Author: Bence Pap

iheartblob is an award winning architectural design studio and research collective formed by Aleksandra Belitskaja, Ben James and Shaun McCallum, currently based in the UK.

The studio has a strong focus on the Architectural Object, yet, draws on core tenets from an array of philosophical and theoretical principles whilst exploring new models of architectural thinking and constructing. The work is meant to both enchant and reflect on the crisis of thought which runs through architecture today by investigating new and established ideas as though they were materials, engaging seriously with hard hitting agendas, whilst remaining at a distance from full immersion.

Watch the interview:

Architecture in the expanded field – The Metaverse and beyond

10 provocations

Q1: the architect

In our physical world the notion of the architect is still considered with some prestige, in some countries it’s a protected entity to call oneself an architect, yielding years of study and practice gathering quite an intrinsic field of knowledge ranging from design visions, political, cultural and social observation and understanding of the world to entrepreneurial skills.

In what ways is this traditional understanding of the profession relevant to working in virtual and digital domains as an architect and what new competencies should future generations embrace to become key players – if their ambitions is to cater to a hybridized world?

P.S.:

To be sure, architects competing for design commissions in the metaverse cannot rely on the government backed monopolistic privileges they enjoy with respect to the design of physical buildings. (As an aside, I would like to argue that these barriers to entry should be lifted everywhere, as a matter of principle, in the name of economic freedom and prosperity.) However, the architects’ skills and knowledge, as well as the architects’ prestige and experience gained in the world of urban development are very relevant competitive advantages with respect to metaverse design. I predict that architects will dominate the design of Web 3.0, at least that part of the metaverse market that aims to host connected virtual cultural, educational, commercial, and work environments, conceived in both competition and continuity with physical cities, constituting a connected communication process. This conception of the metaverse as part of a continuous social reality contrasts with the idea of the metaverse as paralell universe, fantasy world or other-worldly multi-player gaming platform. The latter will be dominated by game developers. Game developers are not part of the design disciplines. While this segment currently seems to be the larger part of the metaverse, in the long run it will be a relatively small market in comparison to what the real metaverse I mean will be. I also predict that the term ‘metaverse’, if it persists in denoting the part I am aiming to contribute to as architect, the gaming worlds will no longer be included in the concept, just as Disneyland is not really a part of the city, and the artistic creators of Disneyland are not recognized as architects/designers. This is not a matter of value or worth, but of distinct professional realms and incommensurable criteria of success.

The design of the metaverse I mean, the design of the metaverse I envision to become a part of the designed environment we communicate, learn, work and transact within, i.e. we live within, is, in my view fully and unambiguously located within the task domain of architecture, according to my understanding of architecture’s societal function. No doubt, the technical boundaries or constraints of metaverse architecture are very different from the technical constraints that bound physical architecture. The move from physical to virtual architecture implies the switching of the whole engineering stack. However, the social functionality criteria are very much the same: maximising communication and collaboration. All design is about framing social interactions. This includes virtual interactions. Any design project in this space involves the three parts of the architect’s project I have distinguished in my theory of architecture: the organisational project, the phenomenological project and the semiological project. The design challenges remain the same:  maintaining legibility in complex scenes, facilitating information-richness, navigation and the identification of social situations etc.  All organisations – firms, cultural institutions, charities, etc. – will host virtual spaces in the metaverse. Most of them will retain their urban premises too. It makes sense that both physical and virtual premises are congenial extensions of each other, and are designed together. I further predict that our physical urban and architectural environments will transform and become interfaces to these virtual spaces. This means users can enter the virtual worlds not only individually from their homes via headsets or laptops but together with others via large panoramic screens and other spatial interfaces. We’ll experience the metaverse from shared physical social spaces, from within our work spaces and public urban spaces. So I predict a mixed reality and a cyber-urban fusion. If this is true, it makes sense to design real and virtual spaces together, as a continuum. This, once more, implies that architects will take this work.

Q2: architecture in “the extended field”

Joseph Beuys coined the terminology “art in the extended field” conceptualizing on the broader understanding of the world trough works of art, but also on the  other hand expanding the understanding of authors of the work, democratizing this singular notion with the statement ”Everybody is an artist”, hence has the potential to work creatively.

Do you see a parallel movement with architecture today entering virtual domains, that are inhabitable, commercially feasible -promising new civic experiences ?

P.S.:

To be sure, the metaverse offers a huge chance to young architects. A long track record of delivering complex buildings, or planning permissions in difficult planning regimes etc. is not required to break into this new market. Market entry is in this sense “democratized”, although I would not use this term here without quotation marks. Similarly, user generated content, facilitated by in-world builders, represents a kind of “democratization” of (virtual) city building. However, while I think this is significant, it won’t seriously undermine the demand for professional design services, not least because the total demand for virtual metaverse venues will be so great in the coming period – an avalanche of work –  that there is more than enough work for everybody who choses to join this market.

Apropos democracy: the great advantage of the metaverse over cities is  – at least at this stage –  the absence of democratic political control. Here, in stark contrast to real estate development in the physical world, we find a realm for the unfettered exercise of entrepreneurial freedom and politically unencumbered design freedom. Here the market can still function as discovery procedure, to use an influential concept from F.A. Hayek.

There is another intriguing aspect that pertains to the coming metaverse as currently envisaged by most metaverse start-ups, an aspect that implies democratization in the sense of collective, quasi-political decision making, namely the project to organize metaverses not as corporations but as blockchain based Decentralized Automonous Organisations, short DAOs. While the self-promotional hype of metaverses claiming to institute “community ownership” is indeed just hype or hyperbole, and the difference to corporations is exaggerated, the opportunity for inventing and experimenting with governance systems is indeed a very interesting opportunity, compared with corporate structures regulated by governmental rules of incorporation and settled into standard forms. The new computationally supported governance technologies and a lively accompanying discourse about innovative forms of governance and their potential benefits or risks, are flourishing in the crypto ecosystem. I believe that metaverse projects can and should join this discourse and experimentation. This space of organizational freedom is a great advantage crypto-oriented metaverse start-ups have over huge but politically closely scrutinized and hemmed in competitors like Meta.

Q3: political boundaries and constraints

Architecture lives within a flux of deploying spatial potentials within an ecosystem defined by politics (among other domains) Some libertarian, others corrupt and some pretentious as pseudo democracies – but all to a certain extend striving for free capitalism. This defines as a result also architectural potentials based on that certain ecosystem. How is your understanding of the political ecosystem within the Metaverse and its other digital derivates and how does this understanding open up new potentials for designers and architects? Where should power structures for these currently non regulated, or decentralized territories develop to in terms of their structural capacities in your opinion?

P.S.: Unfortunately, architecture in the physical world is only insufficiently governed by free market capitalism. The urban development process is very much politically controlled, indeed often paralyzed, and hardly a market process at all. I am not hostile to all forms of collective decision making. Most corporations involve multiple owners and therefore collective decision making via voting, within the framework of designed constitutions, the corporation’s ‘articles of association’. The difference with physical nations and cities is that we are mostly born into one of them without any choice. The theory of the ‘social contract’ is just a theoretical fiction, not a real contract voluntarily entered. Metaverses can offer a true social contract, and there is sufficient competition and choice to make this concept a meaningful reality. Also, while in the regulated part of the economy the corporate constitution is legally pre-framed, in the as yet unregulated ream of DAOs, by contrast, the freedom to design constitutions and social contracts is wide open, only limited by the imagination of the metaverse founders. One thing is already clear: DAOs follow more the example of corporations than the example of national democracies. Universal suffrage, on the basis of one vote per participant, is never considered. Rather, the democracies of metaverses are democracies of the invested, where voting power is proportional to the token shareholding, although deviations from this are being discussed. In the metaverse land owners are playing an important political role, potentially distinct from token holders. This makes sense in particular with respect to urban planning/urban design policies. This implies democracy of the well-informed, specifically invested/interested parties, rather than the currently prevalent democracy of the  rationally ignorant, indiffeent and abstinent voter. Voter indifference, ignorance and abstinence is especially pronounced when it comes to local municipal elections where urban policy is supposed to be democratically controlled.  This has little to do with any genuine ideal or idea of democracy but systematically disenfranchises those who are the real stakeholders with relevant information and incentives to make decisions in the interest of the city’s end users. A landowners’ democracy, with votes weighted by the scale of the investment/land holding is the best way to structure collective decision-making processes for the benefit for all end users, both in the metaverse and in the physical city or city district. To grasp this one must understand that in a n open, competitive market producer and consumer interests align because producers only win by serving consumer (end user) interests better than their competitors. The inherent logic of this process also implies that innovation accelerates. What the overarching platform governance must secure is open market entry. Then landowners can be left to collectively self-regulate the management (internalization) of negative and positive externalities, shared investments/upgrades etc. without fear of anti-competitive cartelization/monopoly. The platform will also participate in land value increases (planning and agglomeration gains) via transaction fees or land taxes. I predict that this rationality of a framed landowner democracy will assert itself and will come through in the free and highly competitive metaverse market. This experience might then open the way to apply this practice also to physical municipal decision making with respect to all aspects of urban planning.

Q4: ZHA – Metaverse

Zaha Hadid architects have designed an entire city, a masterplan proposal, named “Liberland-Metaverse” with the city hall as an expression of political governing power at its core center. That is an interesting take on defining a center of an emerging urbanism. Should there not be a typological challenge, marking that center , getting away from conventional power structure such as a major or religious institutions. What do you think?

P.S.:

The city hall was an attempt to bring Liberland’s political governance, including Liberland Metaverse governance as a subsidiary aspect of Liberland, conspicuously into the metaverse itself. In principle I think the idea makes a lot of sense: to bring aspects of the metaverse governance process into the metaverse itself as immersive, interactive, real-time process, rather than using web 2.0 mechanisms like discord channels. Apropos governance in religious organizations: there is a whole spectrum, all the way from the highly centralized and hierarchical Catholic church to self-organizing protestant sects with lay preachers, or “cults” with charismatic leaders. A similar diversity might be expected in terms of metaverses and network societies.

Let me use this opportunity to update you and note that what has been up to now ‘Liberland Metaverse’ will now fork into two separate and independent ventures. The name Liberland Metaverse will stay with Vít Jedlička and his Liberland Ltd. On the side of ZHA and ArchAgenda the project will continue under the (provisional) name Cyberland. The concept on our side remains in essence the same, perhaps with a more explicit acknowledgement that now our metaverse (intended virtual creative industry cluster) aims to capture the design disciplines/professions, and related institutions rather than the crypto ecosystem (although the designers/firms/galleries we approach are web 3.0 pioneers in their field). This shift in orientation (target market) better reflects the reality of our professional and cultural networks, and indeed the character of the set of potential initial clients we are already communicating with.

Q5: new global context

Similar to the mentioned ecosystem shaping architectural language and expression, historically there is often a contextual relationship between architecture and some form of context. This relationships -down the line of architectural history has helped canonical project to emerge. In the most conventional sense this can be the built physical environment or  (contextual dentistry – as J. Kippnis used to call it) but also technological developments that help redefine the way architects work and the work itself.

How will this context be defined in virtual worlds, will it strive more towards a uniformity or on what levels can you imagine to have differentiation?

P.S.:

There will be many metaverses but the economic factors that promote big world cities will also drive concentration in large metaverse platforms, namely: agglomeration economies with service efficiencies (economies of scale) and the ability  to service long tails (economies of scope), as well as co-location synergies in terms of collaborative networks of production. The metaverse we are imagining, and building will be a virtual city with many districts and many buildings and urban spaces in each district. Therefore all structures and spaces will have immediate, as well as wider spatial and morphological contexts, not unlike buildings and spaces within the city. Further, there are many non-spatial networks into which the virtual venues and spaces might be plugged into. In the metaverse these network proximities are possibly navigated like hyperlinks, via teleporting portals.

Q6: architectural reading

One of the claims and benefits within the Metaverse and other digital worlds is its immediacy. Everything at your hands all at the same time. Similar and probably for the same reason the Metaverse is referred to as the spatialized new internet.  What will these mean in the coming future for “reading” and experiencing buildings designed for the Metaverse? How could designing be challenged if we take into consideration that the average time spent on a conventional website is 14 seconds? How do your think architecture could be more engaging in a virtual world?

P.S.:

While the metaverse might be described as the spatialized or immersive internet, it is not just substituting for websites  – this is only a part of it and 2D web pages will continue to exist alongside the respective organizations’ 3D metaverse sites. The metaverse is privileging and empowering real time interaction, collective events, and offers the possibility of crowd experiences. One key area of substitution is the whole realm of conferencing, including online video conferencing. A large part of the time we now spend on Zoom or Teams will be spent in the metaverse, for the same purpose, but with enhanced opportunities for informal side communications, break out meetings, after conference socializing etc. Btw. both Microsoft Teams and Zoom are actively working on metaverse-like enhancements of their products.

I also want to pick you up on your claim that the metaverse delivers immediacy in the sense that everything is at your fingertips all at the same time, just a click away. This claim trivializes the non-trivial difficulty of making a large manifold of offerings effectively accessible. This implies bringing many items into view, effectively, without overburdening perceptual tractability. This further implies an intuitive and navigable spatial ordering. I do indeed believe that a strategically designed spatialized, immersive internet  – scientifically informed by spatial cognition research, Gestalt psychology, semiology etc. – can much enhance the browsing navigation of the panoply of spatial displays and interaction offerings that we would like to have at our fingertips or discover through quick browsing excursions. This will be superior to the current web navigation that works via key word searches that presuppose a preconceived intention. After arriving at a website, navigation is facilitated by scroll down menus and links. The metaverse will function more akin to urban browsing, giving more chances to serendipitous discoveries and chance encounters that are, however, never wholly random but based on the self-organizing co-location synergy clusters that will spontaneously emerge via the market process operating within the metaverse.

Q7: design potentials

In my previous article on NFA Lab we distinguish between “digital twins” and “surreality”. The former being the digital replica of a building that relies on concepts and constraints experienced and deployed from our physical world, such as gravity and a door to enter a building for example. While “surreality” suggest a more experimental understanding and a questioning of reality and architecture embedded within from the ground up. Similar to the floating elements as suggested in “Liberland” or seen in Andreas Reisinger’s impossible virtual furniture. In this spectrum between “digital twins” and “surreality” where would you define a current sweet spot for architecture to be successful within the Metaverse. How would we differentiate here between formal sensibility, language and the experiential quality of the spaces itself?

P.S.:

The metaverse exploits the analogy of the city, utilizing our hard won, non-trivial ability of navigating urban and architectural spaces, as well as our ability to recognize places and social situations. This requires a high degree of realism in terms of plausible design and photo-realistic rendering because the semantic clues are attached to atmospheric values that might not survive abstraction. While therefore a close adherence to the analogy with urban architecture is important to begin with, we can expect a gradual emancipation and evolution of metaverse native forms of semiological articulation, navigation and interaction, exploiting the inherently different freedoms and constraints of the medium. However, cyberspace will fuse with urban space implying a radical transformation of built architecture and urban life. Urban and architectural spaces become interfaces and windows into the virtual world. Mixed reality  – mixing physical and virtual co-presence  – will become pervasive. Therefore, the expected cyber-urban fusion will always ensure, for many institutions, a certain tie back to the physically instantiated urban and architectural semiology.

Q8:  design profession

Not only established offices, but also emerging new design talents spot their potential for work within digital domains and virtual worlds such as the Metaverse. What competencies does a future generation of architects need to have in order to make an impact in this adventure? How shall academic concepts of teaching be expanded in order to sustain relevant in these emerging fields? Last but not least how do you envision the architect of the next century?

P.S.:

I am focusing my AADRL (Architectural Association Design Research Lab) studio on the huge opportunity that the metaverse and virtual spaces imply for architecture and architects. Last year I focused on the idea of what I call the cyber-urban incubator with the assumption that physical spaces become interfaces into related virtual spaces and thus ought to be designed together. This year I am exploring a fully virtual metaverse urbanism, including issues of governance, and including architectural design elaborations and implemented interaction scenarios. As I emphasized above, the design of virtual spaces, buildings and metaverse cities is instantly recognizable as fitting well with my definition of architecture’s societal function  – the spatio-morphological framing of social interaction processes –  and into architecture’s core set of relevant competencies. I am not the only architectural teacher who recognizes this. Metaverse design will become a standard design studio brief in all schools of architecture. The incorporation of metaverse design as an unquestioned part of the discipline’s task domain also clarifies and furthers the distillation of architecture’s specific competency in distinction to building engineering competency. Architectural design competency moves smoothly between the physical and virtual realms, addressing nearly identical social functionality concerns, while building engineering comes to a full stop as this boundary where a wholly different engineering stack takes over.

I welcome this distillation. More generally, I feel many discoveries  – and there will be plenty of discoveries given the unleashed dynamism of creativity in a context where innovations are genuinely permissionless –  will feed back into the architectural design of the physical built environment. I also know that this is the moment of parmetricism’s long overdue break through. As native digital style Parametricism is congenial with the ambitions of the metaverse and will become the preferred style here. This will feed back into architecture at large and accelerate the dissemination of parametricism. The advantages of a high density, complex, variegated, legible spatio-morphological order and the requirement for continuous adaptation to changing contexts and interaction scenarios, persist in the metaverse and can only be delivered by parametricism.

Dear Patrik! Many thanks!

Bence

NFT & ARCHITECTURE I Towards a Parallel Architecture

The Metaverse and its designed contents, especially architecture, often sold on NFT platforms – is considered today a new emerging reality blurring the boundaries between the tangible and intangible, the physical and the digital – soon to be meaningful for our everyday lives, workplaces, communication and consumption, as some of its creators claim.

First lets acknowledge the hype and meteoric rise of NFTs, before questioning and critically examining this recent phenomena and its relation and impact to architecture at large. A non – fungible token, short NFT – is the authentication of a digital asset. It certifies and gives credibility and originality to a digital artefact. These certified assets could be anything from a jpeg image, a video, a simple 3D model, fashion accessoires or furniture all the way to holistic architectural projects for virtual worlds. Even though a simple image or a piece of architecture could be easily copied and re-distributed, the authentication token renders it into singular work of art – ready for trade. Analogous to the Mona Lisa in the Louvre versus a million of printed copies of the same image.

Second, NFTs come in as a user friendly and intuitive accreditation method for designers and architects, to commercially make their creations available for a new digital market economy. So within an architectural practice one could consider NFTs as an agent connecting architects with markets and demand. This is a pivotal game changer to the established methods of working in an architectural practice, which relies on winning projects trough competitions or direct commissions.

Obviously this comes in quite handy as designers and architects for their majority today and with growing popularity use a myriad of digital tools to edit, market and also design their creations. Its a short and easy leap suddenly to commercialize the work as an NFT. In return NFTs also help giving credit both on the artistic level and also on the economic level to digital creators, who for a long time struggled with exposure and accreditation.

A cyber-capitalist approach enriching the consumption and trade of digital content suddenly on an exponential scale. People in hesitant disbelief or ambiguity following up on this simple in a nutshell explanation quickly get convinced by the legibility and economic force of the adventure when institutions, like the auction house Christies or the art trade show Art Basel incorporate works of NFTs within their portfolios. Simple pioneering NFT architectural projects such as the “Mars House” by Krista Kim were sold online for a net value that could justify a physical construction of a real project.

How can this be concluded and reasoned, and what values does the work, hence architecture for virtual spaces promote? What are emerging opportunities for creators and architects, are questions we shall shed light on.

It is an evident fact that in design as well as trade of “produce”, we are quickly moving from 2dimenisonal assets to 3d artefacts. Emerging worlds and spaces are in large demand for 3d content on a vast scale. So its quite natural that architecture and designers of objects and spaces will find immense opportunities in playing an important role in feeding and designing both the worlds themselves and the content contained in it.

The question arises how this new solely digital architectural and spatial designs relate to traditional values and architectural theories ? Will the phenomena create new ones beyond the commercial aspect. Are people still interested in design per se, concept, or to the meaning of the content? Can the Vitruvian paradigms of beauty – firmness and usefulness hold up and keep its relevance in virtual worlds? Do some of these paradigms need to be replaced by new ones? How can virtual architecture be concluded or rationalised within our world and economy?

If one looks closer to the quality of the actual content available today in the usual NFT marketplaces, it becomes evident that in this early times trade and investment is hyped by the expectation of quick value increase, return of investment or the pioneering participation in a new world order in first place, while the work and its values is rendered secondary.

This hierarchy will need to be reversed.

This dynamic obviously states quite a challenge for a profession like architecture as a discipline. The expectation to contribute positively to society and the environment, to participate and advance an intellectual discourse – to make lives more meaningful – on a civic level are not yet met within the virtual realm and need to find their counterparts in virtual worlds. The civic qualities for virtual worlds are still in development so architecture struggles to be a positive response or an agency to give definition. As spatial challenges will emerge in the broader spectrum of NFT architecture – it will be a crucial tipping point to conceptually be responsive and innovative and not only copy real world constrains to virtual ones. The demand for quality and the definition of these new qualities is something that still is waiting to be explored and also valued accordingly within NFT architecture.

In this sense one also needs to speculate what the alternative notions within these new spaces and architecture can be? What are added qualities and challenging experiences to be designed? If we will only continue the inherited architectural qualities and merits of the past, as duplicates in parallel within the digital realm – architecture will not sustain its relevance as a profession.

One of the major distinguishments architects will need to make in the future in virtual worlds conceptually is between “digital twins”, replicas of physical objects or buildings and “surreality” meaning objects and buildings that go beyond the actual known physical objects and its properties and exploit new ones that match and relate to virtual worlds. This is a huge opportunity for architects to expand their existing design investigations and gain relevance as creators in virtual worlds .

An interesting example in this sense can be witnessed by Andreas Reisinger with his collection “The Shipping Collection” which as a video sold on foundation, one of the main marketplaces for NFT items for nearly 450k $. Ironic in the sense that the project suddenly explores the notion of the impossible, the kinematic and less functional – as something that would only be possible within a virtual environment. These connections might not be yet meaningful, but start to tease a relation between projects and its context that can be discussed and valued as an architectural response.

So the question remains to be explored, what are those surreal qualities within architecture to be designed and conceptualized, similar to Reisinger’s approach in furniture design?

Looking at the first ever architectural NFT project by Chris Kim as an instance, one could argue that it has merely any relation to a trajectory of the architectural discourse and discussion. Is it architecture at all? What aspects of conventions does it ignore and which ones does it open up? It surely has spatiality and gradient surface texture as an expression, but is it in any sense innovative or intellectually provoking in relationship to virtual worlds ? The project as discourse and intellectual contribution of architecture and discipline in relation to virtual worlds is challenging, while its prominent feature of being the first in a series of spatial entities as an NFT stands out, and made history.

The new architectural business model is established on values of fast consumption and trade, instead on new concepts and opportunities, the notion of production and any type of Taylorism promoting quality. The new worlds do not set currently any intellectual or cultural constrains for designers – so anything goes. This in return allows for everybody to be a designer, a creator, an architect – something that is very well aligned with an egalitarian zeitgeist and ethos.

Todays digital endeavor with NFTs has its roots in cultural, technological and social phenomenas of the recent past. Re-establishment, decentralization, flat hierarchies, an increase in self engagement and control are just a few of the socio cultural phenomena’s that have yielded the way. The NFT market economy and hence opportunities in connection of designing and marketing architectural projects could be considered a natural evolution of difficult and infiltrated business models of the profession. If we will and all signs are pointing in the direction that this will be a real scenario – embrace digital worlds into our everyday lives, architecture and the work of architects will play an incredible important role in how we will shape and experience these new environments. A case scenario example would be virtual remote work places in the future, only existing as digital realms, accessed by innovative head mounted user devices. But the question remains, will these environments be still open plan offices, stacked on top of each other as iconic urban gestures, towers – expressing power of the institution they belong to? Or will there be new scenarios and spaces on how we spatially collaborate and communicate? This is merely a spatial and design question, once again pointing out the relevance of architectural designers for these emerging opportunities.

Historically challenges and a try and error mentality always yielded the field in the beginning and emergence of new trajectories. Be it the introduction of computational design, fabrication, social awareness, the sciences, new materials. There is a health struggle in the beginning with a lot of “failures” to learn from and to emancipate from. Its a question of time when architecture tailored for virtual worlds and the NFT economy will emancipate itself, establish a profound discourse and its own set of value criteria’s – and become relevant to the profession. Certainly there are architects who already work in this direction.

Architecture only slowly makes ties with this development, potentially being afraid of losing ground and discourse of the past – substituted by new paradigms. One can conclude from various medias that several key players within the profession are attempting to land projects trough NFTs for virtual worlds. The game changer to previous attempts of this kind is virtual space itself which is important to mention. A space where virtual artefacts and architecture becomes relevant and meaningful. These spaces have not existed with this level of accessibility, visual artistry and user friendliness before. Spaces or new worlds such as the Metaverse, Decentraland, Sandbox and a myriad of its derivatives. Without these new worlds that build on user participation and new experiences and also again business opportunities, socialising, consuming and communicating – digital artefacts and architecture would remain simply used up space on our hard drives. But suddenly there is a space to commercial deploy to, and the demand is staggering.

It is the combination of the new cryptocurrency economy, the accreditation of digital work as originals as NFTs and spaces of deployment where new experiences are promised – that makes NFT architecture – for the current so in demand.

Digital architecture exists profoundly since it inauguration to the profession with the rise of computers from the mid 70ies to the first paperless studios at Columbia University in the 80s. New spatial concepts influenced by mathematics and postmodern French philosophy changed the way we think and how we create. Early experimentation depicted wireframe graphics and surfaces and the application of animation as a method of designing. Something quite alien at that time to the profession. These developments in architecture continued with profound new assembly methods in the material world with new fabrication methods, being responsible for some of the canonical architectural project of the recent past.

In a way it is interesting to see that in the last 20 years architecture and the profession has thrived to rationalize and develop the early digital experimentations to the material word and to the built environment, and now with NFT architecture this development is reversed back to a purely digital domain, without the necessity to actually build something.

The difference that one will need to point out though is that within the development from the early digital experiments to physical built work, innovation was a key driver. Innovation within architecture itself, not the technology that is enabling it. This was an evolution of concepts, new architectural languages and expression, the engagement and enlightenment of its users and participants all the way to modes of construction as a natural response to the technological opportunities. This level of innovation is difficult to trace with NFT architecture at this early stage, and one could argue that it is unexplored territory. Today it is still rather the conventional projects that get implemented, rather than any direct response or spatial innovation within the opportunities in this new economy. Nobody rethinks architecture by its definition and elaborates on new potentials and spatial experiences in relation to let’s say: navigation, orientation, signage, narrative of spaces. These architectural domains will need to be rethought and partially re-invented for a specific digital context that is indifferent to our existing worlds. This again here sets out opportunities for canonical projects yet to be developed.

With some of these conclusions and observations one can clearly state that it is a steep beginning to make architecture relevant as a profession and valuable contribution and not only a business model in virtual worlds. If it wants to sustain relevance with its specific set of competencies it will on the one hand need to let go of some of its perspectives and values as a compromise – but will also need to establish new ones which make it a relevant contribution for its future users, or shall we say avatars.

As a more speculative outlook where this journey might go, we again need to acknowledge and closely observe the world around us and point out the phenomena of simulation and immersion. With the tools and assets available, ranging from AI to big data and machine learning, and exponentially increasing levels of representation – we seemingly thrive towards a parallel digital world. Maybe at a future scenario difficult to distinguish from the real world. The question is will this new world be something “new” or are we craving a healthy “replica” of our existing world without the current challenges of climate, social inequality, political unrests, starvation etc. Will it be a “brave new world”? Its undeniable that we already live in a semi digitalized environment, and daily rituals – if we pay attention – how we communicate, consume, date, navigate our cities – are all already part of a digital world. It is the responsibility of architects and future designers and profession to shape and give meaning in these emerging environments.

If speculatively all these currently somewhat disconnected streams of invention today would merge and be consolidated, and advanced by rapid technological developments – one could claim that in the far future there could be a world, holistic and purely digital that has relevance in its occupation next to our physical world. Maybe todays “Metaverses” are the first attempts as they try to not only embed entertainment but also social, cultural, commercial and political engagement – which all are in demand for architecture.

Joseph Beuys declared the “The expanded notion of the artwork” in the second half of the 20th century, which holds more than true to this canonical transition on all levels for art and architecture trough means of digitization. Challenges will need to be faced because of this extension of our world. Rather than closing in and reverting our views and concepts to old ones, one needs to embrace these new phenomena’s and capitalize on its pioneering moments, and failures and opportunities.

Architects will need to reinvent qualities that will state new competencies of the profession tailored to virtual worlds and the opportunities. What is key in this development is to stay relevant as architecture stands today as a key human endeavour to shape and advance our built environment.

Confidently we can look forward architecture doing so in parallel in new virtual worlds to come.