The Creative Assembly assembles a machine for living
The primordial harshness of space is on horrifying display in the 1979 film Alien. The crew of the spaceship Nostromo - featuring Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley - was stalked by the xenomorph, a fearsome lifeform conceived by Swiss designer and architecture graduate H.R. Giger.
The utilitarian human architecture, gestated by concept artist Ron Cobb and realized by production designer Michael Seymour's art department, is equally memorable, with corridors that have proven especially influential. Director Ridley Scott sought a tangible reality that captured 'the beauty of something absolutely about function'.
In Alien: Isolation, British developer The Creative Assembly lets us inhabit this world, caught in a deadly game of hide and seek. Following the discovery of Nostromo's recorder, the player takes on the role of Ellen Ripley's daughter Amanda and arrives at Sevastopol: a space station undergoing decommission on the outer rim, in the orbit of a gas giant.
Lead artist Jude Bond and concept artist Bradley Wright based Sevastopol's design on the ore refinery towed by the Nostromo in the film; its cathedral-like spires were initially conceived in an illustration by Ridley Scott. Sevastopol features three, not four towers, and extends the decks below the platform that serves as an artificial ground. Massive thrusters - 'gravity anchors' - are retrofitted to domes underneath. In The Art of Alien: Isolation (2014), Wright notes: 'I [initially] explored ideas of this large machine structure that formed the center of each tower's hub - a mini-brain of sorts.' Each tower serves an 'archetypal function - habitation, technical and science' with 'engineering on the lower decks', somewhat reminiscent of Paolo Soleri's arcology, Novanoah I.
For the internal spaces, Wright 'took cues from Cobb's simplified utilitarian color choices to make a clean and readable design'. The spaces emulate the film sets with exacting verisimilitude - from the distinctive padded corridors to the turret rail-mounted chairs - but also sees them evolve into a cohesively complete and functional environment that considers circulation, light, even introductory impact and interior to exterior sight lines. The film's art director Roger Christian clad the sets in old aircraft parts and bond adds: 'We've limited ourselves to things which could have been or were available in 1979.'
The architecture is treated as a machine, with its utilitarian aspects and exoskeleton exposed, like the xenomorph itself. One of the early Nostromo designs by concept artist Chris Foss suggested a 'Mississippi river boat' or steamship - which coincidentally also served as inspiration in Le Corbousier's machine for living, the Villa Savoye.
Alien: Isolation exemplifies architecture in the context of a machine and finds aesthetic beauty in its lo-fi functionalism.
Oliver Zeller
Mark Magazine 55: April/May 2015
