Brick By Brick

Although this is something I’ve been thinking of for a while, it’s concretized this year – by playing Dark Souls 3, thinking about related videogames, and visiting buildings to walk around and photograph (one of which has been described by a site as “mid-century mundane”) – as a subject I’d like to explore further in essay form. First, here are a few photos I’ve taken of relevant sites.

Larsen Hall, Cambridge, MA

AMC Theater, Cambridge, MA (Closed since 2012)

Harvard-Kent Elementary School, Charlestown, MA

What I want to explore is the relationship between invocations of awe and curiosity by massive virtual structures that are sparingly/entirely unornamented, have broad contouring geometric distinction, and (maybe) a material make-up that appears both practical and obsessive (ergo, my photos of brick-based exteriors). I want to be careful with word usage, though, to avoid propagating an aesthetics of boredom (the crux of critics championing, say, Warhol). To me, these structures are exciting. “Mundane” is just the best word I’m able to think of right now for an architecture that is not as bizarre as the most bizarre brutalism and not as barebones as the oldest European fortresses.

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (1988)

Wizardry I & II (1993)

I’ve written before that Demon’s Souls’ dungeon crawler lineage is not just apparent in its designs but also in its appearance. If you’ve played King’s Field IV, the last in the series and also developed by From Software, this lineage might be especially noticeable. Dungeon crawlers have always had a visual mundanity, informed as they were by medieval networks (see the two screenshots above), and even once From Software made the leap to the PlayStation 3, a harsh austerity remained, present in nearly all of Demon’s Souls’ locations, including its tutorial area.

King’s Field IV (2001)

Demon’s Souls (2009)

I think one of the interesting things about Demon’s Souls, and Dark Souls to a greater extent, was that each took the dungeon crawler model and extroverted it so that you might be spending just as much time above ground as below ground. While you were still trudging through concentrated spaces looking for the next point of respite (an Archstone or bonfire), your overall perception of space and its relationship to your person changed, due to a clearer perception of vastness that the wider terranean vistas allowed.

First impression of the Boletarian Palace, from Demon’s Souls

But what was also interesting was that, upon this extroversion, these games had views of structures defined by repetition, enormity, and blunt geometry, rather than by a variety of complex details. What’s evocative to me about the bending bastions encircling Lordran is their plainness, combined with their massiveness and reiteration: sublime, but not the type of sublime a later From Software release, Bloodborne, expresses, attributable to its structures’ high density and extreme level of ornamentation. It’s a sublimity that is ancient and raw. There is really nothing else like to be found in other games for the console.

Two spots from Demon’s Souls’ Stonefang Tunnel

Two views from Dark Souls’ Firelink Shrine

Getting back to something I mentioned at the beginning of this post: Dark Souls 3 helped me to concretize this as a subject I wanted to think and write about by reminding me that one of the results of these games having super-structures that extend much further below than you can actually explore is that you’re given views of structures spectacular for their sheer enormity. One of the resemblances to videogames’ earlier design decisions that the Souls series has is the oft-present possibility of falling into deadly pits, and when this is coupled with a commitment to structural justification the result is captivating instances of built forms that seem to have developed out of an incomprehensible level of ambition and labor. In a strange but not uninteresting way, the justification almost works against itself by creating new absurdities. I was most aware of this when looking at a pier of the bridge originally connecting the Undead Settlement to the High Wall of Lothric.

Sight from a part of Dark Souls 3′s Undead Settlement

Sight from a part of Dark Souls 3′s Archdragon Peak

Anyway, there are a couple of other things I wanted to write here that sort of fit into the topic, but they haven’t been formulated well enough to appear as anything other than incoherent ramblings that would make this already disjointed post even more disjointed, so I’ll save them for a future post or a finalized article. In the meantime, I’ll be looking up more info on dungeon crawlers (hopefully I can find one or two featuring broadly visible superstructures) and trying to find further examples of modernist architecture that might be described as sublime-mundane. If any of you have thoughts or leads relevant to this stuff, especially if they’ll help to widen the range of the considered games, please don’t hesitate to share.