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In contrast with the precision sought by the Gems, the human-built structures on the show are about change and growth, warts and all. “It’s real,” says Steven Sugar, the show’s lead background designer and brother of the series creator Rebecca Sugar. (He’s also the inspiration for the title character.) “There are wires, and pipes, and signs, and cracks in the sidewalks and that kind of thing. So it feels worn and it feels imperfect in a way that’s relatable.”

Beach City, the show’s primary locale, for example, is inspired by the three Delaware beaches that the siblings grew up going to. According to Steven Sugar, its look came together after multiple research trips during preproduction. It wasn’t enough to just copy the basics of any beach town. “One of my goals while working on these backgrounds has always been to really capture what makes those buildings look like that part of the East Coast,” he says. “There were certain things we tried to always fall back to, like the look of the trees and that kind of stuff. We always wanted to make sure that the sun was rising over the ocean in the East.”

Beyond the attention to detail, the town’s landscape reveals an internal logic that persists throughout the show. The viewer gets a good sense of what kind of place Beach City is: It’s perhaps more welcome-feeling and small-towny than the real-life spots it’s based on, but then again, it gets attacked by aliens a lot. The name of a blog on the show, Keep Beach City Weird (cribbed from the Austin slogan), feels right.

For the architectural centerpiece of the show, the creators went to a friend’s beach house, took reference photos, and studied them closely to create Steven’s home and the entrance to the Crystal Gems’ temple, a statue of a giant stone woman carved into a hillside. The result is a headquarters for the team and a domicile for Steven, who despite being part-Gem, needs to eat and sleep. The space is often flooded with light from three directions. All the shelving and seating are what Frank Lloyd Wright called “built-ins,” and the split-level roof is partly supported by a suspension system, opening the space below it by removing the need for columns. And it really is open: The various domains of the room overlap, including Steven’s lofted sleeping area. If he ever gets cold, Steven can use his version of a classic 1960s Malm fireplace.

The mid-century architects who first built homes like this were changing the idea of the “house” and its function. Le Corbusier wrote in 1927 that “a house is a machine for living in.” This idea, that a home should be built in accordance with the things you want to do in it, as opposed to just being a variation of the ideal house design, was a new concept. On Steven Universe, the house functions, just as Steven himself does, to integrate humans and Gems. Many episodes begin inside it or on the beach in front of it, and that’s where we see the main characters struggle with their self-images and evolving roles. In an extended version of the show’s theme song made for the web, viewers learn that the Crystal Gems and Greg, Steven’s dad, built the space when Steven was ready to come live with the Gems: The alien warriors, each thousands of years old, adjusted their lives to raise a little boy. The house—in all its hybridity, whether as a staging ground for Gem fights or familial meeting place—facilitates its inhabitants’ development throughout the show.