Design hawkeyes will have noticed it: As Michelle Fuller, Bugonia’s unusual CEO character played by an in-form Emma Stone, stomps towards her desk in one of the movie’s early scenes, she flits past seating arrangements of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Barcelona chairs. They’re hard to miss with their cantilevered steel bases, signature boxy leather cushions and late midcentury corporate grandeur. At first, they’re black. As Michelle gets closer to her glassed office, they’re white.
From Michelle’s professional environment to her ultra-modernist home, design pieces by notable names like van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jan Bočan, and more can be found throughout Bugonia. By the end of the film—when (spoiler alert) we learn that Michelle is indeed the alien she’s feared to be, and the reason for mankind’s extinction—one might suspect that director Yorgos Lanthimos and production designer James Price were intentionally toying with the idea of vaunted versus embodied humanity via the sets. The suggestion seems to be that this masked extraterrestrial character uses design in part as proof of her authenticity, yet the objects she surrounds herself with carry a chilly reserve and an efficient immaculateness. Inhuman in their stature and presentation, they’re hints that Michelle might be overcompensating.
“I would almost liken the pieces we included to trophies,” Price tells AD. “You could take these examples as pinnacles of human civilization. So much so that Yorgos wasn’t keen on us even having reproductions.”
Michelle, then, seems to have collected these items as a kind of physical highlight reel of human creativity–and therefore, as subtle self-validation of her humanity. Yet the irony is that once possessed, trophies become static, and even cold, objects. In trying to appear human through idealization, she adds… well, something of a chill to the room. (This isn’t a dig at these pieces, but an observation of her exaggeration.)
“I did want to play around with the fact that there was a sort of quintessential midcentury aesthetic idea of what space travel would look like,” Price says. “The Space Race, which lasted from 1955 to 1975, and the advancing technology of the time… it all does go hand in hand.”
Barcelona Chairs by Mies van der Rohe
The Barcelona chair was poriginally designed in 1929 by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for the German pavilion at the International Exposition held in Spain that year. The piece was redesigned in 1950 to feature the seamless, cantilevered base it’s still produced with today. In Mies van der Rohe’s own words, the chair was intended to be “important” and “monumental.”
Taliesin 2 Floor Lamp by Frank Lloyd Wright
This tall, geometric lamp—which almost retains a humanoid figure, as if it has posture—was devised in 1952 by Wright after he was tasked with repairing a theater that had burned in a fire. There, he attached rectangular light “boxes,” per the Frank Lloyd Wright foundation, to an overhead beam. He was so pleased by the softness of their glow, he made a floor-lamp version for his own (now very famous) home, Taliesin.
Ribbon Lamp by Claire Norcross
Manchester-based Claire Norcross designed her Ribbon lamp in 2005 for the lighting company Habitat. Like the Taliesin 2 model, there’s something oddly bodily about it; the protrusion of the band as it curves, the angular little feet. It is rather alien-seeming. Michelle has this example on her desk.
Jan Bočan armchairs
A pair of Bočan’s brutalist yet curvilinear chairs are seen flanking Michelle’s high-gloss glassed-in pool at her home. Bočan’s work is highly collectible; the specific seats seen in Bugonia are said to have been created for the then Czechoslovak Embassy in London (he designed the whole building, and it was completed in 1970).
Designed for the Danish label BoConcept, Pedersen’s Imola chair was one of Price’s nods to Michelle’s underlying menace. It has an almost campy wickedness to its winged headrest; the alien is seen, at home, using an infrared mask while seated in the chair. Price jokes that it’s Michelle in her “evil lair.” Worth noting: There’s a famous example of a wingback chair being used by the James Bond villain Blofeld in 1967’s You Only Live Twice. The chair is called the G Plan 6250 (both Blofeld and the seat are mimicked by Mike Meyers’ Doctor Evil in the Austin Powers franchise). You Only Live Twice’s production designer was Sir Ken Adam, who also worked on The Ipcress File.
