Miami Vice and Violent Architectural Drawings
As the boundaries of the Architecture discipline are increasingly contested against, subsumed by, and merged with the emerging digital and imaginative realms, the bulwarks of the field revolve around a set of key drawings and imagery – plans, sections, elevations, axonometric views, renderings. The perseverance of the capital-A (A-rchitecture) is rooted in the obsession with how the key imagery is rethought, reinvented, perverted and re-shifted. The digital game space is a subject of design. Hence, it operates within a similar framework of representation and finds itself in tension and obsession with the architectural diagram. My architect friend works long days in the office drafting plans and elevations. They also play videogames avidly. At night they close the architectural software Rhino & Autocad and open other drawing editors, still clicking, scrolling, rotating, zooming in modeled spaces. Let’s follow their set of deliverables.
The Plan
Hotline Miami deals with a top-down view of hotels, cafes, bowling bars, offices where Jacket (the protagonist) is chasing Russian mafia. Jacket wakes up in his 13’’ x 13’’ bedroom, leans four feet towards the coffee table, and stands on the soft pink rug stretching from the sofa to the TV set. He runs out through the perfectly-sized 80”x36” door to grab his gun and turns left to take the double flight of stairs down to the lobby. Now Jacket is in a standard 50-person capacity cafeteria, with service, dining, and kitchen areas perfectly split by 0.5-feet thick bearing walls, with perfectly spaces and positioned beams. Jacket pushes the door – it strictly never opens against the evacuation route – and runs into the bathroom with perfectly spaced toilets and sinks. The bathroom entrance and the food service area are properly separated, and the egress space is fine-tuned. Ah, and standard red tiling highlights the service area and the bathroom spaces. By the way, the kitchen area is positioned against the bathrooms so that they share water supply. In the corner of the café, another sofa and a desk enclose a waiting area, three people per couch, two letter-sized documents on the table. The sharpness of the perfect Neufert-style code compliance grotesquely faces off with the aggression of a shooter. The aggressive clicking in a sprawling aggregation of mixed-use quarters blends with Revit late-night project deadlines as the CAD monkey aggressively leaps through program areas in the ultimate quest: expanding Junkspace.
The Section
‘Show the material, show the line thickness, show the depth’ –the architecture critic exclaims as they indoctrinate the student to make a first attempt at a section. The student struggles to slice the model in half and figure out what is cut, visible, and covered. At the end of the procedure, a shy and uncertain drawing comes to life where, indeed, the concrete slab is 0.5 mm thicker than the window panel. A senior student takes a step further and shows mounts, sills, beams, the sunpath, energy-efficient façades with water evaporation routes, arrows, etc. There comes a bit of fog, some distance skewing, a background wall, bouquets of textures and façade details, brickwork. Now, we are in Katana Zero - where the section is enriched with spikes, lava, bonus coins, flights of stairs, enemy creatures lurking on the second floor, elevators, cannons, spring mechanisms, water wheels. Leap, twist, revolve around, shatter the ceiling to fly out and land, don’t get into the vent. The shaft is just wide enough for you not to fall in. Forget about the sad 0.5-mm line – the thickness of the carpet is carefully laid on the slightly polished laminated floor, resting on a cracked concrete slab. Above, the light fixture softy joins the ceiling plate, and a pixel-wide cable disappears into the dark of the circulation below the exhaust HVAC vent. Next goes the rebar, and the roof tiles, and the murky night sky. If you are not sure how the roof assembly works, this could be a place to start. The light power density is fine-tuned to provide dramatic shading to the main chamber, and the dramatic shadows and light spots fall onto the paneled wall, reflecting together with the light from a mounted candle. Note the signs highlighting the circulation between the floors, communication between the levels, evacuation and attack routes. In a matter of seconds, the space is traversed both in length and depth.
The Isometric View
The Sims and the Sim City construct a modifiable, crisp, and appealing system of enclosures, passages, and transgressions. Pastel furniture and rigid domestic objects perfectly spaced against the customized walls, rigid windows, and cookers dictate a fully-controlled order of hyper-comfort. Every single item encapsulated into the isometric grid is thoroughly documented in the BIM system – its cost, expiration date, bonus points and light effects echo in the resonance of a mega-smart house within a modern metropolis. The player exercises a perverse act of architectural programming, a top-down orchestration of the daily life of its citizens, with their data collected and monitored and their lifestyles directed as they evolve. The soothing appeal of the perfectly-cut grass, well-aligned bushes and lights, sterile-clean swimming pool enclosed by the chamfered façade. Zooming out of the Freedomland, we are in the grand strategy master-planning mode, hungry for the expansion of the tightly carved land lots with more and more units joining the interconnected system.
Screenshots of Sim City layered over Health Hazards of YSOA by Winston Yuen and Christopher Tritt
The Perspective
To top it off, we need some sentiment, exaltation, and nice views to show to the client. To make Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the Rockstar game studio traveled to Miami and documented the city in a Venturi-like fashion by wandering the streets and dropping in the bars. They are interested in car chases, helicopter flights, motorbike races, and boat rides across the neon-filled, mad city of Vice, lit by God rays, populated with ornate textures, exotic vegetation, and ludicrous characters. Some particular landmarks – the Colony hotel, the Miami Herald Headquarters, the Washington Mall – are fully modeled and situated in the Vice City context yet amplified, exaggerated, saturated with neon lights, psychedelic sounds from the radio stations, taller palms, grotesque names, self-assertive ads. The windows of the Ocean drive hotel face directly below the lush garden against a yellow Cadillac and two security guards in lilac suites. Finally, a red pulsating portal encloses the player into its flames as they enter the hotel. As Tommy Vercetti murders Ricardo Gonzalez and acquires his mansion, the beauty of the colonial-style palace comes to perfect view behind the downtown panorama, and the multibillion-dollar account is clicking as Tommy’s capital flows into the site. In between, we hear the old-school laugh- and through the thick smoke of the cigar, Tommy’s real-estate developer pokes his face from the leather seat of his limousine.
The Big Disclaimer
As much as gaming realms are representatively architectural, the architectural discipline itself is not a game because of the inherent real-world responsibilities tied to the architect. As much as the obsession with doors, passages, open and closed spaces pours into the imaginary realm, the light-hearted proliferation of architectural drawings on steroids rather shows what the practice is not about.
One agreed benefit of videogames, particularly shooters, is a certain release of violence, diversion of attention away from the mundane and a mental unload through the abstracted space of movement, operation, and hyper-unreal acts of interaction. The Plan, the Axon, The Perspective, and The Rendering all embed their own hyper-unrealistic architectural violence – violence of crazy sprawling code mixed with bloodsheds, the violence of hyper-programmed lifestyle, and the violence of obsession with expensive and lush imagery. What does my friend make of this form of representation? Hopefully, they play videogames to release their architectural violence and obsession with representation and come back to the office next morning ready for deliberate, careful, responsible and attentive design work.
Sources:
“Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.” Computer software. Rockstar Games, October 27, 2002.
“Hotline Miami.” Computer software. Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin, October 23, 2012.
“The Sims.” Computer software. Maxis, February 4, 2000.
“The Sim City.” Computer software. Will Wright, February 2, 1989
“Katana Zero.” Computer software. Askiisoft, October 15, 2020