(500) Days of Summer|Bradbury Building — the atrium where the last day begins

The film ends where Tom finally stops waiting. He has quit greeting cards, drawn buildings instead, and turned up for an architecture interview in a lobby that looks like sunlight poured into a birdcage. The woman sitting beside him in the corridor asks if they have met. Her name turns out to be Autumn.

That corridor is real, and it is one of the most photographed interiors in America. The Bradbury Building opened at Third and Broadway in 1893, financed by a mining millionaire who died before it was finished and designed largely by George Wyman, a draughtsman with no architecture degree who reportedly took the job after consulting a planchette board. From the street it is a modest brown-brick block. Step through the doors and a five-storey court opens overhead under a glass roof, wrapped in French wrought iron, Mexican floor tile, Belgian marble and two open-cage lifts that still crawl up their shafts.

Access is real but limited: the lobby and the first landing are open to the public most days during business hours, usually from mid-morning, free, with a guard who will ask you to stay off the upper floors because working tenants are up there. Go on a clear morning. The building was designed around light, and by midday the iron throws its own lattice across the tiles.

Tom's interview scene is the one moment in the film where he is not performing. The room helps. It is very hard to keep telling yourself a story about fate while standing under a ceiling that was built by a man who guessed.

Location photo: Wikimedia Commons, free licence.