'Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty."
— Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
The movie enchants its audience by plucking at our innermost spatial-cultural instincts. Cinema is the playground for atmosphere and space, and the plot of Dune sets a perfect stage for existential questions of culture and identity through its architectural language; one that steers our moral compass through our sense of relatability.
The Dune world wrestles and wonders what human place is at its essence, even when intended to portray the otherworldly.
What’s really fascinating is that the production designers “shake together” historical architectural references from across the world as to arrive to a new “identity” for Dune — but they achieve more than that: they’ve synthesised architectural features from ancient cultures across the world, revealing overlapping forms of beauty that are not just impactful or interesting, but deeply believable; relatable by instinct, or resonant — spaces which are felt.
In a clever juxtaposition, Dune confronts us with contradictions of ancient-advanced, mystical-technological, tradition-innovation, otherworldly-familiar — very contemporary dialectics in an agnostic yet purpose-seeking world.
"I started crying walking on a location."
— Dune production designer Patrice Vermette on Tomb Brion
This ability to be both agnostic and deeply relatable in ‘general’ (in the sense of Juhani Pallasmaa) is best represented by Carlo Scarpa. Rationalist by design, his then-contemporary designs were agnostic by nature, but without excluding an aura of spiritual-like respect for natural materials, handmade and crafted ornament, a celebration of the imperfectly weathered, and a poetic control of shadows.
Just as Dune 1 absorbed its audience with relatively little dialogue, Tomb Brion embodies the manifesto of Scarpa’s Life’s work, evoking such poetic contradictions, without having to speak a single word.
