Andor, the live-action Star Wars prequel series created by Tony Gilroy and starring Diego Luna, concluded its second and final season last month. Spanning the years prior to the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the series has garnered massive praise from Star Wars fans and critics alike for its deft storytelling, stirring lead performances, and majestic setpieces.
This is especially true in the show’s second season, which sees the former thief-turned-rebel-fighter on the run for his life while working as an agent saboteur and covert operative for Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), a spymaster laying the groundwork for what will eventually become the rebel alliance first glimpsed in the original Star Wars. From the wafting wheat fields of Mina-Rau and the cosmopolitan grandeur of the Ghorman Plaza, to the sprawling ecumenopolis of Coruscant, every location feels as lived-in as it is visually breathtaking.
Coruscant, in particular, takes on renewed resonance in Andor season two. First glimpsed on-screen in a scene added to the 1997 re-release of Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, the capital of the Galactic Republic and later Empire appears much as it did in the prequel trilogy—a bricolage of glittering skyscrapers, Brutalist support columns, and endless lanes of hovercrafts tracing the sky like ley lines of iridescent silver—albeit rendered with a more practical heft and tactile depth than in any incarnation seen before.
Andor’s take on Coruscant took inspiration from many real-life architectural sights, specifically the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain. “In the middle of season one [of Andor], I sort of identified certain architectural styles that would work for Coruscant like Santiago Calatrava and Zaha Hadid,” Andor production designer Luke Hull told io9. “I did a big location scouting trip before we went into production for season two, just to buildings I always found interesting and had good shape language for Star Wars. That took me to Paris, to Barcelona and Madrid, and even Portugal, and we looked at Valencia as well. So it was kind of a little bit of a weird European road trip, some of which was kind of a good reference, and some of which was like, ‘Wow, I wish we could film here,’ but we’re not sure what [Andor season two] was yet. And then some of it was like, ‘Okay, this really has the bones of something ‘Upper Coruscant’ about it,’ which is what I thought Valencia had.”
Designed by Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela, the futuristic 350,000-square-meter educational and cultural complex was built along the dry bed of the old Turia River, which was drained and diverted following a flood which devastated the nearby city in 1957. The project broke ground in 1991, with the first building, the Hemesferic—Spain’s largest cinema and planetarium—opening in 1998. The complex was expanded over the next decade, with the most recent building, the Agora Plaza, completed in 2009.
“With this location in Valencia, you could just walk around in every corner of it, [and it] looked like Coruscant,” ILM visual effect supervisor Mohen Leon said in an interview for StarWars.com. “We ended up shooting so much and it perfectly meshed into our whole approach of trying to ground everything in locations, and then just enhance and augment them. So this location specifically really felt very upscale and formal in a way that you could believe that this could be government offices.”
Fans of Andor will recognize the Prince Felipe Science Museum, a large building buffeted by large skeletal rib-like columns, as one of the centerpieces of the plaza adjourning the Imperial Senate Building, particularly for its appearance in season two’s ninth episode, where Cassian Andor is tasked with rescuing Senator Mon Mothma from being arrested by the ISB.
The Senate plaza wasn’t the only location based on the City of Arts and Science, however, as two more locations—Davo Sculdun’s palatial skyscraper seen in episode six and the final meeting place of Luthen Rael and his ISB mole Lonni Jung—were based on the Queen Sofia Palace of the Arts and the adjourning Montolivet Bridge, respectively.
“We knew we were going to only use up to a certain point on the plaza for the Senate anyway,” Hull told io9. “Because we were going to put the Senate offices, basically, where the building was that we ultimately used for Davo Sculdun’s building, we replaced that with the Senate offices. So then we were like, well, this building is up for grabs.”
Hull added, “I just really loved this idea that you could treat the bit at the front [of the Queen Sofia Palace of the Arts] as a sort of landing pad. You really feel all of Coruscant around you as you kind of bring the limo down. It’s very glamorous and Bond-esque to kind of arrive that way and then also be able to see the partygoers through the glass from outside. It’s kind of rare that you get this opportunity. I love filming on location anyway, but I’ve always fought very hard to try and film on location because I do think it gives us scope that CGI can’t give. CGI can give scale, but it can’t give scope all the time.”
The same fastidious level of attention was also given to the costume designs of the people within the Senate. Michael Wilkinson, the costume designer for Andor, worked hand in hand with Hull to craft clothing for the senators and staff that felt grounded with complexity and reality.
“[Coruscant] is a really good example, because you have so many different types of people at the Senate, and the audience has to very quickly understand who’s who and who’s doing what,” Wilkinson told io9. “So we have senators at the very top of the pyramid; they’re from all different corners of the galaxy and represent lots of different cultures. So we had to sort of try and express that through their clothing. Then you have the people that sort of work at the Senate; the more bureaucratic people, the senator’s aides, the people who help run the Senate, so they have a very different type of costume as well, nothing quite as grand as the senators, a little bit more like the Star Wars equivalent of an everyday corporate look. Then we had Senate security, so they needed a uniform, and then we also had the journalists and the people from the outside world that have come to report about the things that are happening at the Senate.”
Andor isn’t the only sci-fi series to feature Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences. The campus has been indelibly embedded within the visual lexicon of modern science fiction, with appearances in such shows as Westworld as the exterior of DELOS headquarters and in the 2017 episode “Smile” of Doctor Who. It also appeared on the big screen Brad Bird’s 2015 sci-fi drama Tomorrowland.
When asked why he thinks why the City of Arts and Sciences exerts such a powerful influence on the collective imagination of artists and directors alike, Hull was quick to credit the scope and diversity of Calatrava’s vision for the complex’s structure. “It’s just so innately science fiction, and there’s the scale of it,” Hull said. “The scale is monumental. It’s a very coherent, encapsulated vision. There’s a lot to play with. It’s not just one building, and it’s so rare to find that. For our purposes, I really felt it just embodied some of Star Wars’ visual language. I mean, everything Calatrava designs looks like it’s from the future, so it’s sort of inherently going to attract that sort of type of filmmaking and in order to tell those types of stories.”While writing this piece, I learned that a group of Spanish Star Wars fans met up at the City of Arts and Sciences to celebrate May the Fourth in 2005, mere days before the theatrical premiere of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith and nearly 20 years before the campus itself would appear in Andor. Knowing that, it feels like nothing short of an act of the Force to see Calatrava’s masterpiece finally make its appearance in a galaxy far, far away.
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