Art Deco to Brutalist: The Architecture of GTA 6's Vice City

You can tell a lot about a game’s world design by looking at the buildings. Not the hero structures — not the obvious landmarks — but the regular buildings. The stuff that fills the space between set pieces. And in GTA 6, even the regular buildings are telling a story.

The Art Deco District

Miami’s South Beach is famous for its Art Deco Historic District — those pastel-colored, curved-corner buildings from the 1930s and 40s that look like someone designed a hotel inside a birthday cake. They’re iconic. They’re gorgeous. And they’re in GTA 6.

Around 0:22 in the first trailer, there’s a street-level shot that shows a row of low-rise buildings with the telltale Art Deco features: rounded corners, horizontal “racing stripe” lines, porthole windows, stepped rooflines. The colors are right too — soft pinks, mint greens, cream whites. It’s clearly Ocean Drive or a version of it, and Rockstar’s nailed the aesthetic.

What I appreciate is that these aren’t generic “old-timey” buildings. They’ve got specific Art Deco sub-styles represented. I can see Streamline Moderne curves on some buildings and more geometric Tropical Deco patterns on others. Someone at Rockstar did their homework.

Glass and Steel — The Modern Skyline

Vice City’s skyline in GTA 6 includes modern high-rises that are obviously based on Miami’s Brickell and Downtown areas. Sleek glass towers, reflective facades that catch the sky and water, angular designs that look like they were built in the last ten years. The reflections on these buildings are real-time — you can see clouds moving across the glass surfaces in the trailer footage.

There’s one particular tower — visible in multiple shots — that looks a lot like the Paramount Miami Worldcenter or one of the newer Brickell developments. Tall, curved, with a distinctive top section. It might serve as a landmark, like the Maze Bank Tower did in GTA V.

The contrast between these modern towers and the low-rise Art Deco district creates exactly the kind of visual tension that real Miami has. You can literally stand on a corner and look one direction at a 1935 hotel and the other direction at a 2024 glass monolith. Rockstar’s captured that.

The Motel Strip

This is less glamorous but I love it. There are shots of what looks like a run-down motel strip — single-story, L-shaped buildings with exterior corridors, neon “vacancy” signs, peeling paint. Classic Florida roadside aesthetics. The kind of place where bad decisions happen.

These buildings have a totally different vibe from the Deco stuff or the modern towers. They’re tired. Worn. You can see rust stains on the stucco, AC units hanging off the walls, crooked blinds in the windows. It’s the kind of environmental storytelling Rockstar excels at — you know what kind of neighborhood you’re in just by looking at the architecture.

Suburban Sprawl

Less flashy but equally important: the residential areas. There are brief shots of suburban streets with single-family homes that look distinctly Floridian — stucco walls, tile roofs, screened-in pools (lanais, if you want to get technical), palm trees in every yard. These homes aren’t mansions and they aren’t slums. They’re middle-class Florida houses, and their inclusion suggests Rockstar’s building a Vice City that extends well beyond the tourist districts.

The Strip Mall Question

I keep looking for strip malls and I think I’ve found them. Florida is strip mall country — those L-shaped plazas with a dry cleaner, a nail salon, a check-cashing place, and a Cuban restaurant all sharing one parking lot. There’s a shot in the second trailer that shows what could be exactly this kind of commercial architecture, complete with a parking lot and individual storefronts.

If Rockstar has faithfully recreated Florida strip mall culture, I’ll be unreasonably happy. That’s peak authenticity right there.

What the Architecture Tells Us About the Map

Different architectural styles mean different districts, which means the map has genuine variety. You’ve got your tourist district (Art Deco), your financial center (modern glass), your seedy underbelly (motels), your residential zones (suburbs), and likely more we haven’t seen — industrial, rural, commercial.

GTA V’s Los Santos had districts, sure, but the architecture wasn’t always as differentiated. Vinewood and Downtown looked similar in terms of building style. What I’m seeing in GTA 6 suggests sharper boundaries between neighborhoods — you’ll know where you are just by looking around.

That’s good map design. It means the world communicates through environment rather than just through icons on a minimap. And for a city based on one of America’s most architecturally diverse metros, Rockstar had incredible source material to work with.

They don’t seem to have wasted it.