Architecture of Modern Experience

So often do we go to the Louvre, or the Sistine chapel, or the Duomo of Milan, to marvel at great works of the masters of yesterday. But rarely do we accept that the truly great architects, not of the structures around us but those who painted truths with a brush, were, in fact, the children of the modern age. And this is only natural. The time of the Neu is one of unprecedented experience, blending together the holistic phenomena of human past alongside the distinctly non-human symptoms of modernity. Then, why should it not be so that those who lived through the great war and the upheaval of its sequel, and all the character that makes up the liminal haunted industrial landscapes of the modern land, would emerge from the flames, a phoenix who once gazed into the secret of human experience, past and future, and returned with the knowledge that humanity is long gone. It is, indeed these masters, these new old masters, who best depict the architecture of our experience, the fabric of our every life. 

Chief among these is the American painter Edward Hopper. In his cool and Ballardian rendering of American landscapes, city wastelands and suburban fields, the paintings of Hopper allow for a window into this post-human world.

Take a moment, considering you are likely reading this on a blue lighted screen in the darkness of some hovel in the city. (I make this assumption based on a loose understanding of the readership as well through a statistical wager) Stand up, distance yourself from the words, walk to the window or a nearby terrace door and throw open the sash to look onto the outer world. What is it you see? What streets line the peripherals of your experience? It is likely not an observance you often note. Is the city empty? Is it alive? Can you feel the pulse, or has the concrete life blood of the Neu filtered away any appearance of life? What do the people look like? After all, shouldn't a city be for people? What are the people of this city, the city at the end of human time? Are they actual people? Can you recognize them? Or are they just vague renderings, dark shapes shuffling about the grey and towering landscape? 

In reality, these people are not vague oil, painted blots on an unmoving landscape, but to your perception, your process of life, these people you will never meet, are not people at all. They are impressions, colour added to the landscape. They are aspects of the city, projected outwards to give it the appearance of authenticity. That is the fact of life in the Neu, constantly living isolated, atomised, liminally, outside of the bounds of the historically human. And this, more than any other painter, is Edward Hopper.

Just on the American horizon, over the fields of wheat and beyond the concrete expenses of the cities, rests the land of only partial dreams where Hopper  lives. Here is the eternal suburb. Here we can look in the windows and see our neighbors as the vague shapes they truly are, or stop at stores that teeter on the brink of being too real to exist.

Hopper’s most famous work is undoubtedly the late café portrait Nighthawks. With its soft blue evening light reminiscent of a late Frank Sinatra album, and set in a city familiar yet still out of reach. Inside the dinner, an indistinct soda-boy services three patrons, each swallowed by the industrial night.

Nighthawks (1942)

The first, and most moving of these figures, is the man with his back to the viewer. Through total depersonalisation--the removal of face and form--this man resembles more the bureaucratic villainies of a Kafka novel than a businessman out for a late coffee. One must wonder what strange ends brought him here, what defeats in the world of corporate monotony sent him out into twilight to need a coffee when the sun approaches on the horizon.

He is separated from the other figures, framed in the centre of the portrait and barred on all direxions. To his right, the other figures, seeming more connected and coalesced, stop any self extension; to his left, the bars of the restaurant and eventually the road of the city; and towards us, the viewer, a window blocks us from getting too close.

There is a reason he faces this way, he faces the same direxion as the audience. He too is a voyeur staring into these unspoken lives, observing the night with callous acquittal. 

The next shapes appear to be a couple. A man and woman so drowned in Americana one must question how they can breathe. There is nothing special about these figures, and in that, they are understood also as surrogates, or more aptly, as the dissociated figures of the urban landscape, those shapes we see everyday but never register as people.

One piece of note is the posture of the woman. She is shaped in examination, studying something about or in her hand. There is no consensus on what this is, some believe it to be a box of matches, another entrance into the smog, while others maintain it to be a second glance to see if she has removed a wedding ring. Either reading lends credence to the critique presented therein. Either one sees a casual task, a habitual task (if infidelity can be called such) reduced to only an impression of itself, no longer holding the significance because the psyche of its character is too far removed. We, the viewers, with our binoculars, cannot claim to understand the driving factors of these people, these shapes, we watch.

The final figure of Nighthawks is the server, the soda-boy. His dress suggests two paths of interpretation, one of actual context and one of anachronistic prescription. The first sees him dressed in the attire of the age, forced to trade-in his identity for the title of server, as Sartre’s own waiter. The second, more interesting though less supportable, sees him taking on the archetype of an American staple, the sailor. The conflation of these two uniforms serves another purpose in our dissociative analysis; it asserts that these figures are rôles, no longer humans, no longer even shapes. These people have been molded into concepts as to better characterise them, and we have done just that! Revisit our speculation and see: a businessman, a (possible) woman of the night, a server. None of these are people, they are titles, archetypes and ideas, just as the Neu transforms us into the rôles we play.

This final truth is a staple across Hopper’s work, and it is indeed the slight dehumanising which makes the work so emblematic of the modern milieu, the flavour of ennui in our cultural stew.

To extrapolate to two separate pieces, both similar strains and different ideas emerge in Gas and Rooms by the Sea.

Gas (1940)

In Gas, Hopper pulls a similar trick, pining his character, a gas station employee, against the background of painful Americana, some fill-er-up station out in the forest, splitting the industrial world and the rural unknown. This figure, like led by Vergil, is trapped between the liminal, straddling the known world with its unknown fearful counterpart.

Important also is the funxion of light. It stands, even from the sun, with the foreground of the painting, confronting the audience with an entrance into this world and slowly falling back into the woods where it vanishes completely. Some of this light is artificial, industrial, spilling from windows on the egg-white walls, the pumps, the signs; the rest comes from the sun above, stationed overhead the observer.

Think now of light, of its power, its connotation. Light, the brightness of day, is a metonym for safety, for security and the understood. Standing under the bathing brightness of Helios, all is known, observed, felt and cataloged. When one steps into shadow, even for a moment, the intelligibility of the world falters, the familiar becomes obfuscated and the world regains its worldliness, banishing any human imposition.

This aspect was unclear in Nighthawks. Being evenly painted, the illustrious darkness of night only suggested this transformation rather than confirming it. Everything only hinted at the shifting of the figures or the repining of the landscape, but because of the light enjoyed by its primary subjects, the idea of morphing darkness is lost. All remains understood.

Rooms by the Sea (1951)

In Rooms by the Sea, everything falls before us unclothed, wearing no disguises or wool garments. The light and darkness are as they should be, not only in a facsimile of the world but in demonstration of this phenomenon. Light remains radiant in understanding. The door opens to the sea. A couch in the back looks painfully familiar. But all in the shadow remains in question. What aspect of these walls makes us feel disconcerted? What might be around that darkened corner?

The attentive reader no doubt noticed something subtle in this transformation. Though the painting maintains the aesthetic feelings and mise en scène of the previous presentations, it lacks something: people. Furthermore, it lacks subjects.

This painting is a landscape with no landscape. It’s a landscape of the habitual, those overlooked everyday places which soon cease to be places and become only a matter of routine, but now those enacting the routine are gone.

I believe this to be the piece Hopper approaches ascension, where he climbs the ladder to Neuvian Enlightenment, throws up the door, and begins to paint with light from this new knowledge. And, despite his technical acumen and relative fame, he is far from the greatest acrylic architect to do this.

Indeed, none compare to Giorgio de Chirico, the absolute peak of this emptiness, of portraying the landscape of the habitual, and unmatched in his ability to alienate these everyday spaces from the experience to be had within them, the filleting of familiarity. 

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914)

Look at Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. This will be the only de Chirico piece studied which involves a figure, human, subject not becoming a part of the environment but rather as an individual actor. Note how even in this most human of works, the subject, a little girl playing a ring game, is still only prevalent in the bottom corner, dwarfed by the landscape and nearly forgotten by the painting.

Instead, the focus is the geometry, the familiarity, how the shapes form objects we should understand but don’t. In essence, these landscapes (as will be seen in another I will show soon) reflect an unknown aspect of the human psyche: they portray the world around us without our bias of observation.

Think how strange your house, your street, your city must be to an unacquainted observer. I don’t just mean to suggest a tourist who has wandered in, but someone with no context of cultural history. We are all geschite-verfolgt, whether we know it or not, by years of human development, predominantly in a straight direxion. All cultures developed settlements, buildings, streets, cities. All of this is the infrastructure of our minds. Even if we tried to step out of experience and view a day phenomenologically, it would be impossible to erase this prejudice. A building is always a building. A street a street.

So, now, as an exercise, remove yourself. Remove the aspects of this shared history and portray a being, either one from the stars or from the annals of the past, and look on this next de Chirico work, titled The Enigma of a Day.

What do you see? What do you really see? How might you even put this into words? There are tall white tree trucks which form into a red canopy at the top. Large crags of red clay, circular in shape, looming on the horizon. There is a tall rock shaped like yourself, so intentional that it reflects your very being. The ground is made of some strange material, horrifically flat. What else could be said? Imagine how alien it must be?

In essence, I believe a primary task of Art in the Neu to be a rendering, contextualisation, or understanding of this geometry, this architecture in the modern world. For Art is perhaps the only medium which allows us to abstract, extrapolate, and remove the familiarity of the habitual to examine the truth of our own constructed world.

Cities are so strange because they are simultaneously a work of Art and one of Nature, never deciding between the two. They are a habitat used for routine funxionality and a sculpture meant to be marvelled at, a piece of cultural heritage, and achievement of human creation and ingenuity. No city is alike, and yet every city is the same city--this being the very conceit of perhaps Calvino’s best work.

For most of this work I have focused on works rendered in the medium of painting--a distinctly none architectural (though highly geometrical) medium. Let us now ask, what would an exploration of this idea look like in a form more suitable.

We cannot explore it in architecture or city planning outright, as what we’re seeking is a simulacrum not simulation. We want a copy of the copy, a photo taken of the Mona Lisa by a well trained artistic photographer.

I propose there is no greater architectural medium, none more suited for this pursuit, than that of video games. I must now, as I have many times before, follow in the footsteps of the modern Ruskin, Benjamin, the speaker of this century’s Arts, Jacob Geller. For he has already explored games with this specific geometry (in ‘After a City is Buried’, ‘Cities Without People’, ‘Gaming’s Harshest Architecture: NaissanceE and Alienation’, and most notably and topically for this discussion in ‘The Architecture of Fumito Ueda’ as we are going to tread similar ground). 

But what do I mean in this assertion? What can be gleaned from games that couldn’t be understood through photography, painting, film? As established, games give a recreation of three-dimensional space, and not just through a manipulation of perspective but by adding an element of virtual extension, of voyeurism that allows the audience to literally enter the space through an avatar. This means games can do the artistic impossible and extrapolate our lived spaces in new lived spaces, one with a level of artistic analysis that can allow us to see the world unburdened from prejudice.

Team Ico and Ueda are, no doubt, the ruling masters in this regard. It is their work on three of the medium's greatest pieces which show this is possible in the first place. From the impossible geometry of Ico, the lifeless, natural expanse of Shadow of the Colossus, or the post-human world of The Last Guardian. Each of these games approaches the idea in a different form: our architecture in a world with humans, one without, and one after. In each, and in each, the audience puts together everything offered by de Chirico or Hopper along with much more, the ability to conceptualise all of this in a literal space.

But Ico is far from the only team to do this. The same idea can be seen in many of gaming’s shining stars: Dark Souls, Subnautica, Nier: Automata, Elder Scrolls, Bioshock, Soma, Journey and the Arkham games (not to mention many more).

In Dark Souls, the familiarity of medieval stylings are drawn in on themselves, bent together in logical yet impossible ways, castles built behind castles, or castles in the world’s deepest depths. A swamp supported by a forest of immortal trees. If one takes anything away from Dark Souls, aside from a nihilistic frustration with its punishing mechanics, it should be the aspect of the world. Everything, the story, the characters, the themes, are all tied to the way the world is constructed. So much can be understood in the placement of an item, a building or npc. Everything is a consequence of the environment.

Similarly, Subnautica demonstrates this environmental consequentialism, but on a non-human (or non undead) level. The alien world of Planet 4546B is a depthful showcase of how life responds to environment. Ghost Leviathans, bioluminescent creatures, only exist in the depth and darkness (primarily in the Lost River and Crater’s Edge). In fact, all life in Subnautica can be understood by proximity to its environment, and this only becomes more interesting when finding the ruins of an alien civilisation.

Bioshock, both games, present an interesting case, mainly because their environment behaves much more like the realities of our own world and in that way are more accurate extrapolations. Both Rapture and Colombia serve the same environmental funxion as the castles of Dark Souls, but they themselves are products of different environments, both of America in historical time periods, and the ideologies of Objectivism and of Christian Nationalism. In this ouroborosian game of origination, the facticities of each city's landscape are merely products of a different landscape--perhaps ironically a macrocosm example of America itself.

Perhaps the most effective usage of this, though not in the manner of abstraxion or exploration of hitherto unauthentic realms, is in Pathologic. This game, in its geometry, does not portray an understanding of the world beyond dissimilarity. In fact, the Russian steppe village, aside from the Polyhedron, is distinctly notable, painfully average and familiar. Instead, the brilliance of Pathologic comes with its ability to slowly develop the experience of routine, and make something at first recognisable but alien into something overwhelmingly habitual.

The walking of the game, an explicit and common feature, forces the audience to grow in disinterest, slowly viewing the entire village as we would our cities or homes, as objects experience daily and devoid of in essence in themselves. In a game of extreme punishment and constant disempowerment, this facet is perhaps its cruelest trick.

Some of you, the skeptics in the audience, may complain about video games towering over the other mediums in that regard. You are right to assert other forms attempt and achieve similar things. Invisible Cities in literature. Koyaanisqatsi in film. City in sculpture, and so on. But all of these--with the exception of City--lack the geometric physicality of a video game, and thus reduce the experience to mere simulations.

So now, with nowhere left to go and already buried under an accumulating fear of disunderstanding, we must confront the zenith of this trouble. After all, are the environments themselves, the cities themselves not the greatest illustration of this form? I’m not speaking of the architecture, of the intricate spirals of La Sagrada Familia, I mean the cities within themselves as works of Art. Could they not be the ultimate candidate to wake us from this slumber of inauthenticity?

Correct! You are correct. More than you could ever know. There is only a small problem to this assertion, not all cities are created equally, and more importantly the modern city, as with much of modern Media, does not serve the interest of the Artistic but that of the Commercial. In this regard, cities of the Neu are mere products not the piece of Art they long to be.

This, in a way, describes the deterioration of modern life. Living in a piece of content rather than a work of Art does monumental work at eroding the human soul. But what can be done about it? Is not a city always a piece of content? It must, after all, always serve the needs of some outside substance, must always house and interconnect and can never exist l’art pour l’art.

In truth, it’s a conundrum. One might take a position on either side. But I believe this: the only worthy ulterior a city should serve is the people within it. A city for the people; that, indeed, is a work of Art.

I leave it now to the utopians to dream of this vision, what it may look like and where it may be; not because it’s an impossible dream but because the Neu, by its nature, is a selfish time that serves everything beyond the processes which birthed. The child of humanity now ravages its parents to perpetually stay alive. That is the sad state of Art, and of cities, and of humans. But it has been done before and could be done again. It is the reason for understanding a place beyond the daily interaxions and the cursory knowledge of environment. Places too are haunted. Places too have souls. Imagine the conversation one could have with Venice or Xi’an or Athens or Baghdad. These places predate the modern conception of our race. What untold secrets might they hold? As one has a conversation with a dead author and a dead thought when reading, one too begins to speak to an invisible soul when living in a city of Art, of art and history from time immemorial. 

Lucus in urbe fuit media, laetissimus umbra,

quo primum iactati undis et turbine Poeni

effodere loco signum, quod regia Iuno

monstrarat, caput acris equi; sic nam fore bello

egregiam et facilem victu per saecula gentem.

Hic templum Iunoni ingens Sidonia Dido

condebat, donis opulentum et numine divae,

aerea cui gradibus surgebant limina, nexaeque

aere trabes, foribus cardo stridebat aenis.

Hoc primum in luco nova res oblata timorem

leniit, hic primum Aeneas sperare salutem

ausus, et adflictis melius confidere rebus.

Namque sub ingenti lustrat dum singula templo,

reginam opperiens, dum, quae fortuna sit urbi,

- Aeneid, Book I, 441-454

A city for the people; that, indeed, is a work of Art.