Marcel Breuer’s Meister Hall stages bad bunny’s nuevayol video
In Bad Bunny’s recently released NUEVAYoL music video, the Puerto Rican artist stages a festive quinceañera at one of New York City’s Brutalist icons: Marcel Breuer’s Meister Hall. Designed in the late 1950s as an extension to the Bronx Community College campus, the lesser-known structure is recognizable for its rugged concrete surfaces, angular geometries, and stripped-back material palette. It was built originally as part of a Cold War-era campus plan, demonstrating a structural clarity and massing that typifies Breuer’s architectural language, with intricately textured details echoed in the other 3 Breuer-designed campus buildings.
The video transforms various planes of the architecture’s austerity into a richly stylized backdrop celebrating Latin culture. It opens with waiters tiered cakes being wheeled across the terraced plaza and pans through dark interiors, their ribbed concrete detailing and ambient lighting adding theatrical texture. At one point, Bad Bunny appears dwarfed against the vastness of the facade as he stands atop a cantilevered overhang, his teal suit and casual posture cut against the harsh modernism in a moment that feels both ironic and nostalgic.
NUEVAYoL is just one example of how musicians have utilized architectural landmarks to play a central role in their visual storytelling, drawing from their drama, scale, or symbolism to enhancing the mood, meaning, and cultural texture of their work. From Harry Styles running through the Barbican Estate’s labyrinthine walkways to Solange perched atop Robert Bruno’s almost alien Steel House, here are some standout music videos where iconic structures have played a starring role.
NUEVAYoL, Bad Bunny | image via YouTube
Bronx Community College — Marcel Breuer building | image by Enki323 via Wikimedia Commons
Jalousie by Angèle at Oscar Niemeyer’s french communist party headquarters in paris
In Jalousie, Belgian pop singer Angèle dances through the futuristic, wave-like halls and circular corridors, and plush, confined interiors of Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris. Completed in 1971, the building is one of Niemeyer’s few European projects and bears his unmistakable touch with sweeping curves, stark concrete forms, and sensual, organic geometries that break from the rigidity of traditional office architecture. Most iconic is the domed subterranean meeting hall, an otherworldly, white sculptural void, which appears in the video as a stage of mirrored movement.
Niemeyer, a lifelong communist and master of Brasília’s monumental language, envisioned the building as a democratic space with undulating surfaces that seem to reject hierarchy altogether. Niemeyer’s belief in democratic openness is given a surreal, almost pop twist, reinforcing the song and video’s themes of emotional duplicity and reflection.
Jalousie, Angèle | image via YouTube
the dome of Espace Niemeyer | image via Espace Niemeyer
As It Was by harry styles at london’s Barbican center
Harry Styles’ As It Was is choreographed across several memorable London locations including the Royal Horticultural Halls and the London Zoo’s former penguin pool. A somewhat melancholic reflection on change, loss, and love, earlier scenes depict the singer walking across an endlessly looping platform before he runs out through the concrete expanse of the Barbican Centre. It is one of London’s most iconic examples of Brutalist architecture, designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon and completed in the early 1980s atop a post-war bomb site to form a self-contained neighborhood with cultural and residential facilities.
As It Was, Harry Styles | image via YouTube
Intriguing in both scale and form, the Barbican appears almost fortress-like — its exposed concrete surfaces, elevated walkways, and maze-like structure forming a complex and imposing environment in central London. The design draws on Le Corbusier’s modernist ideals, layered with Roman, Mediterranean, and Scandinavian references, and was envisioned as a hopeful post-war symbol of renewal. Its visual austerity seems to mirror the sentimental undercurrents of As It Was, a song that sounds upbeat but carries a sense of longing. Styles’ barefoot sprint through the Barbican in the final moments, gleefully smiling, in this sense reads as an ambiguous release of maybe joy, or maybe acceptance.
Barbican Sculpture Court | image by Max Colson, via Barbican
I Dare you by the xx at lloyd wright’s Sowden House and john lautner’s rainbow house
The XX’s I Dare You is as much a love letter to Los Angeles as it is a moody portrait of youth, filmed across two iconic houses tied to Southern California’s modernist history. The first is the Sowden House, designed in 1926 by Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright. Known for its Mayan Revival style, the house is characterized by a dramatic geometry, with its facade of textile blocks with jagged edges, a central courtyard framed by theatrical colonnades, and interiors saturated with shadow and mystique.
I Dare You, The XX | image via YouTube
the Sowden House by Frank Lloyd Wright | image via The Sowden House
Equally striking is the Rainbow House by John Lautner, a longtime apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright and a major figure of expressive mid-century design. The house’s name comes from its sweeping rainbow-shaped roofline and the vivid, multicolored glass panels that throw colored light across the interiors. Both locations serve as cinematic vessels in a nostalgic haze, the cinematography’s emotional undertones bridging minimalism and theatrical modernism through architectural design.
I Dare You, The XX | image via YouTube
image © Aaron Kirman
Outside by Injury Reserve at Paolo Soleri’s Acrosanti in arizona
Shot almost entirely at Arcosanti, Outside by Injury Reserve captures a posthuman eeriness that echoes the equally evocative and unconventional track. Designed by Paolo Soleri in the 1970s as a desert utopia, Arcosanti is a hand-built experimental micro-city that fuses architecture with ecology, its domes, vaults, and amphitheaters forming a strange harmony with the Arizona desert.
In the video, wide tracking shots and static frames highlight the vastness and emptiness of the complex, inside and out, built largely from poured concrete. In the video, the camera lingers on these monumental yet half-finished forms, such as vaulted corridors, sunlit terraces, exposed rebar, revealing a place caught between utopian ambition and gradual decay.
Outside, Injury Reserve | image via YouTube
the amphitheater at Arcosanti by Paolo Soleri | image by Jessica Jameson Photo, via The Cosanti Foundation
Cranes in the sky by solange at robert bruno’s Steel House, texas
Solange’s Cranes in the Sky is filmed across many scenic landscapes in the American Southwest, but one of its most unforgettable settings is Robert Bruno’s Steel House in Ransom Canyon, Texas. The artist appears atop its almost alien form as a small silhouette towards the end of the video, coinciding with the song’s emotional release. Perched on a cliff like a rusted spaceship, the house is made entirely of welded steel (around 110 tons of it), bent, sculpted, and slowly assembled by Bruno over more than three decades until his death in 2008. Part sculpture, part home, the structure features bulbous forms, curving tunnels, and oddly intimate window openings that frame panoramic views of the canyon below.
Cranes in the Sky, Solange | image via YouTube
Steel House by Robert Bruno
n95 by Kendrick Lamar at Fort Worth Water Gardens and Renzo Piano Pavilion at Kimbell Art Museum
Kendrick Lamar’s music video for N95, released during the pandemic, confronts societal structures of power, isolation, and virtue signaling. We see several modernist architectural locations from Texas activated as visual metaphors and cinematic stages to these conversations, moving between surreal montages and austere compositions, and monochrome vignettes and saturated overlays. The brutalist Fort Worth Water Gardens designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee in 1974, become a notable dramatic backdrop as we see Lamar descend a landscape of cascading concrete and water.
N95, Kendrick Lamar | image via YouTube
The scenes depict a rugged contrast between the raw built environment and the fluidity of the natural world, paralleling the ideas of exposure, vulnerability, and cleansing that N95 grapples with. In a more calculated counterpoint, Lamar takes to the stage in the quiet Renzo Piano Pavilion, illuminated as a silhouette as he plays a grand piano. A symphony of glass, concrete, wood, and steel, the space was designed as an extension to Louis Kahn’s original Kimbell Art Museum from the 1970s.
aereated pool of the Fort Worth Water Gardens, by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Fort Worth, Texas | image by Carol M. Highsmith, via Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons
N95, Kendrick Lamar | image via YouTube
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