Italian architect Carlo Scarpa is one of those architects you might study at university. 

His incredible material detail and sense of celebration in design comes from his home city of Venice, and has always felt beyond the everyday. 

One of his master designs, the Brion Tomb (1978) made a star cameo in the latest blockbuster Dune: Part Two.

It's the scene(s) where the Bene Gesserit witches meet with the imperial princess Irulan in the garden and chambers of the Corrino home, which appears about 40 minutes into the film.

Its recognisable double moon gate windows, richly coloured ceramic tile trim, textured finish, and the stone that surrounds it all, are as beautiful today as the day they were finished.

The tomb is instantly recognisable to anyone who has studied architecture, but perhaps not to most people — until now, that is.

Of course, it's not the first time an audience has learnt about a celebrity architect's work through a blockbuster movie. But that's the point — so many architectural ideas make their way into our popular cultural imagination, not through the design press, but by stealth in movies and TV, becoming part of our visual and design cultural catalogue.

In the movies, we expect to see the landmark buildings that locate us in, or transport us to, a place, city or country; think the Empire State Building in New York (King Kong, The Day After Tomorrow or Oblivion) or the Opera House in Sydney (The Fall Guy and Anyone But You).

But it's the next tier of buildings that star in movies that are perhaps more interesting.

What buildings tell us on screen

So does architecture 'speak'? Yes – and we've been trained through the movies and TV to listen when it does. 

It's a cultural language we're now well trained to quickly pick up on, there are a couple of ways in which architecture does this.

First is architecture as a scene or backdrop. 

In the case of Downton Abbey, for example, the architecture tells us the period, the style and the 'class' of the protagonists in the drama and importantly sets the expectations for behaviour of the protagonists within the film. 

Think of the Russian Spy TV series The Americans, and how the premise of pretending to be 'normal Americans' relied so much on the average house these Russian infiltrators took up residence in.

Or the Grand Budapest Hotel, where nothing is 'normal' and of course a superb Wes Andersen adventure takes place.

The second tell is where architecture is actually a protagonist itself. 

In Amityville Horror, or any haunted house horror, the house is more an actor than a background. 

The buildings take on a persona that is central to the narrative.

And finally, there is architecture as a metaphor or index for the action. 

As the film progresses, the locations speak to the drama unfolding; metaphors of relationships falling apart as a city falls into ruin, for example. Or cities being 'folded' in Inception just like the minds of the key figures bending as they go deeper into their dreams.

Iconic architecture in pop culture

I was introduced to the famous Sheats-Goldstein house by architect John Lautner as the living room of a porn mogul in The Big Lebowski, where 'The Dude' (Jeff Bridges) abided for a brief moment.

The house, one of the most celebrated Los Angeles homes of the late mid-century, was donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by James Goldstein in 2016.

The coffered ceilings, hand-made by Lautner with glass jars embedded in the concrete to let in points of light, the dramatic triangular roof folding out from the internal courtyard to project over the pool into the view beyond, is unmissable. 

It's more impressive in person, but its impact in the scenes in the movie is as much cultural as it is architectural.

Once you start to see famous and not-so-famous architecture in the movies, it only adds to the enigmatic quality of the designs. 

Perhaps the ideas were so strong in the original architecture they organically found their way into the eternal life of film. 

Perhaps these were ideas that were so far ahead of their time when they were built, that it's only now, in the exaggerated spaces of the movies, where culture is ready for them.

More likely they are just so out of the ordinary that their visual power and cultural load transcends any one medium.

It's interesting to note that there are people whose job it is to source these locations, and in that sense, a whole second life of architecture exists for some of our most inspiring buildings.

But what the movies tell us is that architecture is a medium for storytelling, as much as a place to live or a home for a family.

So next time you're at the movies, take a moment to think of the architecture that sets the scene; the power of design to shape culture, not just space, and architecture's ability to speak to us … and the design education you're enjoying without realising it!

Anthony Burke is a professor of architecture and the host of ABC iview's Grand Designs Australia.