7 Supervillain Lairs Set in Deviously Well-Designed Homes

Niander Wallace’s brutalistic Wallace Corporation Earth Headquarters towers over 2049 Los Angeles, a gloomy dystopia—an apocalyptic, haunted, yet oddly beautiful landscape lashed with dirty rain and hologram porn dolls, radioactive smog and neon-tinted favelas. Glowing billboards from Atari and Pan Am loom over the city’s grimy underbelly. (In this alternate reality, both companies are global giants.) DNA sequences are printed on microfilm and iPhones don’t exist. It’s even more joyless than the Los Angeles of the original Blade Runner, which is saying something.  The scale of Wallace’s dark and foreboding lair puts every skyscraper around it to shame with its trio of slanted towers framed by squat, pyramid-like buildings (a visual nod to the Tyrell Corporation’s ziggurat in the original Blade Runner). Production designer Dennis Gassner used the word "brutality" as a touchstone in developing the film’s aesthetic; that was director Denis Villeneuve’s guidance when Gassner asked for a one-word directive. As he told Vanity Fair, "I developed a pattern language we used to create the rest of the city…the tower, police station, and other elements reflecting a more brutal universe—things that were robust enough to fight against the elements and remain standing, like pyramids." Filming took place in part in Budapest, among the city’s massive, brutalist architecture, which perfectly served the film’s visual mood.