An audio log in The Witness - found inside the Mountain, underneath a series of wall panels with sketches of concept art hung up - is a short lecture from Paul Cézanne on the nature of painting. In it, he relays his concept of the Motif in painting. Beginning by putting his hands together, he then remarks on two facts of his posture. The wholeness made by the clasp, and the coming-together of the different strands. Each finger, a unique piece, that must lock in perfect context with the rest. Like a bell, the entire object requires a total unity in order for a proper ring to sound when struck.
For quite some time, a certain uniformity in design was enforced. From Quake, forward until quite recently, game engines rendered 3D space using a binary space partition tree, which enforced a geometry composed of solid brushes - three dimensional convex shapes, and a game environment totally “sealed”, or enclosed, by these brushes. It led to a particular philosophy of design, seen even where it breaks, the seams where you find an open sky to be a hard border, an infinite vista to be capped with a solid wall and nothing but blackness beyond a noclip.
From this, a few characteristic markers of video game environments emerged, blocky environments with func_detail brushes added to give depth and weight to objects, props placed secondarily, like an interior decorator hired after the fact (as the workflow often works that way for simplicity, props are much easier to replace than brushes), the overall layout being subtly yoked to a grid and totally enclosed from any infinity.
A new set of characteristics began emerging too, after this was done away with. With engines like Unity and Unreal taking center stage as of late, where the brush is a thing of the past, all things are done with meshes - premade assets that are combined as finished products in the final program. Rather than the level being sculpted from nothing by the creator, a two step workflow takes precedence, where first each “thing” must be modeled and then worked through the steps of fitting it into the overall design. This can be seen parodied in the design of Getting Over It, where a mountain of junky assets are positioned against an infinite beyond. Lighting now comes from Beyond, a place that lasts forever, the void and the level are one in the same. This was the great invisible transformation of virtual architecture that happened recently - from enclosed geometric labyrinths to a sculpture garden floating in the void.
The Pipeline or Workflow began to take over as foundation in game creation. The 3D artist focuses on singular characters, known as entities in earlier technologies, that a second team of meta-artist recombines into the level, which are of course done through the channels defined beforehand by the programming team, large studios almost always having proprietary versions of every piece, from tools such as Maya to frameworks such as .NET or engines such as Unreal. This is in stark contrast to the piecemeal design of earlier games. The .BSP era and previously (speaking of the 2.5D Doom era) had all things done in pieces. Each part of the game can be carefully lifted from a neat bento-box packaging. The .WAD file contains sprites, scripts, sounds, levels, etc, all wrapped up in a lowest-level engine that turns all of the packaged data into the end product. This modularity made for a certain spirit, still seen to this day, as games that use modern renditions of this framework have the same form in their modding communities as the earliest Doom mods did, small cottage industries of specialists who prefer to replace one or another piece of the game, whatever they find themselves most comfortable with.
Workflows evolved, and as such, the final product did too. The connections of levels reached its limits in the Half Life school of thought - countless maps in Source having obtuse features such as invisible walls, doors that go nowhere, empty buildings, loading zones in the middle of hallways - all because they’re forcing a more fluid design to fit into the firm boxing-in of the first .BSP games, where Quake had each level named by code (E1M1), and was a unique file with an exact start and an exact end, loaded one by one in sequence. Today’s games often make use of the opposite, where the new engines allow for the open world game to become the standard over the linear. A wide flat plain works as sort of an extension of the Mario 64 school of design, that is, begin with an empty field bounded by sky, and then warp and shift it, while adding various playground-type features atop it. That game’s swings and slides and ramps evolved into Skyrim’s cities and dragons and mountains. Level design here shifted importantly, and the open world game over the more linear experience is a consequence of that, as games switched to working off more integrated and proprietary products of workflow - every piece fitting into its exact place and nothing else - over the modular system of pieces bounded by a small core.
Similar revolutions always occur in architecture, as the production of structures changes the forms of the structures. Even our modern constructions, supposedly alienated from the world around them, are contingent on conditions around them. An environment, whether considered “architecture” as it comes from human hands or “natural” as it comes from without, emerges, as a process of all things that flow into it. These individual structures too, are never in a vacuum, just as the digital ones cannot be via their technological limitations. A McMansion exists from the lawn, from the cul-de-sac, from the interstate, from the commute, from the horizontality of American cities, etc.
Whatever the era, many often rail against the final product, without understanding its function. A given environment exists after the fact, as an emergent property of the processes underlying it. Technological motion begets the final thing standing. The machines pack up, the game ships out, and its then given to entropy where it evolves further. The “final product” is a sort of apex where the processes acting upon it shift, from those of an earlier moment, where the economic and technological forces come together to produce it, cinching together at debut, where it’s then made into a piece of the world. A Dutch term for human-trod dirt paths through manicured lawns - “Elephant Paths” - where design was further warped by humans, as the planned carpet of grass turns into a path as tramped down as the sidewalks and paths cut near it.
And so goes the age old question of what makes architecture? The question here isn’t what it is, as one walks through a building and marvels like a child awe-struck by the logos he doesn’t know the references of, but what it does and what it is from. A given environment is nothing but a monument, a temporary verticality emerging from the flows that made it and that it produces.
Consider the way that cities develop into “heat islands” - glass and steel rising into the clouds trap sunlight coming down onto asphalt and create canyons of amplified heat, even with the sun eclipsed at street level darkness. Each building, these glass and steel towers we know as our modern prosperity’s equivalent to Roman columns and Egyptian tombs, is beget by particular needs of the modern economy - methods of control developed for the workforce tasked with middle-level management of information, the economic need for such an enormous population tasked solely with higher and higher layers of meta-level information processing, recombination, and presentation, etc - and then this set of needs working down through economic channels to produce the grid-patterned canyons of these structures - eventually arriving at the point after existence, where a new biome of sorts is created by them, the street level desert, where the sun is now amplified in a way it never was.
The architectural critic often takes a childish approach to all of this - the thing is a thing, and I judge it on gut feeling mixed with its relation to a system of appraisal I was taught in school. Walking blindly through environments, treating them as though they stood forever, he takes the temporary for the permanent, marking it onto the page as though the exact minute he saw is the forever-standing of the thing in a noumenal realm. The misguidedness of this is self-evident. The question of architectural criticism is a question of environment, both history and prediction. It’s question not of what this building is now, but what this building emerges from, in all the mycelium that it fruits from.
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