All photos: Jaap Buitendijk for Architectural Digest.

This Friday, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the year’s most highly anticipated film and the seventh and final installment of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, will be released, thus ending one of the largest and longest running film cycles in cinematic history. We tend to think that some of the films’ most magical moments come in the form of the architecture populating Rowling’s uchronic world. Of course we’re excited for all the drama, dueling, bombastic music-visual cues, and gratuitous yelling to unfold onscreen in gloriously rendered images and surround sound, but we’re just as thrilled about seeing all the new set constructions, picking out architectural changes made to the Hogwarts castle and grounds, and pondering the structural integrity of the Shrieking Shack.

Click through for photos of our favorite Harry Potter sets!

Gringott’s Wizarding Bank.

Now, Architectural Digest has an interview with Academy Award–winning production designer Stuart Craig, who was responsible for realizing the look and feel of the Harry Potter universe, from the whimsically narrow and bending chimneys of Hogsmeade to the inane anonymity of No. 4 Privet Drive to the ornate, but cold Gothic halls of Hogwarts. After a decade of planning, building, and filming, Craig discusses how his team inevitably assembled an archive of old sets and used materials, most of which were re-purposed and applied to newer sets and constructions. He also talks about how the design of Hogwarts ebbed and flowed with the different visions of each new director (of which the eight-part film series had four), with new capricious additions added for one scene of one film, only to disappear in subsequent entries.

Of his work, which blends several seemingly incongruous architectural styles into an appealing, albeit tragic, aesthetic, Craig says, ”I love architecture, and I regard myself as a kind of architect—an architect that works in plywood, but nothing more substantial than that. We try to get the detail absolutely right. In a building as complex as Hogwarts, however, the mix of periods is absolutely permissible.”

[via Architectural Digest]

Inside the Room of Requirement.

Dumbledore’s Office at Hogwart’s.

One of the catwalks upon which Harry and Voldemort face off.

Fleur and Bill’s seashell cottage.

Honeyduke’s, in Hogsmeade.

[via Architectural Digest]

by Samuel Medina

posted in Archifilms Uncategorized news

tagged film architecture, Harry Potter, set design, the Deathly Hallows

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