I was invited by my dear friend Daniela to visit an exhibition held at a privately-owned Neutra house in Beverly Hills. Daniela and I pride ourselves on an encyclopedic knowledge of Richard Neutra as former student docents at the VDL House in Silverlake, but I had never heard of the William H. Levit House. I had also never heard of the famous celebrity hairdresser who owned the home, and my parents scoffed when I admitted as much in front of the chic docent and his French Bulldog. Feeling a little guilty for wandering into Los Angeles during crisis, we said goodbye and I climbed into the backseat as my parents chauffeured me through Beverly Hills. I’ve been here before, but I couldn’t place it. I recognize Mulholland Drive, but only from that song or that David Lynch movie or - oh no - the Manson family. Then it dawned on me, and I had to explain to my parents that I’ve been in this neighborhood before in Grand Theft Auto V.
Grand Theft Auto V was originally released in 2013 for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, but I didn’t get my hands on the game until Black Friday in 2020. Grand Theft Auto was one of the few pieces of media my parents (understandably) didn’t want me interacting with as a kid. After Black Friday I sat on the floor, loaded up the game, and stole a sports car in broad daylight on virtual Rodeo Drive. I would find the biggest hill in the game (usually in Vinewood Hills, the game's proxy for Hollywood Hills) and launch the car full speed off a cliff and laugh until I cried. I’ve never actually played the game’s story mode, and I couldn’t tell you why this ritual brings me so much joy. But every few months when I need respite, I will wait an hour and a half for the game to redownload and laugh until my stomach hurts, taking out street lamps and running red lights until it actually becomes more fun to briefly follow the law and try parallel parking in Grand Theft Auto. This habit may be inherited, since my mother is enamored with another game by the same developer: Red Dead Redemption. RDR came out in 2010, and it’s been at the heart of many family jokes ever since. My mom now plays Red Dead Redemption 2 to ride her horse (she calls him Horace) and go sightseeing; she doesn’t care much for character dialogue or shooting bad guys.
“Vinewood Bowl” in Grand Theft Auto V
Role-playing games such as Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption give the player an immense sense of freedom and exploration, and seem to have impressive replayability because of this. With the design of massive open world maps, game designers make careful, deliberate decisions that often mirror what an architect considers. Decisions about scale, graphic style, perspective of the players, material, light, and time must be made. Game designers must evoke a mood or even an action through design, and this is often done through architectural features. GTA V is set in Los Santos, a virtual proxy of Los Angeles. There are distinct similarities between the Los Angeles of real life and of Grand Theft Auto. While researching, I drove a stolen smart car to Legion Square (Pershing Square), the Rancho Towers (the Watts Towers), the Vinewood Bowl (I’ll let you guess that one), and the Kortz Center (the Getty Center). In contrast, Grand Theft Auto features no traffic at the airport (or anywhere for that matter) and for a game centered around driving, the neighborhoods are surprisingly close to one another - has GTA V solved urban sprawl? My recognition of real life Beverly Hills shed light on a phenomenon of video game urbanism, and digitally designed spaces. In the song “Imaginary Places,” Busdriver advises:
“Kids, if you want to piss off your parents
Show interest in the arts
Kids, If you really want to piss off your parents
Buy real estate in an imaginary place”
“LS Airport” in Grand Theft Auto V
In some ways, video games such as GTA V are considered low brow entertainment, banned by even the most lenient parents. In many other ways, video games are a form of Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. It took the work of dedicated reviewers such as Action Button and Into the Aether Podcast to teach me to appreciate video game design, and begin to see its similarities to architectural design. Across the pond, the Bartlett School of Architecture has already made this connection and offers a Masters of Architecture program(me) in Cinematic and Video Game Architecture. While architectural projects weigh considerations of constructibility, resilience, and budget, video game architecture is unbound by these restraints, but has added considerations of time and player interactivity. Game designers might use architectural features to enhance spatial awareness - a low, narrow pathway that opens into a cavernous hall means trouble ahead. Games such as Doom, Skyrim, and Borderlands are masters of this tactic, using architectural compression and expansion to heighten a player’s situational awareness. Lighting design also encourages activity, where a player might explore a dark area of a room to find hidden rewards. A private bedroom in an RPG might be a save point or a place to change your character's outfit. Architectural design in a video game is also crucial to establishing setting and tone. An architectural style will give immediate cues to a player of time period, plot, and culture. Red Dead Redemption’s Wild West town of Armadillo is instantly iconic, with a corner saloon, shops, and a humble single cell sheriff’s office at the end of this one-horse town. Whether or not you’ve played the game or even heard of it, you can probably picture Armadillo.
Through BIM or an RPG, digitally designed spaces can occupy your mind even if you have not physically been there. Because I’d never been to Beverly Hills, Grand Theft Auto’s replica held more weight in my psyche than the real thing. Within a real-world context of wealth disparity, natural disasters, and traffic, the Los Angeles of Grand Theft Auto may be more readily accessible and familiar to some than the real thing.
“Muscle Sands Beach” in Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto and Las Vegas have the replica in common, and in some cases, their designers have “improved” upon the original to optimize it for a specific purpose. In 1997, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable observed this phenomenon in Vegas in “Living With the Fake, and Liking It,” claiming:
“I do not know just when we lost our sense of reality or our interest in it, but at some point it was decided that reality was not the only option. It was possible, permissible and even desirable to improve on it; one could substitute a more agreeable product.”
Huxtable passed away in 2013 at 91 years old, shortly before GTA V was released. In Las Vegas, the Great Sphinx in front of the Luxor is 50% larger than the Sphinx at the Giza pyramid complex in Egypt. Grand Theft Auto edits the Getty Center’s visitor experience to be more vehicle-friendly, creating an architectural promenade from the driver’s seat instead of emerging from a parking garage to board a tram. GTA’s “Kortz Center” is nearly identical to the real thing, with an added parking lot at the welcome center. In Grand Theft Auto, there are no speeding tickets, red light cameras, or traffic jams, and you can visit your favorite landmarks whenever you desire. When you move out of California, this becomes increasingly fascinating and absurd. Twelve years after its 2013 release, Grand Theft Auto V’s online multiplayer mode inspired the theatrical release of Grand Theft Hamlet, a film festival favorite Shakespeare adaptation created in, you guessed it, GTA V.
“Kortz Center” in Grand Theft Auto V
In some corners of the internet, the devastation of the Los Angeles fires are being explained and understood through Grand Theft Auto V’s open world map. The GTA V map encompasses roughly 12,000 acres of land area. In comparison, the Eaton Fire burned approximately 14,000 acres, and the Palisades Fire burned just under 24,000 acres. For some growing up in another part of the world who might be more familiar with the fake Los Angeles of Grand Theft Auto, this may be a scalable way of quantifying disaster: the fires burned a combined area about 3x the size of the entire GTA map. In response, players have also begun to identify real life locations modeled in Grand Theft Auto V that were lost in the fires. We mourn the loss of the real, even if we’ve only met the fake.
“Legion Square” in Grand Theft Auto V
Special thanks to Jeff Melgar, Devan Guzzetta, and Hunter Hawkins for their input for this blog, who are all better at video games than me.
Aryana Leland is a designer based in Denver, Colorado. She studied Architecture + Art History at Cal Poly Pomona, and loves lowercase “a” architecture.
Bartlett School of Architecture | Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch
Game Rant | GTA 5 Locations That Are Based On Real-Life
Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Living With the Fake, and Liking It.” The New York Times, March 30,
1997, National edition, sec. 2.
Malamud, Margaret. 2000. “Pyramids in Las Vegas and in Outer Space: Ancient Egypt in
Twentieth‐Century American Architecture and Film.” Journal of Popular Culture 34: 34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.2000.3401_31.x