A recent site visit for a potential new project had us donning hard hats to inspect a dramatic building in East London, immersed in history and ripe for experimentation. It’s a very well-known site – culturally speaking – because it's been the backdrop for dozens of blockbuster films and series. It reminded us immediately of the recent post-apocalyptic series Fallout – which probably wasn’t shot here, but which easily fit into the same visual language – making for an uncanny visit: a space that felt, experientially as well as physically, so familiar despite never having been before.
Fallout (the series) was based on Fallout, the video game franchise, but in fact we could refer to any of a number of post-apocalyptic games – because they all have a similar proposition, that some failure of humanity has caused widespread devastation in which survivors struggle on.
There’s an entire discipline dedicated to studying the interplay of cinema, videogames and architecture but two things struck us in particular.
First was how our relationship to the building itself was so deeply informed by cultural references (and preconceptions) that marble together layers of digital and physical experience, even before we bring our work to bear on it.
And we realised this is becoming increasingly common for architecture throughout the city – most buildings won’t appear in blockbusters, but, their identity, purpose and experience is ingrained in our collective psyche through other digital experiences – as backdrops for social media, points of reference on Google/Apple Maps routes, as memory reminders in our photo histories. This must, more than ever, factor into the built environment design process.
Second was a reminder. We should not let the bleakness (and implied inevitability) of a video game distract us from our guiding mission at HAQUE TAN: designing for shared futures. We are not interested in speculation. We focus on what's going on right now right here, rather than an abstract future – and we do this, not because we aren’t interested in the future, but because we believe that the future must be created, deliberately and deliberatively right here right now. Nothing in that process is inevitable: neither our failure, nor the idea that technology solves it.
So our challenge, on this project and others, is going to be: how do we design for this context, blending physical and digital architecture, in a way that embraces its history and context, but doesn’t get overwhelmed by its cultural textures? Check back in a few months to find out!
