The best thing about sci-fi films? The corridors

In the cinema of science-fiction, corridors take a lead role. It’s within those interstitial spaces that the action and beauty unfold, from intense moments of peril to the panning of backlit walls configured to look infinite in scale. Each possible future has its own design. There are the hexagonal passages of the Death Star in Star Wars circa 1977, and the octagonal ones in Alien: Romulus. The corridor is a sci-fi trope – and the extreme nature of these spaces gives interior designers something to draw from. 

Set designer Gary Card created the original and recently refreshed interior for the LN-CC store in London, with its much-photographed octagonal corridor. “It has a definite retrofuturism to it,” Card says of the bright-orange wood tunnel. “I liked the idea of making something futuristic out of an economical, simple material and seeing how far we could push it. When we saw its parallels with 2001: A Space Odyssey, we leaned into that feeling further. Something I’ve learnt with corridors is that they’re a good way to envelop an audience as well as anchoring a space.”

The corridors of the future take disparate visual paths. Some look like an intergalactic take on Gaudí, as in the David Lynch version of Dune; others are chillingly reductive, like the warren of whitewashed underground halls in Westworld, where Yul Brynner’s rogue cowboy android pursues the last surviving guest of the theme park. 

I give hallways a feeling of ‘no gravity’

Norma Kamali’s New York penthouse in the Herzog & de Meuron 160 Leroy building in New York is all white, including the bare internal corridors, where shadows cast by doorways change during the day. It’s a bold, deliberate choice. “I want things as simple as possible,” says Kamali of the design. “It works creatively for me, so I still feel that there’s another idea coming tomorrow. I hate looking back.”

The influence of sci-fi design on the psyche has become an obsession for many. Between 2012 and 2015, the artist Serafín Álvarez assembled an online archive – scificorridorarchive.com – collecting stills of hundreds of scenes set in connecting halls on film. The process itself was the artwork, as Álvarez brought various worlds together on the blog, inviting you to imagine connections between them. But you can also enjoy the graphic arrangements.

Nerds of all kinds are fixated on sci-fi sets, from the obsessives who can tell you that Clara in Matt Smith-era Doctor Who walks through the same distorted, honeycomb corridors in “The Name of the Doctor” as she does in “Journey to the Centre of the Tardis”, to the architects who have made it their career goal to turn fiction into reality. The Zaha Hadid signature is sci-fi – the corridors and staircases of the 520 West 28th building in Manhattan that she designed shortly before her death have amorphous apertures, windows and bends, and her studio still creates similar silhouettes. 

Marc Newson has created numerous projects with poured floors, seamless curves and dramatic sheen that’s a universe away from traditional tongue and groove in architecture. What could be sexier than a reflective floor in a material you can’t quite identify? Think of Darth Vader’s menacing walk, at pace, on those shiny black Imperial surfaces. Likewise, backlighting of walls in sci-fi corridors lends a celestial glamour. Some sci-fi is purposely grubby – Andrei Tarkovsky’s art direction was the work of genius but has a dank, dripping vérité. But most sci-fi is pure gloss. The tube-shaped corridors in Gattaca look like a series of ring lights around a runway and feel very Prada.

“I have always been obsessed with hallways and giving them a feeling of ‘no gravity’ or an illusion of the information age,” says New York-based designer Karim Rashid, who has created numerous projects with hyper-real graphics in carpets and walls, including the Magic Hotels in Norway and the Prizeotel chain. “I want to transport people from public to private. It creates a mood shift. I was brought up with science fiction, watching 2001, Logan’s Run, Solaris and Blade Runner. Sturgeon’s Law [90 per cent of everything is crap] applies to corridors – 90 per cent are badly designed. But lighting and technology now afford us Tron-like spaces with long lines of LEDs. For example, the hallways at the Nobu hotel in Warsaw and the Belgium Nhow hotel.” 

The interlocking fabric Clouds tiles by the Bouroullec brothers could easily be used to create an astounding fractal tunnel, while recent designs by Paddy Pike – who cites the film Ex Machina as an inspiration  – include polished-steel portals and the striped rugs of his Cresco Collection, which he has shown installed as arches to pass through from room to room, like a kind of trompe-l’œil 1970s starship corridor. “My recent focus has been on doorways,” he says. “I’m drawn to creating pieces that dominate a room, offering a sense of transformation as you move through the space.”

Cate Blanchett’s home in Tár was shaped by the owner’s fascination with 007

Many public and private spaces take their cues from sci-fi corridors. Most of Tadao Ando’s buildings on the art island of Naoshima in Japan feature concrete corridors that recall the work of set designer Ken Adam (most notably the beautiful but abysmal Moonraker). Australian design practice Wood Marsh has created fabulous spaces with concrete curves that are wonderfully Ken Adam too. In the same vein is the concrete walled gallery and private penthouse of the Boros Bunker in Berlin, which was also home to Cate Blanchett’s eponymous character in Tár. Speaking to the FT in 2017, owner Christian Boros talked of his fascination with 007, which helped shape the penthouse. 

When architects George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg moved into their Richard Meier-designed apartment overlooking the Hudson River, they left most of the walls and columns gallery-white, but panelled one corridor with smooth wood from a single log sourced from India. This is backlit at each corner with a disorienting concave Anish Kapoor lacquer dish hung at the end of the hall, where the axis of each line of light meets. The effect is totally sci-fi but also quietly sensual. To play against it, a Napoleonic French chair sits midway down the corridor.  

Next May, Tate Modern opens a survey of work by Do Ho Suh entitled The Genesis Exhibition, including installations featuring coloured translucent corridors. The artist is not the first to explore internal spaces. In 1959, utopian architect Frederick Kiesler created “Model for the Endless House”, a cement sculpture in the permanent collection of the Whitney. Each space meets another in a never-ending loop, like the corridors that sci‑fi characters run through on repeat. 

Elongated transitional spaces can be emotive and dramatic. Back in 1987, Foster + Partners created a store for Katharine Hamnett on Brompton Road that was revolutionary – a white tunnel that led from the street into the industrial store incorporating a 35m glass bridge, lit from below, with a gentle arch. It created a sense of awe and mystery. Its most recent reincarnation was as a now-closed restaurant, festooned with fake foliage and Chesterfields and serving bottomless brunch. The world will change again. The only way is forward, whichever corridor you choose.