20 Things You Somehow Missed In Die Hard
4. Frank Lloyd Wright's Work
Most of Die Hard was actually filmed on location at Fox Plaza, including sequences that you might not otherwise have thought possible.
One of the few sets constructed were the executive offices on the 30th floor of the building, including the impressive atrium, which resembles a garden complete with a waterfall.
Production designer, Jackson De Govia based the impressive communal space on Frank Lloyd Wright's impressive organically designed Fallingwater, which was built as a weekend home for a Pittsburgh-based businessman and his family in 1935. The house is located in Stewart Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania and is one of Wright's definitive works, sitting over a waterfall. Although it has inspired sequences in many films before and since (most notably as James Mason's house in Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film, North by Northwest), Fallingwater is quite fitting as an inspiration for this film's design, as Wright had an affection for Japanese architecture.
Additionally, followers of Frank Lloyd Wright will recognise his unfulfilled "Butterfly Bridge" project, which he proposed as a second Bay Bridge for San Francisco in the offices of Nakatomi's head executive, Joseph Yoshinobu Takagi (James Shigeta); indeed, it is the model that Hans Gruber remarks so fondly upon.