The Tblisi Ministry of Transport is very constructivist and/or brutalist. Basically, very Soviet. It also bears a striking resemblence to the kind of structures that you’d find in future-set FPS games. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Half-Life 2 is set in an Eastern European styled city.
It makes me wonder if anybody has done (I’m sure somebody has) a study on architectural/civic design as represented in video games. Could be an interesting subject.
Bonus content: Russian Utopia: A Depository.
There’s very little I’ve come across about how videogames represent cities and other environments - too bad as yeah, it’s utterly fascinating.
However, not wanting to bang my own drum too much, I wrote an article for a design mag I used to work for on the design of game spaces a while back, and I interviewed Victor Antonov, HL2’s art director:
http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/october/gamespace.htm
Dan Hill of Cityofsound wrote a really great post comparing Los Angeles and San Andreas that I can’t recommend enough:
http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2004/12/los_angeles_gra.html
Trawling through my delicious there’s also this from Things Magazine:
http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2004_03_01_oldthings.htm#108054706676693864
And this from the NYT about videogame representations of New York, but I guess it’s more about society than bricks and mortar:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/nyregion/thecity/13vide.html?ex=1162616400&en=9adc193a517739a4&ei=5070