You never forget your first Lynch. Mine was Dune (1984), that gorgeous, confounding mess of a film that somehow managed to be both a critical failure and a masterclass in architectural fever dreams. Years later, while poring over the works of Hans Poelzigthat mad genius of German ExpressionismI discovered something that made perfect sense: Lynch had borrowed heavily from Poelzigs subterranean Groes Schauspielhaus for the Emperors throne room. Of course he had. Who else but Lynch would look at a 1919 Berlin theater renovation and think, Yes, this is exactly what space feudalism should look like? The thing about Lynchs spaces is that they were never just settingsthey were characters themselves, brooding and breathing entities that seemed to exist independently of the stories they contained. Take Blue Velvet (1986), which I first experienced through an appropriately Lynchian act of teenage rebellion. I hid in the exit stairwell in the front of a theater at Baybrook Mall in Houston, waiting in that dark, smelly space while one audience filed out and another filed in, the coming attractions reels spinning above. When I finally emerged to take my seat, it felt like I had stepped through one of Lynchs own portalswhich, considering what I was about to witness, seemed perfectly appropriate.The seedy underbelly of Lumberton unfolded before me like a nightmare dollhouse, each room more suffocating than the last. In the apartment of Dorothy Vallens, who was played by Isabella Rossellini, shadows seemed to move of their own accord. And then theres The Slow Club, where Dorothy sang Blue Velvet under lights that rendered everything in hyperreal, oversaturated tonesa world more vivid than reality itselfand where Lynch performed his first great act of pop cultural alchemy, transforming tender Roy Orbison love songs like In Dreams into something menacing and strange, a trick he would repeat years later in Mulholland Drive (2001) when Rebekah del Rio sings Crying on a dimly lit stage.My introduction to Lynchs earlier work came through an equally strange confluence of pop culture. I first learned about Eraserhead (1977) through, of all things, a Rush music video. There it was, the movies poster, hanging in the background of their Tom Sawyer promo clip, like some sort of secret handshake between different forms of weird. It was fitting: Lynch had a way of seeping into the margins of mainstream culture, leaving his fingerprints in the most unexpected places. Lynch understood something fundamental about architecture that can elude even the best filmmakers: Spaces arent neutral containers for actiontheyre active participants in our psychodrama. The Brutalist geometries of Dunes Giedi Prime werent just set dressing; they were manifestations of the Harkonnens industrial evil, all sharp angles and steamy hardtop that seemed to want to hurt you just by looking at them. And what about Twin Peakss Red Room? Those curtains and chevron floors created a space that existed somewhere between a theater and a nightmare, a waiting room for the subconscious.I remember my freshman year of college, huddled around a TV set with friends, watching Twin Peaks unfold week after week. Angelo Badalamentis theme music, with its dark, reverb-soaked country-western tones, didnt just accompany the imagesit created the space, sonic architecture that seemed to extend the physical dimensions of the screen into something vast and unknowable. Thats what Lynch did better than anyone: He understood that space isnt just visual; its auditory, its emotional, its our subconscious. Its almost funny now to think about how Lynch approached interior design like a deranged architect. Every space in his films felt both meticulously planned and somehow wrong, as if theyd been designed by someone whod only heard about human habitation through an elaborate game of telephone or read plans though glasses with wrong prescriptions. The Palmer house in Twin Peaks, with a seemingly normal suburban layout, somehow managed to feel more disquieting than any haunted mansion. The way Lynch lit those spaces, and the way he moved his camera through them, was like watching architecture have a slow, deliberate nervous breakdown.And then there were the transitional spacesthe hallways, the curtained passages, the roads that seemed to lead nowhere and everywhere at once. Lost Highways endless dark roads, Mulhollands sinuous curves, even Eraserheads industrial wasteland corridorsthese werent just connections between places, they were liminal spaces where reality itself seemed to break down. Lynch understood that the scariest thing about any building isnt the room youre in, but the hallway leading to the room you cant see yet. Whats particularly remarkable about Lynchs architectural sensibility was how he managed to make even the most mundane spaces feel charged with potential energy. A coffee shop in Twin Peaks became a stage for cosmic drama, and New York, in a 1991 anti-littering ad for the Citys Department of Sanitation, became a haunted, rat-infested trash heap. A suburban street (and close-up shot of technicolor flowers in front of an iconic white fence) in Blue Velvet held secrets that would make Freud clutch his own overanalyzed pearls. He had this uncanny ability to take the familiarwhether it was a space, a pop song, or a slice of cherry pieand twist it just enough to make it deeply, profoundly unsettling. It wasnt about making things scaryit was about making them wrong in a way you couldnt quite put your finger on.Lynchs Expressionist sensibilities go far beyond that Poelzig-inspired throne room in Dune. You can see echoes of it everywhere, like in the distorted perspectives, the dramatic use of light and shadow, and the way architecture seems to reflect psychological states rather than physical reality. Watch The Elephant Man (1980), a nod to Carol Reeds monochrome dramas from the 1940s, and at the same time infused with a hoary mise en scne straight out of Charles Dickenss Bleak House (1853). Whatever the inspiration, Lynch wasnt just copying a stylehe was metabolizing it, processing it through his uniquely American optic to create something entirely new.Looking back at Lynchs body of work now, its clear that he wasnt just making films: He was one our best world-builders, architect and dream-maker rolled into one. Those gilded, Brutalist interiors of Dune, the tawdry bars of Blue Velvet, the iconic draped spaces of Twin Peakstheyre all rooms in the same vast, interconnected haunted house of the American psyche. Lynch wasnt just showing us these spaces; he was showing us how spaces shape us, haunt us, define us. He became, perhaps inadvertently, the master chronicler of late-modern Los Angeles. Though born in Montana, Lynch is undeniably one of Los Angeless own, his artistic DNA intertwined with the citys from his earliest works. His 1967 student film Six Men Getting Sick showed a passing flirtation with another SoCal talentthe conceptual artist John Baldessaribefore he developed his singular vision. He captured the citys essence not just in the fever dream of Mulholland Drive or the digital nightmare of Inland Empire, but in something as mundane as his daily weather reportsthose oddly comforting dispatches where hed announce the temperature and forecast with the same gravitas hed use for his surreal dream sequences. His spatial visions were so compelling that reality began to imitate them: Club Silencio in Paris, designed by Raphael Navot, sought to give form to Lynchs architectural nightmares, proving that his dreamscapes could breach the membrane between imagination and reality.Theres a bitter irony in learning that Lynch died of complications from emphysema while Los Angeles still sifts through the smoky, charred remains of the Palisades and Eaton fires. Its the kind of dark synchronicity that might have appeared in one of his filmsthe master conjurer of hazy dreams finally succumbing while his beloved city struggles to breathe. Perhaps thats the only way it could have ended for him. Lynch built his career on finding poetry in darkness, beauty in decay, meaning in confusion. He taught us that every exit might be an entrance, every ending a beginning, every silence pregnant with possibility. Silencio.Enrique Ramirez is a historian of art and architecture. He lives in Brooklyn.