#longform ### **Learning from Minecraft** ## 2015 Historically, an act of architectural design consists of an active engagement of a designer with a rectangular piece of an empty two dimensional [[Space]]. This static receptacle of ideas, paper, has in recent times been replaced with a somewhat more active, if also rectangular, surface of a computer screen. Not that this mutation changed much in the minds of architect: most software packages still employ the same old paper space paradigm, as it becomes very easy to simulate any kind of a traditional design tool. Although the fine art of gestural specificity has been almost lost, it will inevitably slowly reemerge as the digital tools become more and more sophisticated. Since Alberti, design as a process has been separated from building into a clearly demarcated, cultural practice operating through abstraction of living space into a two-dimensional projection. The techniques for articulating this abstraction are all subject to the need to produce documents for builders - this is why it becomes necessary to use orthographic projections - plans, sections, elevations. The special case of perspectival drawing has mutated from a design tool in its own right to after-the-fact illustrative helper technique, useful only to show how the finished design will eventually look and feel in reality (of course, the fact that perspective is still a two dimensional projection always remains). This whole development can be useful to point out a number of different ‘unspoken’ and ‘unrealized’ corollaries of every design act. First and foremost it shows that conceptually, any design act is an act of looking at an object _from the outside_. Any ideal, mathematically demarcated architectural design (meaning any design since Alberti) is always produced in a way that is disconnected not just from the intended immediate surroundings of a possible real site, but more importantly, it is also disconnected from any possibility of understanding the actual embodiment of a personal, singular, non-objectifying experience as evidence of a human standing on a ground and looking through the eyes that lie on some distance from it. In other words, an act of design is an act of god not just because an architect acts as a form-giver, but precisely because the conditions upon which an architect looks upon the world are the conditions of disembodied, abstracted gaze facilitated by the total access and overview that the medium affords. ‘The [[Plan]] is the generator’. Any and every part of the design is fully accessible to the eyes, as conversely any and every part of the model is fully accessible to the hands. It does not matter, then, whether an architect uses drawings or models as a primary tool, the optical access to his material is always fully actualized. It could be an easy conclusion to say that this is precisely where the seed of inexplicable detachment between architecture and non-architects is sown - simply put, non-architects are usually completely alienated (as they are non-initiated in the techniques) from the typical architectural gaze. Another, more bold conclusion would point out: this is why almost all architecture is strangely overwhelming, as all evidence of the human, grounded viewpoint is erased at the start of design process. The historical fact that some of the Renaissance architecture was designed through a technique of perspectival drawing remains. This technique, as is well known, employs an invisible plane that cuts through the light cone going into one eye, and conversely takes the projected eye as a vanishing point on a flat surface, where all the orthogonal (but not vertical) lines converge. Perspective still favors a single vantage point, and presupposes a privileged view of another kind, one that although implying the existence of a ground and eye level, invokes a sense of endlessness, as well as reinstates the idea of infinity (Panofski). Even so, classical perspective is still experientially wrong, as it excludes the subtle bend every vertical line undergoes as is gets projected on a human retina. It is by now a well established cliche to point out that a digital turn is taking place in architectural design since the late 80s. What is missing in the whole discussion is, in my view, a certain commitment to analysis of the gaze problem that is afforded by the various digital tools. Not surprisingly, even the most brief exploration will show that any software package is in fact reproducing the paper condition, complete with all the approximations of the ‘analogue’ design tools, and with medium specific additions of various algorithms that afford a more optimized and generally faster creation of models. What has however changed is that a so called ‘perspective’ or ‘3d’ view in later softwares (Maya, 3d Studio, Rhino) has been introduced. In this special view, the software introduces a camera that is free to orbit, pan, zoom and rotate around the model, thus enabling the new, purely digital access to the entire reality of the model. This camera is completely adjustable in all its parameters (lens etc), and it affords a completely new paradigm of accessibility to the model, yet it still stems from, and reinforces fully the very old Albertian paradigm of total access. A radical difference is that 3d modeling softwares introduce the idea of a volumetric diagram, effectively reducing orthographic projections to status of an afterthought. The model is always intended to be in the center of the screen, and can be looked at from any angle imaginable, it can be approached in any scale and edited from any vantage point. The ‘god view’ is now absolute, the model sits on the screen as fully actualized external object, waiting to be manipulated. The current digital tools utilize in this way a continuation of the gaze of the camera, a gaze of a technical object that has defined much of the last 150 years. A camera is a technical approximation of a human eye, as is well known, and historically, it has functioned as a perspectival tool that projects light onto a small rectangular surface of a film or a digital chip. The only addition camera has introduced to the perspectival gaze is the lens - an iris approximation, that adds a possibility of bending the verticals and makes the world appearing more in accordance with our own experiential reality. In photography, a camera is a static object looking onto the world, in film, it begins to move and record time. The gaze of a camera can not be easily identified as a human gaze, however, even when appearing to completely match the eye level. A camera image will always have a certain ambiguous residue, and it will always reproduce the conditions which to a certain extent alienate the viewer. As a photograph is a static image, and film a time-based image, they still remain constructed narratives that always have a certain ambiguous qualities - they seem to reproduce and reinstate a disembodied experience in a viewer, perhaps just because they are technical objects. It is almost like the act of looking itself is put on display as well, which would point to a direction of photography and film being understood as _reflexive_ mediums, as there is an active separation between the viewer and what is being viewed. The principle of detachment and alienation that the camera gaze installs is nowhere better observed than in the specific case of a ‘subjective look’, or a so called _first person view_, a type of camera gaze that, according to Alexander Galloway, first appeared in 1947, in the film ‘Lady in the Lake’, directed by Robert Montgomery. In this specific type of camera shot, the presence of a looking subject is reinforced by introducing a body element of the character, typically a hand holding a gun in the forefront of the shot. In the history of film, this type of a gaze goes through many different transformations, especially in Hitchcock, to be fully appropriated only in the 80s, when it becomes closely related to the technological gaze in films like “Terminator” or “Robocop”, or ‘alien’ gaze in, for example “Predator”. While in cinema, as Galloway argues, this kind of shot has been reserved to “effect a sense of alienated, disoriented or predatory vision”, this type of shot has found its natural habitat in the realm of computer games, where it serves a reverse function: that of immersion. The first popular example of the use of a subjective (first person) look in computer games is Id Software’s 1992 game Wolfenstein 3d. The game is played by traversing spaces while looking through the eyes of a protagonist. In this way, a protagonist is blended with the player, and player’s avatar looses its usual ‘string dummy’ qualities. The feeling of identification with the avatar is much stronger than in cases where an avatar model is actually shown on the screen. In other words, the paradigm changes from ‘I am controlling the character’ to ‘I am the character’. (For a small fraction of the players though, the need to actually control (as opposed to embody) the character remains strong, and subsequent games will also include a so called ‘reverse Y axis’ option which gives an inverted control to the camera (when a mouse movement goes up, camera goes down), creating a feeling that the player is indeed ‘pulling the strings’.) Minecraft, a very popular game from the developer Mojang that was recently bought by Microsoft, on the other hand, helped to promote the so-called _world building_ game genre. As a result of its primary first person view, people love spending time building in-game, as well as inhabiting their creations. Minecraft’s blocky, voxelized structures can hardly be called beautiful, or new - Lego has practically invented the aesthetic. Yet, Minecraft architecture is rarely experienced in state of distraction. One needs to actively engage with the world, and it feels comfortable and strangely familiar. What makes it different from making the Lego objects is precisely the sense of inhabitation, which is enforced by the first person look. The polemic point I would like to make here would be that users feel comfortable because they designed something from human point of view. In other words, they can inhabit their structures _while creating them_. Although Minecraft has a ‘god mode view’, majority of design is done from a first person perspective. If we were to attempt to learn from Minecraft, it is precisely this that we can take as a starting point. The main proposition is that the first person view found in computer games can be used in architectural design softwares to create spaces through something that we will call ‘grounded vision’. The grounded vision concept is explored in the [[Software]] called ‘The Other Method’ (a title with an obvious reference to Robin Evans’ book “The Projective Cast”), a design environment where the only access to the model creation space is the first person view. As there is no [[Plan]] view, the coherence of composition deriving from the idealizing function of a plan is forfeited. The hidden implication of 3d modeling design softwares, namely, that the plan is not the generator, is radicalized. The full volumetric (groundless) diagram is transformed to a grounded one, and the idea of horizon is reintroduced. Vertical and horizontal become datums for the volumetric diagram. The access to objects in space always depends on the oblique, and what was once corollary becomes active - namely, the shape, contour and silhouette of an object as seen from the ground it would be standing on. It enables the reappearance of perspectival vision, not unlike the one that guided Piranesi and his ability to evacuate the planar center of composition (as Tafuri shows in “The Sphere and the Labyrinth”), yet, as the objects can be created from an almost unlimited amount of points on the ground, it completely disperses with the idea of center, enforcing a multiplicity. A relation between the movement in space and creation of that same space becomes evident and appears as an entanglement of habitation. The other notion intimately connected to the vision problem in architecture is the so called ‘architect’s hand’ phenomenon. As traditional vision in architecture gives a privileged, totalizing access to the model space, the hand of the architect emerges as a disembodied hand hovering over the design domain, quite literally becoming the ‘hand of god’. This phenomenon is evident in the many photographs of architects, most famously ones with Le Corbusier. In ‘The Other Method’, this hand is replaced by a different one. Traditionally, first person games have always incorporated at least one hand in the foreground, in order to create a stronger immersion effect. This hand usually holds a weapon pointing to the geometrical center of the screen, where the main interaction takes place. Envisioned as a living (although again disembodied) hand of the player becoming the avatar, it appears in ‘The Other Method’ as a hand of the architect no longer having the privilege of total access and control. The avatar inhabits the design space, and the hand is able to point and create objects in the center. The ‘prince of rays’ is back with a vengeance.