In this session, visiting Ph.D. researcher Ricardo Boffetti presents his research on the use of brutalist architecture in the video game Control (Remedy, 2019). Riccardo will analyse the Oldest House, Control’s main setting, to show how it participates in the contemporary resignification of both Brutalist architecture and dystopian science fiction. In doing so, the game exemplifies a broader, multi-front phenomenon: the systematic neutralization of critical speculative genres—most notably cyberpunk and dystopian narratives—wherein their original function as cautionary warnings against hyper-capitalist expansion is subsumed into a marketable and "cool" aesthetic commodity. Parallel to this genre shift, the historical experience of New Brutalism is being detached from its social-democratic ethos (rooted in postwar civic emancipation and public housing) and re-framed strictly as a visual trope of corporate totalitarianism and bureaucratic paralysis.

​Suggested readings​:

Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. 1988. “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism.” Mississippi Review 16 (2/3): 266-278.

Martin, Reinhold. 2005. “Introduction." The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. MIT Press. 3-13.