This summer, I gave a Zoom talk and imagined a scenario where every design made by (for example) Frank Lloyd Wright was fed into a deep-learning neural network. In the real world, advances by AI (artificial intelligence) into architecture may well render most architects redundant.

I’ve previously warned about how we’re sleepwalking into an immersive digital world and of course the 1999 film The Matrix has left some thinking that we’re already in a vast simulation. But as any hikikomori kid in Japan will tell you, just order that online.īefore we get giddy about the architectural prospects of our new life in Zuckerberg’s world, let’s stop a moment and get serious about going deep digital. The point is, virtually anything can be made in the metaverse! Apart from food and drink, of course. Oh, hold on, I just double checked, sorry… there are actually quite a few replica Flinstone houses in the US. Historically, some of the most fantastic buildings ever remained fantasy, such as Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenopath for Newton (1784), Ivan Leonidov’s Lenin Institute (1927) or Fred and Wilma Flinstone’s Flinstone House (1959). Competitions alone generate loads of them, because the only design to (sometimes) get built is the winning entry.

Architecture has always produced fantasy buildings anyway. Sure, a building that’s not physical isn’t quite the same as a real one, but in the metaverse, as John Lennon anticipated in Strawberry Field Forever, ‘nothing is real’. Of course, the metaverse will need digital buildings, so no need for architects to worry - the work should keep rolling in. That gives us plenty of time to make sure that the internet connection in our safe bunker will be secure. That timing could not be better! ‘Update to limits to growth’, a paper by Gaya Herrington published in Yale University’s Journal of Industrial Ecology last year outlined four scenarios and two of them suggested civilisation collapsing around the 2040s. Second Life is an example of a metaverse, but Facebook thinks the true metaverse may need 15 years to develop. Cyber-sex is surely just a temporary challenge to be solved by a start-up in wearable technology.

What is the metaverse? It’s an online alternative digital world in VR (virtual reality), where you can work, play, trade, hang out and who knows what else. But maybe that doesn’t matter anyway, because the news from Silicon Valley is that Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg has changed the company name to Meta to be better focused on the metaverse. (At the time of writing, it could go either way). From Glasgow, the COP26 climate change meeting of world governments will decide if we give ourselves a future or we all go to Hell. The Metaverse, NFTs, Crypto-architecture, Fantasy Architecture and a word about the Real World at COP26…īy Herbert Wright Do Androids Dream of Leonidov? (2021) by Simon Tyszko, courtesy of the artistīig news is coming in for humanity.

Hell architect platforms