Downtown Atlanta contains very little brick and mortar. A westward view of the city’s skyline—the same image used in the opening credits of TV’s The Walking Dead—reveals this Southern capital’s history at a glance: It burned to the ground in the Civil War and was rebuilt as a transportation hub filled with pulsating veins of highways and eager Fortune 500 companies. A construction boom during the Reagan years gave the ATL shiny buildings buttressed by tons of cement, creating an army of concrete and glass in a landscape practically devoid of the past. Now, the city is crawling with movie producers looking for backdrops for their science-fiction thrillers, further bolstering Atlanta's growing reputation as futuristic cinema's go-to city.

Over the course of a century, the sci-fi genre invited viewers to travel through space and to dwell in the urban centers of tomorrow. A quaint cardboard rocket went to the moon in the 1902 silent film Le Voyage dans La Lune; the largest soundstage in Europe housed the models that became space stations and death stars in 1977’s Star Wars; and in 1999, The Matrix combined next-level special effects with airborne action, upping the ante for how characters interact with architecture on film. Today, film editors use software to build up and tear down entire civilizations in a matter of keystrokes without leaving their desks. Yet one architect’s work is luring movie franchises such as The Hunger Games and Divergent to the rooftops of Atlanta, where forty-year-old buildings—and computer-generated environments—are locked in a pixelated power struggle.

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