What do you remember?

[BladeBlast]: I think i was around 15 years old when I got into half life. After having played other valve titles like tf2 and cs for some years, I started becoming aware of the developers behind the games I was into and the artistry that goes into making these games. I strongly remember the heavy atmosphere, the vibe as we call it now, of visual design language of city 17.

[BladeBlast]: Frankly I’ve become far more cynical about the games I play. There is no more magic and childlike wonder. Instead of posing broad questions of how such feats are achieved, or what’s going on behind that fence, I remind myself of the technical limitations of that era. Video games hardly feel like spaces anymore, just a set of geometries, an arena, where I have shootouts with my enemies.

[BladeBlast]: It’s hard to pinpoint now, but I have fond memories of the part where you drive the car alongside the drained beaches and serpentine roads alongside them. You could stop at these scattered houses that had supplies and told little stories of what happened previously with the objects inside. Since the experience of the game is linear, this really sold the impression of an open world that I could freely explore at my own will. It was refreshing and contrasting to the rest of the game.

[BladeBlast]: I don’t attribute great influence on my practice to this game specifically.

[BladeBlast]: City 17 hits close to heart. The cars are all Soviet. Their number plates too. The city is filled with post-Khrushchev buildings. The trains are the same Soviet ones we have at home. And most importantly, the overall melancholic atmosphere is present and conveyed convincingly and palpably...

[BladeBlast]: I hate romanticising this idea, and I’m sure there was conscious and subconscious influence from the widespread media doing just that. But what separates the social housing back home from the ones in the west is the character brought by the appropriations of the residents. Whereas western social housing zones all remained soulless and sterile (just like middleclass westerners in general, laughable values), the ones back home have been since expanded upon, painted over, and made to imply a quasi social status, in a charming, kitschy way. Its architecture that was reclaimed from the architects and made by the people. Informal architecture, if you will. The beauty of it is that it breaks the modernist homogeneity and imbues it with personality.

[BladeBlast]: Good urban planning.

[BladeBlast]: The Romașca has to be one of my favorite buildings from Chisinau. It’s a tall cylindrical tower that tapers down close to the base volume and creates a nice waistline. Aside from its morphology, it used to be the tallest residential building, spanning 24 floors. It was designed to have all the amenities inside the building itself, like a barber, a cobbler and a little store . There is also a popular urban legend that the tower used to spin around its axis, offering its residents a different view of the sunrise/sunset each day, popularized by a Soviet cartoon where it had similar looking buildings that spun. What makes it interesting is how the building failed. What was once prestigious, now became inhabited by blue collar. The stores are defunct and the basement of the building, which is almost as tall as the building itself, is flooded with water, which sets it on course for a structural collapse. If you get lucky, you can sometimes see people pump out the shit water from the basement.

[BladeBlast]: Enough misery to keep everyone too tired to rebel.