Digital architecture – creating new worlds with pixels

Designed around 1880 a group of French artists’ illustrations imagining the future in 2000. The futuristic motifs of the art series “En L ?? An 2000”, which were printed on cigarette paper and postcards, showed, among other things, flying firemen, air taxis and a “Cinéma-Phono-Télégraphique”, a type of video telephony with a mouthpiece. In 1900, when the World’s Fair took place in Paris and the Métro was inaugurated, the first telephone lines were just being activated, only a few had a connection, but perhaps contemporaries already had a faint premonition of what a world of video telephony might look like. If you look at the history of technology, science fiction has always influenced innovations.

Even today one wonders what the (post-pandemic) society might look like in 100 years. If Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has his way, we will be in the future Metaverse live, a digital parallel universe where you plug in with data glasses and work, shop or meet friends with your avatar. Work colleagues who are thousands of kilometers apart in physical space can discuss at virtual conference tables; Students living on different continents attending a lecture at the same time; Mechanics from all over the world tinker with cars. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in New York or Timbuktu. In the “Placeless Society” (William Knoke), places no longer play a role.

Internet in 3D

Linked to this is not only an anti-capitalist development, at the end of which land prices may be leveled, but also an urban planning challenge to redesign, indeed redefine, physical space. What should the cities of tomorrow look like? Do we still need train stations and airports when everyone withdraws into their own space capsule? Become marketplaces too Junk Space (Rem Koolhaas)?

The communication theorist Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) writes in his spatial theory (“Rooms”): “The separation between private and public becomes less and less meaningful when the so-called politicians can appear uninvited through cables in the kitchen. This forces future interior designers also superficially (and not yet actually spatially), no longer thinking about things like walls, windows and doors, and also not about streets, squares and gates, but rather things like cables, networks and information. ” In other words: the virtual space must also be designed. But how? Do you build planned cities like in physical space? Skyscrapers or single-family houses? Roads or rails? Renaissance or Art Deco? How do you build virtual cities in which people feel comfortable? These questions inspire architects all over the world.

In contrast to the physical space, there are no building regulations and long approval procedures, no raw material shortages or delivery bottlenecks in the Metaverse. And also no gravity that could set limits for sky-strikers. The laws of physics are undermined in the virtual. In principle, you can build infinitely in height (the matrix is ​​limited in some games), and the code as building material can be reproduced at will.

The metaverse as a three-dimensional further development of the Internet, as Facebook and other corporations want to develop, is still under construction. However, some institutions have already laid the first cornerstone. The organization “Reporters Without Borders” has built a library from 12.5 million blocks in the computer game “Minecraft”. “The Uncensored Library”, a monumental dome building that is somewhat reminiscent of the Library of Congress, houses articles from countries in which the press is censored in its sacred halls.

The virtual space opens up new freedoms. When the universities were closed during the lockdown in March 2020, students from the University of Pennsylvania recreated their campus in “Minecraft”. Dormitories, food trucks, lecture halls – the university campus was digitally reconstructed block by block. Even a detailed replica of the Fisher Fine Arts Library has been created in the virtual world.

The computer game, which you can imagine like a virtual Lego game, is a playground for architects. For example, the Royal Institute of British Architects, in cooperation with the international architecture collective Blockworks, built a brutalist building in “Mincecraft”. The geometric pattern of the structure is a reference both to the digital aesthetics of pixels and to the formal language of brutalism.

Vaccination

In 2015, Blockworks designed an ideal city (“Climate Hope City”) as part of a campaign by the Guardian. The computer model, which looks like a mixture of Singapore and the urban planning simulation “Sim City”, should be a blueprint for climate-neutral cities: Green house facades should provide cooling and a good microclimate, multi-storey farms should supply the residents with fruit and vegetables, hydrogen-powered boats should Ensure micromobility in the canals. You can take a virtual tour of the city on YouTube. Some of them – such as the vertical farms or the forest towers modeled on the Vertical Forest – is known, other things seem visionary.

Of course, one can ask oneself what the use is of a wind turbine that is lost in the virtual landscape when the servers are run on dirty coal power. But in virtuality, certain forms of living can be tried out, which are then recreated in real space. The London architecture firm JaK Studio let itself be used for the design of its Tiny Houses inspired by “Minecraft”. The modular cabins, clad in wood and intended for home offices or weekend trips, are small enough to be set up in a garden.

A prize for virtual architecture in “Second Life” was awarded for the first time in 2007 as part of the Ars Electronica media art festival in Linz. The winning design by the Berlin architect Tanja Meyle, “Living Cloud”, is a castle in the air that surrounds her avatar – a symbol for privacy in virtual space and, at the same time, an allegory for the total dematerialization and liquefaction of the digital.

The community of “Second Life”, a forerunner of the Metaverse, has created a series of impressive 3D landscapes: islands, oil rigs, castles. On the “Ile Sarkozy” in 2007 election campaign workers distributed virtual pizza slices and T-shirts between sun loungers and tanned avatars. The Chinese Ailin Gräf, who at times owned ten percent of the available land with her avatar “Anshe Chung” and was dubbed “Rockefeller of Second Life”, has become a millionaire in the game.

Virtual architecture is booming – not least because NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) gives an instrument to acquire ownership certificates for virtual objects. In March 2021, for example, a virtual house (“Mars House”) was sold as an NFT for half a million dollars. Infinity pool, lounge, designer furniture – the property leaves nothing to be desired. You just can’t live in it. At least not in real terms with his physical body.

However, this does not prevent crypto investors from purchasing virtual real estate and land. A few weeks ago, a virtual piece of land was sold for $ 4.3 million in the crypto game “The Sandbox”. In other games, too, such as “Axie Infinity”, property prices are sometimes called up that could compete with areas in prime locations in metropolises. Virtual land prices are exploding. The reason is not a limited resource in the virtual space, there is no storm damage, no risk of loss of substance. In addition, there is no real estate transfer tax when buying. This makes virtual real estate an attractive investment property.

Seoul wants to be the first city to be present in the Metaverse. The South Korean capital plans to have its own representation in the virtual space by the end of 2022. A civic center is then to be opened in 2023, where Internet citizens can use their avatars to handle digital administrative procedures. E-mail was yesterday, teleporting is tomorrow.

Virtual Urbanität

Historically, cities are the most successful information system of human civilization and are not tied to a specific “hardware”. On the one hand. On the other hand, urban infrastructure with its power lines, rail and road networks reflects the economic and social conditions of the industrial age, which no longer seem compatible with a global information society.