Here’s What David Lynch Would Look Like as a House

Federico Babina illustrates houses inspired by the signature style of 27 film directors.

June 19, 2015, 6:15pm

Images courtesy the artist

If you could pick a famous director to build you a house, who would it be? Italian illustrator Federico Babina’s new series, Archidirector, might help you answer that question. The new series of illustrated houses inspired by 27 directors range from an art deco manifestation of Stanley Kubrick, a mid-century modern Elia Kazan, to a New York tenement complex for Jim Jarmusch.

“The houses want and try to be a reflection of the aesthetic personality of the directors. To try to reach this objective I can directly take real elements or simply try to capture a linguistic essence and transform it in an architectural shape. This could be anything: a light, a fog, a color palette, a material, anything that speaks the language of the director,” Babina tells The Creator’s Project. “In the Lynch house I try to capture his unique style and use of lighting to create a mysterious and surrealistic atmosphere…The curtains open, the movie begins…”

This is not the first time we’ve seen Babina interpret pop culture into art or architecture. He’s combined the forces of iconic painters and well-known starchitects, imagined musicians as buildings, and made famous buildings into movie posters. Babina’s ability to distill the artistic essence of different artists into new mediums is ceaselessly fascinating. He talks us through a handful of his new illustrations, pictured below.

“The house is a wireframe structure. A naked house with no wall. Just some elements like windows and door or part of a wall that are floating in the air. An almost transparent house where seemingly everything is seen but that maintains some elements to hide small and big secrets.” says Babina of the Lars Von Trier house.

“The Tarkovsky façade is a kind of old stone invaded by plants. My idea was to create a home inside another like matryoshka dolls. A classic and abandoned structure like an old church that hides inside a throbbing heart. A structure between the sacred and the profane, classic and modern at the same time.”

“Wenders’s atmosphere is always both melancholy and tender, filled with a gentle existential ache that wraps you in its beauty. I tried to create a structure in a balance between a painful cold feeling and a gentle silence. The house is a mixture of an industrial structure and a building that hides a secret life. A 'road house' where the life’s soundtrack is the buzz of the neon sign.”