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Where do architects and designers get inspiration? When creatives are in search of architectural inspiration, they can take cues from literally any aspect of culture – even a favourite movie. The featured projects have been informed by well-known science fiction motion pictures and brilliantly designed through meticulous deconstruction of their sets and scenography.

Inspired by the “blurry and warm sense of the future” depicted in sci-fi romance Her, Chinese designer Xiaoxi Xiong has teamed up with the in-house design team of the furniture brand Fnji to develop  a 1000 sqm office for the brand’s base in Beijing. The movie by director Spike Jonze chronicles how a man falls in love with an artificially intelligent virtual assistant, and is set in his high-rise minimalist apartment.

Trying to replicate the movie’s striking aesthetic, the designer covered almost every surface in the office, including the floors, the balustrade and the stairs, with soft grey gypsum plaster. This ultra-matte finish is interrupted by a couple of textural featured walls, which she created by pouring semi-solidified gypsum over jumbled piles of broken bricks.

Blending with the surroundings, the furniture in the office is also grey. So is the carpeting. To strike out the softness of the interior, some dark-coloured elements are added, such as a rough black stone counter reception counter, huge slate-coloured planters and a sheer dark grey curtain extending from the ceiling to the lower level of the office.

Another workspace informed by Her movie is RayData’s Beijing headquarters designed by the Austrian architecture studio Precht, which strikes a perfect balance of technology and tactility.

Taking over the 19^th floor of Poly International Plaza, a cylindrical skyscraper in the Chinese capital, the 980 sqm office follows the building’s looping plan but has been split into two halves, each accommodating a certain function.

The north-facing side contains work areas for employees and mainly features white surfaces, thus creating a bright and relaxed working environment. The architects scattered numerous triangular details throughout the interior, as a nod to RayData’s logo: these include desks, bench-style sofas, and even spotlights and door handles.

The desk are arranged in a zigzag pattern and include large partitions of glass engraved with geographical maps of different cities to separate staff. To recreate a warm and tactile atmosphere depicted in the movie, each desk has been partially lined with dark-grey fabric from Danish brand Kvadrat. This, along with the grey carpets, also helps to manage acoustics in the open-plan workspace. Upholstered booths divided by pivoting floor-to-ceiling screens are placed in the corners of the rooms for those wishing more privacy.

The southern side of the office is dedicated to communal areas like the reception and company showroom and is completed in a darker palette to dramatise the appearance of the presentation screens and interactive models on-site.

Unlike soft and neutral Her-inspired offices, the interior of a day spa in Venezuela by local Atelier Caracas creates a striking contrast to the surrounding context with its architecture aiming to evoke the imagery of outer space, the mysterious and ‘other worldly’.

Aptly named 2020: A Spa Odyssey, the space is modelled after Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and mimics the movie’s settings and characters. Thus, formica boards with rounded edges, which feature large porthole windows of opaque glass, are reminiscent of the movie’s sentient artificial intelligence character, HAL 9000. Beige curtains provide privacy for occupants of the suites during their treatments, and additional glass separations attach to the panels blurring the view between the cubicles.

The architects describe the spa as a “diffuse threshold between earth and outer space.” A decorative stone supporting the tabletop of the black formica reception desk is meant to resemble a meteorite, while green plants and fake grass carpet are among the details added to the space as reminders of life on Earth.