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 originally built 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 tiered cakes being wheeled across the terraced plaza and pans through dark interiors, their ribbed concrete detailing and ambient lighting adding theatrical texture to the track. 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 scene 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 enhance the mood, meaning, and cultural layer 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, we’ve rounded up 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, circular corridors, and plush, confined interiors of Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris. Completed in 1971, the building bears Niemeyer’s unmistakable touch with sweeping curves, stark concrete forms, and sensual, organic geometries that here break from the rigidity of traditional institutional 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. His 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.