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 Features
GDC
2002: Manhattan as Muse: New York City as a Conceptual Tool
Grand Central Station
Grand Central Station, which was completed in 1913, has an enormous concourse.
The single main space is 120 feet wide, 375 feet long and 125 feet high.
(Just as a comparison, based on eight game units being roughly equal to
a foot, Quake III Arena's Arena Gate level is approximately 128
feet by 328 overall.) Very few game engines can support the Grand Central
scale. Perhaps as pre-rendered scenes, but certainly without the crowd
and it would be tedious to walk across. However, we can reutilize the
space's formal configuration and detail character at a smaller scale.
The space is not just the concourse but also a system of entries, balconies
and ramps that extends over four floors.
Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Center is a great modern complex of underground spaces and
circulation. Buildings are linked underground, more common in Minneapolis
than Manhattan, and you can travel for blocks indoors or underground.
The buildings are classic Art Deco design, not just a series of corridors
but lobbies with strong connections to outdoor spaces; squares and below
grade plazas.
There are
numerous other potential examples to study; from the Metropolitan Museum
to the Guggenheim, and more recently the Rose Center at the Natural History
Museum. Many more buildings and spaces of similar scale exist in Chicago,
San Francisco and Los Angeles and provide opportunities for study and
inspiration.
A Simple Walk
A simple walk down Ninth Avenue from Times Square offers different program
types and locations for events. There is the space of Times Square itself
and all the electronically animated activity leading off from it. We pass
the Port Authority Bus Terminal with its super-scaled structure and myriad
of transit connections. The Jacob Javits Convention Center is just a few
blocks west on the river. The air vents for the Lincoln Tunnel are a dramatic
construction. At 34th Street, we cross over the Amtrak entry into Penn
Station from New Jersey, which opens up a large hole in the ground, and
reveals a building spanning the tracks on a large truss. Traveling further
south we pass a Post Office Sorting Office. And in need of a temporary
conclusion, we can turn right and head towards the piers.
The Alienist
For more of an armchair sampling, we can draw examples from a book set
in New York. The Alienist by Caleb Carr is a historical thriller
with a group using early detective methods to hunt down a serial killer.
The killer ritually murdered his victims in prominent places close to
water. In 1896 New York was just developing and much of it still under
construction. The plot leads the reader through a series of turn of the
century downtown environments; the Williamsburg Bridge, Lower East Side
tenements, Madison Avenue mansions, Bellevue Hospital and the seedy bars
of the Tenderloin. Unrelated to the story, a list of locations could create
another narrative-a parallel space of events.
Reversal of the
Ordinary
The establishing shots for Die Hard with a Vengeance cover the
Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, river views and then street
vendors, yellow cabs and the subway. You know where you are.
A reversal
of the ordinary, or inversion, is used in game play situations to create
new, exciting events. In the case of Die Hard in New York, this
would be the scenes of driving the cab through or across Central Park,
you don't get to do that everyday, and opening the street grate to jump
down on to the moving subway car. Or the fact that the aqueduct is still
under construction gives additional room for play. Riding the motorbike
through the subway in Money Train would be another example. Or
that Times Square is completely empty in Vanilla Sky.
By nature of being a sports arena, Madison Square Garden is already designed
for event purposes. It contains not only sports activities, modern day
gladiatorial combat, but in Godzilla it takes on another role-spawn
site for the creature eggs. The arena is a centralized space, but also
a network of supporting corridors, lobbies; crowd gathering and meeting
places.
Godzilla
visits New York, takes a downtown tour, and tramples everything. In this
respect, Godzilla represents an assault on the iconic event locations,
and Mimic the infrastructure. In Mimic, the bugs visit New
York from the opposite spectrum; no single entity but a massive, persuasive,
insidious attack.
Organizing Frameworks
Architecture has a long history of techniques and strategies for tying
all these events together. Structure in the sense referred to here is
the order or organization of a system. Analyzing building and cities,
other levels, or even pieces of art and music, we can abstract patterns
of order. Architecturally that order is usually tied to a particular time
and place, but they can be creatively reinterpreted for our own purposes.
Movies have
their own structure of cuts, dissolves and fades. Movies have an establishing
shot, then cut to an interior or sound stage. In the remake of The Thomas
Crown Affair, the Metropolitan Museum is actually the entrance lobby
to the New York Public Library, and then it switches to a set for the
galleries. As a fragment of architecture, levels need a continuity and
structure that doesn't seem forced. Like the embassy at the beginning
of Rainbow Six, they are partial city fragments-gated environments.
Levels exist
at a scale between buildings and cities. In terms of experience, they
operate between movies and theme parks. They are an assemblage of buildings,
and fragments of large cities. We will quickly survey the potential of
the city grid, the subway system and the highway network.
The Grid
A street grid is the most basic organization for laying out spaces and
events, connecting them together. Manhattan's grid is perhaps one of the
most famous and unrelenting in the world. There are two distinct roles
for the street grid in the city. Downtown where the buildings are lower
and the section simpler, the grid was simply overlaid on the outlines
of the old Dutch farm settlements; producing a complex pattern of intersecting
diagonals.
In Midtown,
it acts as a neutral background for the skyscrapers. The 1811 master plan
divided the remainder of the city into the 2,000 plus blocks that we know
today, creating as Koolhaas writes, "an undreamt of freedom for three-dimensional
anarchy." Buildings stack multiple activities on top of one another.
What is
particularly exciting is the way the buildings work in section or vertically
in New York. Subway lines are many floors below ground, with utilities
between them and the street. Buildings and bridges, that support trains
and cars, cross streets layered with pedestrian circulation too. Level
design is often only considered in plan, but New York is also an opportunity
to consider it in section.
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