Los Santos Without Its Skin

Strip the textures from Grand Theft Auto V and what you’re left with isn’t nothing—it’s something stranger than nothing. Artist Kim Laughton did exactly that, then walked through the resulting Los Santos with a virtual camera, documenting the city as pure geometry: hills, overpasses, building-shaped voids, drained of color and grime and any sign of habitation. The images are quietly unsettling in a way the actual game, with its maximalist noise, never quite manages.

As a designer, I keep returning to this kind of work. Stripping a familiar surface to its underlying structure tells you more about how a space was conceived than any developer commentary could. Los Santos, seen this way, is a paranoid city—everything optimized for movement, for a camera that never stops, for a player who is always either escaping or chasing. Without the texture noise masking it, that becomes obvious very fast.

Laughton titled the project Los Santos.obj. The.obj is a 3D mesh file format. A city as object file. Nobody home.