- There's this horrible building
here in New York City.
It's called the AT&T Long Lines Building,
and let's be real, it's creepy.
It's got no windows,
it was designed to survive a nuclear blast and fallout,
and it might be an NSA spy hub called TITANPOINTE, all caps.
It's also the inspiration for the Oldest House,
where "Control" takes place.
(eerie music)
The Oldest House is home to the Bureau of Control,
a government agency specializing
in unexplained phenomena like aliens
or when your refrigerator devours your child,
things like that.
The Bureau didn't build the Oldest House.
No one built it, or maybe it built itself.
But the Bureau found it in the middle of Manhattan
and moved in, seems legal.
It's a place of power,
a living structure beyond human understanding.
And to capture that cold, alien feeling,
the team at Remedy turned to
a particular architectural style, Brutalism.
- [Allison] Now a lot of people think
that the word Brutalism comes from the fact
that it looks brutal.
It actually comes from the term for raw concrete,
the French term, which is (speaks in foreign language).
- This is Allison Arieff.
She's the editorial director of SPUR,
an urban planning and policy think tank,
and she's also one of the founding editors
of "Dwell" magazine, and when it comes to Brutalism--
- [Allison] I'm a fan.
I mean, I wouldn't necessarily wanna live
in a Brutalist building.
- Brutalist buildings don't look
like they want you living in them either.
They're predominantly concrete and geometric and huge.
Because the style was often used for schools,
government buildings, churches, and apartment blocks,
Brutalist buildings have a tendency to loom.
They've got too many windows or none windows,
and they're ugly and miserable and cold,
and why do they exist?
- [Allison] Most trace it back
to the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier,
who loved concrete.
- Concrete was considered this very humble medium
of the people, you know, as opposed to something
that's ornate and rococo
and made in this very elaborate way, so--
- [Narrator] That's Avery Trufelman.
You can hear more from her
in 99% Invisible's episode on Brutalism
and the Nice Try! podcast, which is really good.
She's got a great voice.
Europe was recovering from World War II
when Brutalism was at its peak.
A lot of cities were notably fucked up.
People needed to build and to build quickly.
They didn't need anything fancy.
- So it was made from this very charitable, intense urge
to create spaces for people, to house a lot of people,
making sure that the municipal buildings
and the public buildings are accessible
to as many people as possible.
So I think there was a deep appreciation in that.
- But despite Brutalism's humanitarian roots,
it can still give off the vibe
that it wasn't actually made with human comfort in mind.
A style that was born from a socialist need
to provide housing for people can now look dehumanizing.
And a government building that to one generation
looked humble and unadorned
can now look totalitarian and oppressive,
which, for the design team at Remedy,
was the perfect combination of form, function, and theme.
- But I do think that it's a good metaphor
for the Bureau and for the game in a sense that what started
as a very utopian and idealistic architecture
has become to represent oppression and bureaucracy
and maybe a lot of negative things these days.
- Janne and Stuart were instrumental
in creating the world of "Control,"
and for Stuart, a former architect,
Brutalism perfectly represents the Oldest House.
- One of the terms I always liked
was the sort of a prison for the weird,
so it's not a comfortable space, really.
- The way we've been approached it
is that like maybe the building doesn't really care too much
about the people inside.
- Seemingly adhering to its physical outer constraints
and yet constantly breaking the known boundaries of reality.
- It's not just a visual idea that we had in the beginning.
It ticked a lot of these boxes from the gameplay
and performance and destruction sense.
- All of this stark concrete
doesn't just look ominous and foreboding.
It's also part of what makes "Control" so satisfying,
because for all the time I spend admiring these rooms,
I spend even more time destroying the shit out of them.
(Jesse grunts) (explosion booms)
A core part of Remedy's design philosophy
is that it should feel like the player
is having an effect on the world.
The Oldest House is perfectly designed
to make you feel that way.
The concrete walls are blank like a canvas,
so every reaction is apparent,
and even better, specific to your actions.
So when you hover and then slam into the ground,
you get an impact crater.
Bullets leave scars and fill the air with dust.
You can rip out a gnarly chunk of wall and throw it,
or use it to shield yourself.
If you throw furniture, it bows on impact
because concrete is freakin' hard.
You start with smooth, bare walls
and end with a catastrophe of rubble
that tells the story of your fight.
- [Stuart] And then also, because we looked
at creating a comprehensive destruction,
it gave us a good balance, that cleanliness,
because two minutes later, it's going to be complete chaos,
so to get the contrast,
you have to start-- - Yeah, quick.
- [Stuart] With quite a clean environment.
- In the center of this Venn diagram
of world building, gameplay, and visual design,
we find "Control's" relationship with ritual.
The Bureau knows the importance of ritual
in keeping Objects of Power under control,
and as Jesse moves through the Oldest House,
she's restoring order by ritualistically cleansing
the Hiss powers from the house's control points.
It's a video game.
Ritual is also reinforced through the architecture.
- When we were talking a lot about ritual
being repetition and recursion in the game world,
and were looking at Brutalist architecture,
I suddenly recalled Carlos Scarpa.
- [Janne] At certain point in the game,
there is a television that has this sort of a feedback loop
like when you point a video camera at a television.
I saw a similar thing what Scarpa does,
that there might be a simple shape,
but repeating in the concrete, like a rectangular shape,
and then there's another smaller rectangle inside,
and smaller one and smaller one,
and that's how these depths appear.
- [Stuart] It was like coral, as well,
like it steps and grows.
It repeats its rule several times, so it does
this kind of strange kind of obsessional feedback.
- This inspired the visual design
for the house's shifting halls.
The building is engaging in its own unconscious ritual,
repeating its shapes and growing inwards,
which is disturbing because it's concrete.
It's not supposed to do that.
So the structure and the people inside it
are all engaged in ritual.
That's a lot for a humble New York office building to take.
Luckily, the Oldest House is really bad at being an office.
It's much better at being a church.
- [Janne] We were often treating the spaces as churches,
at the end of it, like what if this was a church,
how would this be lit, or how can we build a space
around that kind of altarpiece?
- It's not quite practical,
and they're really impractical spaces.
There's these huge, massive halls
and then these little tiny corners that are offices,
and then things shift, as well.
- Like a cathedral, many of the spaces in "Control"
are built around a symmetrical one-point perspective.
It subtly reinforces the message
that this was never supposed to be an office.
It feels weird and disorienting to navigate.
- It does give you the feeling of being lost
in someone else's new development, someone else's dystopia.
It was beautiful, I mean, in a horrifying way.
- And that's exactly how I feel
about Brutalist architecture now.
In "Control," I learned to appreciate
the sparseness of concrete, its textures
and how light falls on it and the way that it contrasts
with wood or with greenery.
I think it can be beautiful, in a horrifying way.
Hey, what if I delivered it
like I had a perso-fuckin'-ality?
Hey, we'll needed it build, and build very quickly.
They didn't need anything fancy.
Don't laugh at me (laughs).
As Logan Roy would say, "Fuck off."
(smooth music)
Europe was recovering from World, World War (mumbles).
(laughs) World War Poo (laughs).