The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films

This was good, worth the quick read. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the Sydney office building where The Matrix was filmed, and how its suggestively spinal form echoes themes in the movie.

Back in my days of architecture school we threw around terms such as "human scale" and "typology" in classes.

The article demonstrates well the idea of "typology" - how we came to associate Brutalist structures with FBI-style surveillance states. Did you know we also associate stuff like Greek Columns with government in general?

The "human scale" term refers to how a building's shape and texture should be broken up to break up any notion of the building being looming/threatening to tiny humans by comparison - kind of like how a person would prefer wearing different colors as opposed to a monocolor jumpsuit.

Almost all "evil" architecture fails human scale design on purpose by making oversized elements or using the same material everywhere - the idea is to make the organization seem greater than the individual or even society, and make it seem impossible to challenge. This is also seen in architecture built or designed by fascist Germany and Italy back in the 1930s, for exactly this reason. Look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_architecture if you want more.

This article really nails this topic. Architecture and film theory are two of my favorite topics, because visual symbolism is so integral in both. Both disciplines have a lot of domain-specific language that it's really easy to write an article that is inaccessible to most readers. Most articles by 99% invisible really hit the sweet spot where they are entertaining and accessible introduction to the subject, but are still interesting to people familiar with the topics being reported. This article could easily have been "Five real buildings that housed Evil Megacorporations, #4 will surprise you!"

Speaking of dystopian megacorps and their architecture, I bought Invisible Inc during the Klei sale on Steam. I'd highly recommend it. It's a turn-based stealth rougelike based based in a cyber-punk world run by dystopian megacorporations. You control a team of technologically augmented spies who infiltrate these megacorps. The levels are all procedurally generated, which works really well for the inhuman sameness that corporations have in science fiction.

The gameplay is well thought out, and the story mode is well written. It deconstructs a lot of themes typically present in cyberpunk, but the deconstruction doesn't upstage the gameplay (I feel like game designers sometimes try to be 'clever' when deconstructing tropes, to the detriment of fun.) The story mode isn't very long, but it has good replayability due to the roguelike nature and the procedurally generated levels. There is also an endless mode, which adds a lot of replay value, and is something that I miss in other roguelikes, such as FTL.

I played it on Linux, and it runs well. It's $20 normally. I'd say it's a must-buy at $10 or below if you enjoy roguelikes or stealth games. I'd say take a pass if you don't enjoy turn based games or cyberpunk. You can probably get a pretty good idea of the gameplay from watching a video on youtube, but I'd definitely try to avoid spoilers.

Out of curiosity, how do you think the SIS building in London fits in architecturally?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIS_Building