
Echoes of the Mountain
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #187. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Architecture and games.
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Imagine standing at the precipice of a cliff. You’re alone in the desert. The sun has already started setting but still beats down on you from above, its heat radiating back upwards from the bleached black rocks beneath your feet. There’s dry dust blowing around your ankles and the scent of sunbaked sand fills your lungs like some sort of sulfur.
The desert seems remarkably alive with sound, smell, color, texture and a strange sense of presence, despite the miles and miles of apparent emptiness, despite a few snakes. Your fingers run along the rockface below, and you can feel the warmth of its rough surface.
The material crumbles at even the softest of touches. With a shift of the light, shadow stretches and expands, painting the canyon with various shades of red, orange, yellow, blue and black. There’s a certain stillness to the place, but certainly not a resounding silence. The shallow breath of this ancient landscape flows like water through the growing darkness.
Phenomenology is the practice of seeking out the subtle differences between space and place. While the former is nothing but a blank slate, the latter is deeply imbued with meaning, filled with collective and of course personal feelings, thoughts, memories and perceptions. The desert previously described is in other words more than just an empty expanse filled with dust and sand but a lived experience crafted through wind and heat, scale and solitude.
I’ve always been fascinated by worldbuilding. When I explore a game world, I try to inhabit the environment, and as you may have guessed, I’ve recently been inhabiting Hyrule. The latest of my adventures took me to a place which is both tangible and oppressive, yet strangely alive in its harrowing hollows, Goron City. This would be the home of the Gorons, a sort of stone people who live at the base of Death Mountain, appearing for the first time in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
The architecture of Goron City in Tears of the Kingdom offers a striking lens through which to see the study of structures based on the subjective impressions of experience and consciousness, in other words phenomenology. Spend enough time in this molten stronghold and you’ll find several interesting examples of architecture that transcends functionality, buildings primarily shaped by the local way of life.
The field of study known as phenomenology, theorized almost a century ago by philosophers including Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has always emphasized the lived experience of space, being focused on how environments reveal themselves through perception, interaction and movement. With its minimalist and perhaps even utilitarian design, Goron City encapsulates these concepts, rooting its architecture in the physicality of the surrounding landscape, in addition to the unique physiology of its inhabitants.
The first and most striking aspect of the architecture in Goron City would have to be its materiality. The settlement seems to rise organically from the volcanic sediment, with buildings directly carved into the mountainside and sweltering streams of lava flowing through the city center, suggesting a tactile relationship between the inhabitants and their landscape. You can see pumice pummeling the streets at any given time of the day or night.
When seen from a phenomenological perspective, such a seamless blend of material and structure speaks to a form of “dwelling,” something which Heidegger describes in terms of the intimate connection between space and place. Gorons refrain from imposing architecture onto the world around them, allowing the limitations of landscape to dictate both form and function. The stone walls of their homes aren’t just a response to the unbearable heat which emanates from the ground below but a feature which reinforces their connection to the environment. Gorons are made of stone, after all.
Goron City is made up of winding paths, abrupt inclines and fallen terraces, creating a labyrinthine layout that encourages a concrete negotiation with space. Standing in clear contrast to the structured grid of your typical town, Goron City embraces irregularity, compelling you to engage with the surrounding structures on their own terms.
In the mind of Merleau-Ponty, movement was always the key to understanding the experience of space. You have to climb over the rocky outcrops, leap across the lava flows and scale the protruding ledges of Goron City to really grasp its topography.
This develops your sense of “being in the world,” a connection to space in which the space itself is more than just a concept but an active participant in the overall experience, in other words a place. Gorons quite literally roll over their landscape, a social practice which is definitely more practical than locomotion, although perhaps best understood as a response to their oppressive environment.
Phenomenology encompasses a multisensory experience of space. The soundscape in Goron City is integral to its architecture, given the constant rumble of Death Mountain, and the hiss of the steam vents or the crackle of its rapidly cooling lava flows, not to mention the rumble of its rolling inhabitants. This forms a kind of aural architecture that shapes your perception of the settlement. Think of sirens wailing in the distance of a major city.
Sound isn’t something which merely accompanies the visual experience of Goron City. This provides reinforcement, echoing the notion that we don’t simply “see” spaces but inhabit them through a collision of our senses. The architecture of Goron City extends beyond the standing stone and liquid lava, steaming and groaning. The experience of moving through the settlement is a deeply innate, visceral memory within itself.
Goron City exemplifies how architecture, when viewed from a phenomenological perspective, can truly transcend the limitations of traditional production. The environments created are capable of building an experience shaped by a combination of materiality, movement, time and sensation. The architecture of Goron City is the expression of a broader culture, expressed through the close bond of the Gorons with Death Mountain, and the embodied experience of a world in constant flux and flow.
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Justin Reeve is an archaeologist specializing in architecture, urbanism and spatial theory, but he can frequently be found writing about videogames, too.