Architecture in Star Wars includes the cities, buildings, ships, and other structures of the fictional Star Warsuniverse as described and depicted in books, movies, comics, and cartoons. Architects Journal ranked the top 10, including the Death Star and the Jedi Temple. Comparing the urban and natural environments pictured in Star Wars, Mark Lamster wrote that the cities are places of danger and corruption, while the forces of good find sanctuary in the natural world. He also describes the "retro-futurist" cities in the series as being in between those extremes and places of "great beauty but dubious moral character." He attributes the ambivalence towards urbanity to series creator George Lucas' own feelings about cities and urban environments. The settings of the movie have generally been praised, but one author took exception to the "anachronistic period architecture and statuary" of , saying it improperly associated third world buildings with conceptions of innocence and the primitive in a way that was discriminatory and demeaning.
Planet settings
is first seen in living with his adoptive parents in a "complex of caves and domed structures" on Tatooine, filmed in the Tunisian desert town of Matmata. The end of the first movie was shot in the Guatemalan rain forest where a celebration with rebel allies takes place in a caved area. The exotic locales provide scenery that is unfamiliar to "all but a few experts in non-western architecture", providing the films with fantastic settings that could still be believable.
Urban planning
Three architecture and planning students noted that the "latest" Star Wars movie ' offered "a variety of urban development options" in a San Diego Union-Tribune story headlined "How would you like to live on a Star Wars' world?" The article included illustrations of Coruscant, including views from the Jedi Council building, and the city ofTheed. On Coruscant, "development extends miles below the surface of the city and up into the clouds." The "urban future" has also been depicted in Blade Runner where "the setting is a grimy, crime-ridden Los Angeles in the 21st century". The architecture of Star Wars may also have been influenced by Stanley Kubrick's'. The designs continued Lucas' work from his first feature film, THX 1138, which featured a claustrophobic, Orwellian "subterranean world of black-and-white spaces" where the population is subdued with drugs and kept under constant surveillance.
Architects' Journal rated the Jedi Temple third on its top-ten architecture of Star Wars list behind the second Death Star and Jabba the Hutt’s palace on Tatooine, and ahead of Coruscant, capital city of the Old Republic. The temple is described in the article as adapting "the robust typology of Mayan temples, with durasteel cladding specified for the external stone walls for improved defensive strength" and said to be a ziggurat that "is built above a Force-nexus and has ample room for training facilities, accommodation and the Jedi Archive." The temple has five towers—the tallest is Tranquillity Spire—that are stylistically similar to the minarets surrounding the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Star Wars Insider listed it as the 100th greatest thing about Star Wars in its 100th-issue special.
Ships
The battle cruisers featured in Star Wars have been described as examples of "Suprematist architecture".
