You may have never heard of Galina Balashova. Yet she occupies a unique place in history, being the first architect to ever be involved with space travel. You might be surprised to know that she designed the interior of the most reliable, successful and widely used spacecraft in human history, the Soyuz. The spacecraft which even now, remains the only one which brings astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Her name, like much of the real exceptional Soviet space travel pioneered by Sergei Korolev and his “Design Bureau,” has been obscured from Western history by the supposed American “victory” of the space race, a race if judged by achievements in space science and travel, was already won before America joined.
It’s only in recent years that her delicate watercolor designs have re-entered public consciousness. In a field dominated by engineers and scientists, Balashova brought aesthetic and design sensibilities to purely functional designs. Her first Soyuz sketches feel almost naive to a generation brought up on imagery, both fictional and not, of vast industrial spaceships, brimming with unknown technologies and bulbous, blocky walls. Her Soyuz designs are distinctive in the extreme, complete with picture rails, magazine racks, nautical looking wooden portholes, and equipment desks that resemble the interior of a luxury 60s yacht, not a revolutionary, void-bridging spacecraft. Her designs separate function and style into a careful arrangement of coherent forms, their soft colors and cleanliness suggesting a need to evoke home, and the normality of earth-bound human habitation, with an ornamental hint of streamlined luxury.
Instead of blinking lights on kit-bashed surfaces, we get precisely machined, interlocking parts, that click and whirr and screech
It was exactly this quality that brought Balashova’s designs to my mind the moment I set foot aboard Prey’s glittering space station, Talos I. It was not a match of visual styles, Talos I is far more luxurious than a Soyuz could ever hope to be, but a sense of a continuation of an idea, a re-emergence of something lost. The wood panelling, the carpets (when was the last time you saw a space station with carpets?) the instruments, even the nautical quality, though here borrowed a grand cruiseliner not a diminutive yacht, all make the connection explicit. We’ve seen this kind of visual detailing and opulence from developer Arkane before, in the Dishonored series, but while those richly designed interiors muddied with dirt, wear, and function pointed to themes of wealth and corruption, here, in the lofty void of science-fiction, they feel like grounding markers, so that a wrinkle in a rug suddenly reminds you of humanity’s earthly origins. This gestures towards the same idea that Balishova proposed, that a room in space should foreground its terrestrial comforts, seek to imitate the known, the tactile, the familiar. And perhaps more than that; the idea that a space-faring vessel might be an ornament, a sculpture, an aesthetic statement, not just the coincidental, symmetrical arrangement of functional forms.
In the aesthetics of space travel, it was the greeble that killed the ornament. The Sputik 1 may have been a singular sculptural object, and the Soyuz a lost design icon, but it was a different aesthetic: the gold foil of the Apollo capsule, the graphical quality of the fiducial crosshairs, the inflated white and reflective visors of the astronauts suits, that would be drilled into the visual register of space travel by the 1969 Moon Landing. 2001: A Space Odyssey, just one year earlier, struck a balance between the NASA aesthetic and the sculptural, ornamental design of its interiors and rooms, but a decade on, when Star Wars arrived, the industrial, technical, and functional visual style of representing space travel was in ascendancy. Consider the Death Star, that lasting icon, a Sputnik robbed of its elegant chrome simplicity and speckled instead with a million kitbashed details, a skin of “greebling” (as the technique of covering spaceships in unfathomable detail was named by its creators) and its canyon like trench bristling with a million suggested pieces of exotic technology, like a bricolage of every spacecraft humanity had built. Alien in 1979, and its militaristic sequel Aliens in 1986 would continue this trend, and hammer the final, fatal nails into the fanciful, elegant, ornamental coffin of Balashova and her descendants, spawning thousands of tributes to the film’s visionary production designer, Ron Cobb. Even today, Alien’s industrial aesthetic remains the touchstone for films, comics and games alike.
Conceivable as a single architectural object. An ornament, floating in the void
Prey is a notable shift in that trend. Its space station of Talos I can most aptly be described as a “skyscraper in space”, a neo-deco monolith of gold fringing and warm tones, built from natural materials and even outfitted with golden winged lions, leaping from its exterior edifices. Its interiors are often plush, outfitted in a distillation of 1960s chic, apparently inspired by both historical references and newer reinterpretations, such as the almost fantastical, noir-and-deco inspired elegance of the 2013 Viceroy hotel in New York. To my eyes however, the interlocking golden framework of its exterior resembles Moscow’s Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences—if its spectacular crown had finally met its ostentatious ambitions and been launched into orbit. Talos I matches that building’s dual-purpose too; the Presidium houses not just a centre of focused, obsessive research, but its “golden brains”, as the local nickname for its ornamental peak goes, houses a luxury restaurant. Talos I goes one further by having an entire arboretum at its peak, set in a carefully landscaped garden, with a Frank Lloyd Wright-esque modernist house at its centre. Even so, it has the same split focus as the Presidium, with a set of laboratories concealed beneath the floors of tasteful hardwood and brass fittings. It is in these labs and engineering bays that Prey best demonstrates its mirroring of Balashova’s aesthetic separation of the functional and the ornamental.
Much of the greeble-skinned, military-industrial aesthetic of science fiction we see used so widely relies on a sheen of not-knowing. Its interlocking technologies and faceted surfaces suggest, rather than reveal, the mechanics of their world. Though occasionally retro in style, this approach points to our own, “black box” relationship to technology as a series of light emitting devices that “just work.” In cinema especially, the overt detailing of spaceships and space-technologies acts as a kind of symbolic but empty stand-in for technological exposition; a set of blinking lights and a boxy silhouette are all we need to accept function and move on. Prey, despite being set in an alternate future decades from now, refuses this approach. Instead of blinking lights on kit-bashed surfaces, we get precisely machined, interlocking parts, that click and whirr and screech.
They feel like grounding markers, so that a wrinkle in a rug suddenly reminds you of humanity’s earthly origins
Though Prey‘s game mechanics of recycling materials into building blocks of resources and then fabricating them into useful weapons and items may be based on absurd, exotic technologies, Arkane is insistent on making these processes visible, even comprehensible. It’s powerful, near-magical recycling and fabrication machines resemble pillar-drills or machine-shop equipment, complete with chunky handles, riveted metal, corrugated chutes, and plastic splash-guards marked with the stains of a lifetime of heavy use. There is a strong satisfaction to the click-clack processes these machines go through when delivering your items, each detail becoming part of a functional, understandable whole. Talos I is packed with these painstakingly designed artefacts: huge Jules Verne-like brass telescopes, humming IBM tape decks instead of server stacks, vast electron microscopes of polished steel. They distinguish themselves totally from the golden lions, the murals and paintings, the designer leather furniture, and in doing so they choreograph an aesthetic play of function and ornament that makes that connection to Balashova and her Soyuz designs.
The result is a revival of function and ornament as separate qualities in science-fiction: an embrace of the purely aesthetic without losing the grounding touch of mechanized realities. While the greebled Death Star might, for all its qualities, remain a generalized blob of tech and ornament, Talos I becomes, over the player’s time in its halls, a nuanced balance of visual ambition and literalized technology. It is liveable, understandable, even historical, and when the game lets us drift out into space and orbit its every surface and room as if we were debug testers, outside the bounds of the map, it becomes conceivable as a single architectural object. An ornament, floating in the void. This image only lasts for a moment of course, because we must always descend, back through the exposed hydraulic systems of its airlocks, into its multifaceted interiors. And, as I moved through these intersecting spaces within this grand sculpture, I was delighted to find at the very centre of Talos I, a Soviet satellite caught in the gossamer strands of an alien web, as if frozen in time. This alternate Sputnik feels like an explicit nod from Arkane as to the origins of their vast ornamental space station. Though explained away by the setting of the game, an alternate history where the Soviets and Americans abandoned the space race to collaborate on the research and harnessing of an alien power, it can’t help but feel like tacit acknowledgement of the references at play here, and the hidden history at its centre.
If you enjoyed this study please consider supporting the Heterotopias project through purchasing our zine. Issues 001 + 002, featuring almost 200 pages of visual studies and critical essays on games and architecture, are currently available in a discounted launch bundle here.
Thank you for your support!
You may have never heard of Galina Balashova. Yet she occupies a unique place in history, being the first architect to ever be involved with space travel. You might be surprised to know that she designed the interior of the most reliable, successful and widely used spacecraft in human history, the Soyuz. The spacecraft which even now, remains the only one which brings astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Her name, like much of the real exceptional Soviet space travel pioneered by Sergei Korolev and his “Design Bureau,” has been obscured from Western history by the supposed American “victory” of the space race, a race if judged by achievements in space science and travel, was already won before America joined.
It’s only in recent years that her delicate watercolor designs have re-entered public consciousness. In a field dominated by engineers and scientists, Balashova brought aesthetic and design sensibilities to purely functional designs. Her first Soyuz sketches feel almost naive to a generation brought up on imagery, both fictional and not, of vast industrial spaceships, brimming with unknown technologies and bulbous, blocky walls. Her Soyuz designs are distinctive in the extreme, complete with picture rails, magazine racks, nautical looking wooden portholes, and equipment desks that resemble the interior of a luxury 60s yacht, not a revolutionary, void-bridging spacecraft. Her designs separate function and style into a careful arrangement of coherent forms, their soft colors and cleanliness suggesting a need to evoke home, and the normality of earth-bound human habitation, with an ornamental hint of streamlined luxury.
It was exactly this quality that brought Balashova’s designs to my mind the moment I set foot aboard Prey’s glittering space station, Talos I. It was not a match of visual styles, Talos I is far more luxurious than a Soyuz could ever hope to be, but a sense of a continuation of an idea, a re-emergence of something lost. The wood panelling, the carpets (when was the last time you saw a space station with carpets?) the instruments, even the nautical quality, though here borrowed a grand cruiseliner not a diminutive yacht, all make the connection explicit. We’ve seen this kind of visual detailing and opulence from developer Arkane before, in the Dishonored series, but while those richly designed interiors muddied with dirt, wear, and function pointed to themes of wealth and corruption, here, in the lofty void of science-fiction, they feel like grounding markers, so that a wrinkle in a rug suddenly reminds you of humanity’s earthly origins. This gestures towards the same idea that Balishova proposed, that a room in space should foreground its terrestrial comforts, seek to imitate the known, the tactile, the familiar. And perhaps more than that; the idea that a space-faring vessel might be an ornament, a sculpture, an aesthetic statement, not just the coincidental, symmetrical arrangement of functional forms.
In the aesthetics of space travel, it was the greeble that killed the ornament. The Sputik 1 may have been a singular sculptural object, and the Soyuz a lost design icon, but it was a different aesthetic: the gold foil of the Apollo capsule, the graphical quality of the fiducial crosshairs, the inflated white and reflective visors of the astronauts suits, that would be drilled into the visual register of space travel by the 1969 Moon Landing. 2001: A Space Odyssey, just one year earlier, struck a balance between the NASA aesthetic and the sculptural, ornamental design of its interiors and rooms, but a decade on, when Star Wars arrived, the industrial, technical, and functional visual style of representing space travel was in ascendancy. Consider the Death Star, that lasting icon, a Sputnik robbed of its elegant chrome simplicity and speckled instead with a million kitbashed details, a skin of “greebling” (as the technique of covering spaceships in unfathomable detail was named by its creators) and its canyon like trench bristling with a million suggested pieces of exotic technology, like a bricolage of every spacecraft humanity had built. Alien in 1979, and its militaristic sequel Aliens in 1986 would continue this trend, and hammer the final, fatal nails into the fanciful, elegant, ornamental coffin of Balashova and her descendants, spawning thousands of tributes to the film’s visionary production designer, Ron Cobb. Even today, Alien’s industrial aesthetic remains the touchstone for films, comics and games alike.
Prey is a notable shift in that trend. Its space station of Talos I can most aptly be described as a “skyscraper in space”, a neo-deco monolith of gold fringing and warm tones, built from natural materials and even outfitted with golden winged lions, leaping from its exterior edifices. Its interiors are often plush, outfitted in a distillation of 1960s chic, apparently inspired by both historical references and newer reinterpretations, such as the almost fantastical, noir-and-deco inspired elegance of the 2013 Viceroy hotel in New York. To my eyes however, the interlocking golden framework of its exterior resembles Moscow’s Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences—if its spectacular crown had finally met its ostentatious ambitions and been launched into orbit. Talos I matches that building’s dual-purpose too; the Presidium houses not just a centre of focused, obsessive research, but its “golden brains”, as the local nickname for its ornamental peak goes, houses a luxury restaurant. Talos I goes one further by having an entire arboretum at its peak, set in a carefully landscaped garden, with a Frank Lloyd Wright-esque modernist house at its centre. Even so, it has the same split focus as the Presidium, with a set of laboratories concealed beneath the floors of tasteful hardwood and brass fittings. It is in these labs and engineering bays that Prey best demonstrates its mirroring of Balashova’s aesthetic separation of the functional and the ornamental.
Much of the greeble-skinned, military-industrial aesthetic of science fiction we see used so widely relies on a sheen of not-knowing. Its interlocking technologies and faceted surfaces suggest, rather than reveal, the mechanics of their world. Though occasionally retro in style, this approach points to our own, “black box” relationship to technology as a series of light emitting devices that “just work.” In cinema especially, the overt detailing of spaceships and space-technologies acts as a kind of symbolic but empty stand-in for technological exposition; a set of blinking lights and a boxy silhouette are all we need to accept function and move on. Prey, despite being set in an alternate future decades from now, refuses this approach. Instead of blinking lights on kit-bashed surfaces, we get precisely machined, interlocking parts, that click and whirr and screech.
Though Prey‘s game mechanics of recycling materials into building blocks of resources and then fabricating them into useful weapons and items may be based on absurd, exotic technologies, Arkane is insistent on making these processes visible, even comprehensible. It’s powerful, near-magical recycling and fabrication machines resemble pillar-drills or machine-shop equipment, complete with chunky handles, riveted metal, corrugated chutes, and plastic splash-guards marked with the stains of a lifetime of heavy use. There is a strong satisfaction to the click-clack processes these machines go through when delivering your items, each detail becoming part of a functional, understandable whole. Talos I is packed with these painstakingly designed artefacts: huge Jules Verne-like brass telescopes, humming IBM tape decks instead of server stacks, vast electron microscopes of polished steel. They distinguish themselves totally from the golden lions, the murals and paintings, the designer leather furniture, and in doing so they choreograph an aesthetic play of function and ornament that makes that connection to Balashova and her Soyuz designs.
The result is a revival of function and ornament as separate qualities in science-fiction: an embrace of the purely aesthetic without losing the grounding touch of mechanized realities. While the greebled Death Star might, for all its qualities, remain a generalized blob of tech and ornament, Talos I becomes, over the player’s time in its halls, a nuanced balance of visual ambition and literalized technology. It is liveable, understandable, even historical, and when the game lets us drift out into space and orbit its every surface and room as if we were debug testers, outside the bounds of the map, it becomes conceivable as a single architectural object. An ornament, floating in the void. This image only lasts for a moment of course, because we must always descend, back through the exposed hydraulic systems of its airlocks, into its multifaceted interiors. And, as I moved through these intersecting spaces within this grand sculpture, I was delighted to find at the very centre of Talos I, a Soviet satellite caught in the gossamer strands of an alien web, as if frozen in time. This alternate Sputnik feels like an explicit nod from Arkane as to the origins of their vast ornamental space station. Though explained away by the setting of the game, an alternate history where the Soviets and Americans abandoned the space race to collaborate on the research and harnessing of an alien power, it can’t help but feel like tacit acknowledgement of the references at play here, and the hidden history at its centre.
If you enjoyed this study please consider supporting the Heterotopias project through purchasing our zine. Issues 001 + 002, featuring almost 200 pages of visual studies and critical essays on games and architecture, are currently available in a discounted launch bundle here.
Thank you for your support!
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