Neil Denari in Flynn's safe house. It was fun to pull from all these influences and construct something new for this movie. That's part of the reasons I took this project — I saw the opportunity to build a universe from scratch, not only with the architecture, but also with the character and vehicle design. You can put all of these elements together in a way that you couldn't do with other movies.

Would you say that the design of Tron City is more futurist or 1980s retrofuturistic?

The idea is that the Grid was created in the 1980s and evolved independent of the outside world. Syd Mead and Moebius' designs for the original Tron very much had an early 80s aesthetic, and it was fun to take these 1980s influences and evolve it forward within this particular world.

So, the buildings in the movie are inspired by Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Albert Speer and Neil Denari. There was no mention of any current architects and I would assume Zaha Hadid or Morphosis would be in the group. My brain likes to ponder but it seems my design theory has reach upon a limit that I need to break to move forward. There might be a huge relation between the old school theoritcal design towards the future. I am all confuse and feeling rather stupid, unable to have the ability to think and argue any valid statement for further discussion, all I could do is just ask. All that I could say is, in the past few days while I was surfing through the interweb, kinetic architecture seems to spark an interest within me. Will do abit more research before trying out some experimental design concept for the 4th entrance gate, this might get very interesting.