Tag: alexandra lange

Architecture critic Alexandra Lange, author of Writing About Architecture, talks to the creators of Monument Valley — an award-winning video game in which players must navigate the Princess Ida through a maze of impossible buildings and architectural puzzles — for Curbed:

Much of Monument Valley operates in the impossible space drawn by M. C. Escher, whose 1960 drawing ‘Ascending and Descending’ Monument Valley lead designer Ken Wong has acknowledged as an inspiration. The Escher drawing even features a couple of figures scratching their heads about how to get around. The connection between Escher’s drawing and Wong’s original Monument Valley concept sketch is clear; Wong’s is also strikingly similar to the finished product. The whole structure floats in space in a way that suggests infinity, and it features the same isometric perspective, same gelato colors, and a similar sequence of steps and ladders and domes to give it a touch of character. In Monument Valley, sometimes you seem to be floating on water and sometimes in space; sometimes positive and negative are reversed, and you may be underground in paths and tunnels carved from rock. “We were all so taken with [Escher’s] image,” says [Neil] McFarland, that the designers said, “We don’t know what this game is, but if we can make that into a game we will be really happy.”

For the design buff, the game seems rife with visual cues, allusions to the built world, and academic references. Even if Monument Valley’s designers aren’t familiar with deconstructivism, 1970s architecture may have infiltrated its digital world sideways, as architecture-school graduates turn into programmers and once rarefied ideas turn into placeless pins. Monument Valley’s chapters have to cover a lot of territory, in scale and geography.

Sometimes Ida seems very small, like an earlier puzzle-solving heroine in a gridded Wonderland, wending your way through a music box. Sometimes she appears to be climbing a pixel version of Philip Johnson’s concrete-block Monument to Lincoln Kirstein (1985), “a staircase to nowhere.” Sometimes she finds herself holding a red flower, laying it on a rectangular sarcophagus in a sea of sarcophagi that strongly resemble Eisenman’s Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2004). Sometimes you find yourself tripping along a wall that resembles Bofill’s La Muralla Roja housing project (1968), “characterized by a series of interlocking stairs, platforms, and bridges.” Elsewhere the game recalls Tarsem Singh’s cult movie The Fall, filmed at the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur (a real-life white, floating world) and the Chand Baori stepwell, a Qbert landscape made exclusively of blocks. Some scenes are more perplexing, and require your seven-year-old to show you which button to push or which screw rotates the cube so that what was once an unbridged gap closes, in digital space, and allows you to cross.

I really don’t play a lot video games, but I do love Monument Valley.