Andor: Star Wars, Architectural Theory and Design Innovation
- Mark Lafond, RA
- 1 day ago
- 14 min read
Updated: 20 hours ago
Change Models of Innovation
Star Wars has always been a saga of worlds as much as characters, but Andor reframes that legacy through design that privileges texture, craft, and social context. The series advances a grounded visual language where architecture is more than a backdrop, it is a narrative engine that explains power, labor, fear, and solidarity without needing speeches.
Set in a distant past in a galaxy far, far away, Andor still evokes a classical register, civic ritual, imperial administration, and the physical realities of supply and constraint. Star Wars has long fused mythology, philosophy, technology, and architecture, but Andor sharpens that fusion by letting rooms and streets carry political meaning through use, wear, and control.
Production designer Luke Hull and his innovative collaborators leaned into practical construction, location specificity, and disciplined material palettes to yield interiors and urban fabrics that feel inhabited, legible, and politically charged. The result is a film whose rooms and cities teach as much as its dialogue, and whose influence is already filtering into architectural discourse, fabrication culture, and experiential environments built for museums, retail, and immersive spatial storytelling.
Grit and Shadow
Not since The Empire Strikes Back has the franchise so successfully transported audiences into a tactile world characterized by risk, grit, and shadow. Andor returns Star Wars to a material register where surfaces carry scars, objects have weight, and construction looks maintained rather than imagined. [2.][13.]
This is not simply aesthetic mood. It supports the series’ worm’s eye view of rebellion, where the Empire is everywhere, where control is embedded in protocols and built systems, and where the manifesto of freedom is formed in workshops, corridors, stairwells, back rooms, and streets that force bodies into choices.
Materials, Light, and Shadow
Andor showcases the visual truth of wear and tear, highlighting imperfections and the slow failure that accompanies even advanced construction in its universe. Dirt, patched finishes, grime, and scuffed edges are narrative evidence that systems break, and that people must constantly repair what power demands remain seamless.
The portrayal of maintenance becomes an economic signal. It implies supply chains, labor habits, resource constraints, and the cost of keeping large systems running. In Andor, power reads not only as violence, but as the capacity to standardize, replace, and control the built environment at scale, while pushing the labor of upkeep out of sight.
Maintenance of Materials and Weathering
In contrast to sleek polished surfaces often associated with futuristic settings, Andor embraces the beauty of imperfection, where time and use remain visible. Environments gain texture because they read as occupied and continuously worked on, not simply rendered and forgotten. [2.][17.]
This return to tactile realism deepens the audience’s connection to the story. The series invites reflection on the tension between civilization and decay, technology and entropy, and the ongoing struggle to keep systems coherent when time, trust, and resources are limited.
A Production Philosophy Built on Materiality
Andor’s design philosophy begins with a choice, minimize dependence on virtual volume production, maximize realism through physical sets and real locations. This shifts the burden from pixels to materials, letting brick, concrete, steel, resin, glazing, and found artifacts carry the weight of worldbuilding. Interviews and production commentary stress practicality, craft, and coherence, and they frame the result as a deliberate commitment to physical credibility rather than a rejection of digital tools. [2.][3.][14.]
The logic is straightforward. Physical environments support performance and blocking, they allow directors to discover beats through touch and movement, and they capture micro details, lint in light, scuffs at reveals, subtle bounce, that become expensive when simulated. When the set is real, digital work can extend and deepen instead of substituting for space. [9.][10.][14.]
Cradle to Grave
Hull’s approach treats each planet as a culture with its own resource base, construction techniques, and lifecycle of objects. That design logic produces spaces where wear patterns, repair seams, and maintenance access have narrative meaning, not decorative grime. [4.][17.]
For architectural practice, this models an evidence based workflow. Define climate, material availability, economic history, and habits of labor first, then derive assemblies and furnishing typologies. The result reads as plausible because joints and finishes imply supply chains and repair cultures, even when the camera never explains them. [4.][17.]
Ferrix, A Working City Built by Work
Ferrix functions as Andor’s thesis on urban fabric. Rather than a purely digital town, the production built a working city on a backlot, complete with yards, streets, shop fronts, and circulation networks designed to stage processions, alarms, and collective action. [1.][2.]
Ferrix looks and feels like a salvage economy, the kind of city that aggregates parts, repairs machines, and keeps objects cycling through second and third lives. Hardware is robust, fasteners are visible, metal lintels and overbuilt hinges communicate that buildings are tools as much as shelters, and that survival is a culture of maintenance.
Spatially, Ferrix is calibrated for community choreography. Narrow lanes pinch and expand to create pressure zones for marches and standoffs, while thresholds carry civic devices that concentrate ritual and memory. For designers, this is a lesson in writing civic drama into plan geometry, where subtle shifts in width, height, and permeability can script movement and emotion without spectacle.
Coruscant’s Power Aesthetics
Andor’s Coruscant rejects glossy futurism in favor of power rendered through massing, repetition, and finish. The Imperial Security Bureau interiors are cool, severe, and administratively precise, using long horizontals, crisp joints, and controlled lighting to communicate bureaucracy and surveillance as an everyday spatial condition.
Coruscant’s monumental civic language was also calibrated through real world architectural reference points. Luke Hull has described identifying architectural styles that would work for Coruscant, explicitly naming Santiago Calatrava and Zaha Hadid as part of that reference framework, with Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences emerging as a key inspiration and location anchor for the capital’s civic scale. [6.][7.]
The design reads as authoritarian ergonomics. Meeting rooms enforce hierarchy through sightlines, continuous surfaces erase evidence of maintenance, and lighting compresses atmosphere toward emotional neutrality. The architectural lesson is direct, form, fixture selection, and finish hierarchy can encode governance and shape behavior, even when the room contains no overt symbols of force.
Ward Room
The ISB ward room is toned in white and grey, clean, modern, and geometrically controlled. The classic round table configuration reads as procedural authority, a machine for briefing, coordination, and performance of competence.
The space reinforces the Empire as a vast bureaucratic military organization, impersonal, sterile, and impeccably ordered, where advancement is inseparable from internal competition and institutional compliance. In this kind of architecture, polish is not comfort, it is discipline made visible.
Luthen Rael’s Gallery, Mon Mothma’s Apartment
Two Coruscant interiors distill the series’ semiotics of identity and performance.
Luthen Rael’s antiquities gallery layers vitrines, plinths, and artifacts to create a salon that performs legitimacy and elite access. Object selection and placement fuse connoisseur theater with clandestine logistics, making the gallery a believable front, one that feels historically anchored because it is built from convincing material and curatorial logic. [4.][17.]
The gallery’s joinery and surfaces remain exact, yet it avoids sterility through controlled patina, building tension between preservation and insurgency. This is a practical lesson in how display strategies and surface aging can communicate risk, secrecy, and dual use without changing the plan.
Mon Mothma’s apartment is a counterpoint, a domestic enclave where furniture scale softens state geometry. Veneers and textiles signal a life of protocol and constraint rather than indulgence, quiet wealth that must remain socially legible under surveillance. The set reads as calibrated restraint, a senator who cannot afford to look unpredictable, even at home.
Together, these interiors demonstrate character driven design. Biography becomes plan sequencing, material hierarchy, and acoustic temperament, and privacy is designed through thresholds, pacing, and controlled display rather than declared as theme.
Narkina 5, The Carceral Machine
The prison arc on Narkina 5 is a master class in how spatial systems compress hope. The design is planar, bright, and brilliantly hostile, a white box rendered menacing by procedure rather than grime. Everything glows with aseptic uniformity, and the electrified floor turns the ground into a weapon, making posture, rest, and movement part of a behavioral contract. [5.][2.]
The plan logic makes the atmosphere feel inescapable. It is organized as serial modules, repeated bays, repeated stations, repeated corridors, where the system is legible and therefore unavoidable. Even the work floor reads like an engineered diagram of bodies in position, calibrated spacing, fixed routes, minimal variation, turning modularity into a tool of domination. Circulation is not neutral here, it is policy expressed as geometry.
Sound completes the enclosure. The public address voice collapses distance by making command feel adjacent everywhere. Hard continuous surfaces and tight tolerances imply an acoustic world that magnifies footsteps, alarms, and mechanical hum, a constant reminder that the building is listening even when no guard is visible.
The most unsettling feature is the relocation of force from visible hardware to invisible operations. Floors, lighting, alarms, and timing become enforcement, and the disappearance of bars reframes incarceration as environmental governance. It is a model of compliance designed into everyday building behavior, not merely enforced at the perimeter.
For architectural practice, the transfer is ethical and technical. Systems like sensors, access control, scheduling, lighting control, and public address can quietly become coercive when optimized for efficiency without accountability. The design lesson is to audit agency, override paths, failure modes, and dignity, not only form.
Niamos and the Shock of Sunlight
Andor deploys Niamos to rupture imperial greyscale with sea, sun, and leisure kitsch. Filmed along the promenade in Cleveleys, the sequence demonstrates how modest coastal infrastructure can be retuned with selective dressing into science fiction leisure, without rebuilding the city from scratch. [11.][12.]
The lesson for architects and placemakers is that transformation often rests on precise overlays rather than wholesale replacement. Re signage, targeted furniture, and disciplined framing can toggle the reading of space, while movement and viewpoint complete the illusion. In Andor, the camera behaves like a strict client, it rewards restraint and punishes excess.
Real World Architecture as the Base Layer
Andor’s credibility is strengthened by its use of actual architecture as photographed reality, then extended through controlled augmentation. Coruscant’s civic monumentalism draws directly on Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, using the complex as a physical stage for the capital’s institutional grandeur, with Hull explicitly linking Coruscant’s architectural language to Calatrava as a reference point. [6.][7.]
The film also grounds its industrial and administrative worlds in infrastructure. Coryton Refinery in Essex appears as part of the Ferrix terminal and other industrial settings, exploiting real pipes, gantries, and logistics scale that would be difficult to fake convincingly for long takes. [8.][9.]
In Scotland, Cruachan Power Station and its dam provide imperial infrastructure with real engineered authority, a structure that reads as both monumental and operational, the kind of place where policy and power can hide inside concrete. The point is not tourism trivia, it is the production logic, reality gives you correct proportions, correct wear, correct atmosphere, and digital work can then focus on extension rather than invention. [9.][10.]
Why Practical Construction Matters for Technology
Andor’s preference for physical sets did not reject technology, it rebalanced the pipeline. With real environments, visual effects augment rather than fabricate, which reshapes scheduling, budgeting, and labor patterns, and captures micro details that are expensive to simulate convincingly. [9.][14.]
Commentary around the production repeatedly frames the choice to avoid StageCraft volume shooting as strategic, the film wanted the freedom of real space, real weather, real blocking, and real surfaces, then used digital work to finish the world instead of replacing it. [14.][15.]
For architects and fabricators, the implication is direct. As mixed reality tools proliferate, durable experiences will come from hybrid pipelines where physical mockups and analog materials anchor the virtual. Andor shows that authenticity emerges when physics is allowed to speak, door weight, hinge sound, surface continuity, and light bounce are not guesses, they are captured. [9.][10.]
Design Intelligence, From Prop to Urbanism
One of Andor’s quiet achievements is consistency from prop scale to urban scale. On Ferrix, tools, hardware, and street details align with a salvage economy. On Coruscant, table edges and interior lines rhyme with monumental civic language, implying that bureaucracy radiates from boardrooms to skyline through repetition and standard.
For architects, the method is transferable. Establish a few core verbs and geometries, then propagate them across scales. Instead of imposing style, derive it from economy and culture, then let it discipline detail. The strength of the rooms lies in how often they imply unseen spaces, maintenance shafts, storage bays, adjacent streets, a full city just off camera.
Cultural Influence and the Discourse of Power
Andor’s interiors have entered cultural conversation as visual essays on power and resistance. The ISB’s decisive planes and hard joints have become shorthand for managerial authoritarianism, while Ferrix’s visible repairs and unhidden fasteners read as a politics of labor, mutual reliance, and shared risk. [2.][15.]
This influence reaches beyond fandom. Exhibition and museum design can borrow the gallery versus back of house logic as a template for narrative thresholds. Retail environments can adopt artifact wall curation to construct brand archaeology. Experiential environments can learn from Andor’s density, where close looking is rewarded, and where credibility comes from proportion, detail, and lived in realism, not spectacle. [4.][17.]
What Architects Can Take to Practice
Science fiction production design often looks efficient because it treats architecture as logistics first, then as image. In Andor, that logic is visible in the way geometric order, structural discipline, and material economy shape nearly every space, from street networks to door details. The built language leans heavily on naval architecture, where the ship becomes the archetypal setting and organizing idea for all structures.
First, design from geometry and constraints. Convincing environments derive form from structural logic and repeatable systems, grids, modules, and honest rhythms that imply fabrication, repair, and standardization. If the underlying order is strong, the project can carry meaning before ornament or branding enters the conversation. [2.][3.]
Second, treat buildings as operational diagrams. Andor keeps fiction grounded in plausible routines, patrol patterns, supply movement, surveillance, and escape routes. Towns and rooms are tuned for procession, negotiation, and flight. For practice, the lesson is to test plans by scenario, not only by program, walk the plan as worker, visitor, guard, and person under stress, then redesign until circulation supports those narratives.
Third, make thresholds do real work. Bulkhead thinking shows up across the series, sliding doors, compressed reveals, thickened openings, and dense transitions that communicate rule changes at the moment of entry. Treat every threshold as a designed event, door, jamb, reveal, wall thickness, acoustic shift, and light shift should communicate what kind of space you are entering and why. [2.][4.]
Fourth, treat interiors as instruments. Lighting temperature, fixture height, reflectance, and surface continuity program behavior. A hard bright light implies inspection, continuous surfaces imply control, warmer gradients imply safety or commerce. The transferable method is to tune interiors like tools, calibrate light, acoustics, and tactile continuity to the intended social behavior of the room. [2.][3.]
Fifth, use a single seam to signal a shift in power or purpose. Luthen’s gallery moves from salon to workshop through a deliberate pivot, a small spatial change that rewrites the rules of the room. Major narrative shifts do not require dramatic form change, they often require one decisive transition. [4.][17.]
Finally, if you keep the philosophy of the Force, anchor it in physical realities. In architecture, the equivalent is the forces always present, gravity, heat, moisture, sound, daylight, and human attention. Practicing with the Force means designing with those energies directly, letting buildings express real flows and real constraints as part of meaning, not hiding them behind finishes. [13.][15.]
Technology, Craft, and a New Standard
Andor does not propose a return to an analog past. Its achievement is a recalibration of the digital, analog relationship toward credibility and texture. Visual effects deepen and extend plausible environments rather than substituting for them, and lighting and sound design reinforce illusion by honoring how materials behave on set. In a period where many productions default to virtual backdrops, Andor demonstrates a higher fidelity sequence, physical space first, selective augmentation second, sensory calibration third.
This approach matters because it treats worldbuilding as construction logic. The more the camera can touch real edges and real depth, the more restrained the digital work can be, and the more believable the finished image becomes. That restraint also sharpens authorship. Instead of spectacle, you get legibility, circulation that feels engineered, thresholds that feel intentional, surfaces that look maintainable, and spaces that look occupiable. [9.][10.]
The production’s credibility is strengthened by real world architecture as a base layer. Coruscant’s civic monumentalism ties directly to Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences, used as a real spatial foundation, then extended with disciplined digital insertions. The reference is not superficial, it is a method, borrow proven spatial drama, correct proportions, correct atmosphere, then modify with restraint. [6.][7.]
For the built environment, this is a provocation. The most compelling digital twins will be tethered to accurate material records, tolerances, reflectance, wear patterns, and maintenance states, not merely clean geometry. The most convincing immersive galleries will not be projection alone, but projection layered onto built thresholds, tactile artifacts, and tuned acoustics, so the body reads the exhibit as a place, not a screen. In retail and hospitality, the next wave of science fiction inspired interiors will focus less on spectacle and more on credible details that invite touch, because credibility converts attention into memory, and memory converts visitors into return visitors.
Conclusion
Andor succeeds because its architectural intelligence is never decorative. It binds ethics, culture, and craft to the bones of space, then lets story emerge from how people are permitted to move, gather, hide, and endure. On Ferrix, solidarity is taught through street section, stoops, hard edges, and collective choreography, a town that reads as built by hands, maintained by habit, and defended by shared memory. On Coruscant, power is exposed through finish, repetition, and controlled distance, where scale and polish become a language of administrative certainty, not comfort. Luthen’s gallery and Mon Mothma’s apartment translate biography into plan and palette, showing how identity is expressed through what a room conceals, what it displays, and how it sequences public life from private risk. [1.][2.][4.]
The sharpest warning arrives at Narkina 5, where policy becomes architecture and architecture compresses human possibility. The menace is procedure. Light, repetition, automation, and tolerances turn the interior into a compliance engine, proof that violence can be environmental, bureaucratic, and clean. What makes it resonate beyond fiction is that the same building systems that promise convenience in real projects can become coercive when optimized without accountability. The ethical lesson for practice is blunt, every efficient system deserves an audit of agency, override, failure mode, and dignity, because design decisions can widen human options or silently narrow them. [5.][2.]
What ultimately sets a new benchmark is not that the film looks expensive, it looks constructed. The team prioritized practical builds and real world locations, then used digital work as extension rather than substitution, which is why surfaces read as touchable and spaces read as occupiable. Coruscant’s monumental civic identity draws on Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences, while industrial sites like Coryton and engineered infrastructure like Cruachan carry the weight of governance and logistics with real scale and real atmosphere. Designers will borrow from this playbook for years, not because it looks cool, but because it feels true. [6.][7.][9.][10.]
Works Cited
[1.] Peterson, Karen M. “‘Andor’: How Ferrix Was Built on a Backlot, Not Sound Stage.” Variety, 5 Oct. 2022. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[2.] Webster, Andrew. “Andor’s Designers Approached It like a Star Wars Period Drama.” The Verge, 9 Nov. 2022. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[3.] Mathai, Jeremy. “Andor Production Designer and Costume Designer on Bringing New Things to the Star Wars Universe.” Slashfilm, 9 Nov. 2022. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[4.] StarWars.com Team. “Ghorman and Chandrila, Creating the Worlds of Andor.” StarWars.com, 2025. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[5.] White, Brett. “Inside ‘Andor’s Epic Prison Break Arc, How Narkina 5’s Design Made It Possible.” Decider, 10 Nov. 2022. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[6.] Lussier, Germain. “The Real World Places Behind ‘Andor’ Season 2’s Architecture.” Gizmodo, 13 June 2025. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[7.] “City of Arts and Sciences.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, last modified 2026. Accessed 1 Feb. 2026.
[8.] Staff. “‘Andor’ Filming Locations: Where Was the ‘Star Wars’ Series Shot?” Collider, 5 Oct. 2022. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[9.] ILM Staff. “TJ Falls and Mohen Leo Talk Andor Season 2, Part 1.” Industrial Light and Magic, 31 July 2025. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[10.] “Page 18.” Motion Picture Association, Motionpictures.org, 2025. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[11.] “Bronze Marker Unveiled in Cleveleys to Celebrate Star Wars Filming Location.” Wyre Council, 16 June 2025. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[12.] Burns, James. “Brass Marker Unveiled in Cleveleys to Celebrate Star Wars Filming Location in ‘Andor.’” Jedi News, 19 June 2025. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[13.] Hibberd, James. “‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Answers Our Burning Questions after the Season Finale.” Entertainment Weekly, 23 Nov. 2022. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[14.] Abbate, Jake. “Andor Did Not Use The Mandalorian’s StageCraft Technology.” SuperHeroHype, 2 Aug. 2022. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[15.] “How ‘Andor’ Rewrote the Rules of Star Wars, ‘We Changed What’s Possible.’” The Times, 2025. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[16.] “How ‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Added a French Planet to the ‘Star Wars’ Galaxy.” Le Monde, 7 May 2025. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
[17.] Set Decorators Society of America. “Andor, Season 2, Interview with Set Decorator Rebecca Alleway and Production Designer Luke Hull.” SDSA, 2025. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.
Footnotes in the article text should reference these entries as bracketed numerals, for example [1.], matching the numbering above.
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