Cover Moodboard references for web3 platform Bryteworld, depicting a floating city generated with artificial intelligence (AI) tool Midjourney by Lanzavecchia + Wai

No gravity, no square footage, no expectations—virtual reality presents a new frontier. What can architects and designers contribute to the metaverse?

Hunn Wai is an industrial designer, and like all industrial designers, he specialises in creating things you can touch and manipulate: real objects in the real world. That might sound obvious, except Wai also calls himself a “metarchitect”, and he is increasingly interested in designing things that don’t really exist at all, at least not in the physical sense. It’s not just digital design, or user experience design applied to virtual environments. It’s something entirely new.

“It’s all in service of digital experiences,” says the Singapore designer, who runs the studio Lanzavecchia + Wai with his Italian partner, Francesca Lanzavecchia. “If we move into this new space called web3, metaverse, spatial Internet, suddenly a lot of things in the physical world might not need to be adhered to anymore; things like scale, things like gravity, things like how you enter a space. It’s full potential.”

Wai stumbled into the metaverse in 2018, when he began playing a video game called Journey on his wife’s Playstation console. “I’ve never been a fan of video games. It seemed like a strange way to spend time,” he says. But there was something different about this one. “It removes all superfluous controls. You go there in the middle of a sand-dune planet and you learn along the way because there are no explicit instructions on how to execute a move. You’re there like a newborn—you figure out how to walk, how to fly. It’s an experience you can’t have in real life.”

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Photo 1 of 4 Moodboard references for web3 platform Bryteworld, depicting a floating city generated with artificial intelligence (AI) tool Midjourney by Lanzavecchia + Wai
Photo 2 of 4 Moodboard references for web3 platform Bryteworld, depicting a floating city generated with artificial intelligence (AI) tool Midjourney by Lanzavecchia + Wai
Photo 3 of 4 Moodboard references for web3 platform Bryteworld, depicting a floating city generated with artificial intelligence (AI) tool Midjourney by Lanzavecchia + Wai
Photo 4 of 4 Moodboard references for web3 platform Bryteworld, depicting a floating city generated with artificial intelligence (AI) tool Midjourney by Lanzavecchia + Wai

The game’s purposeful limitations, and the way it creates an immersive digital realm that forces players to really engage with their surroundings, struck Wai as a revelation. Here was a virtual reality that didn’t feel hackneyed or conventional: it was fresh and exciting. He became increasingly interested in the possibilities of the metaverse and the role architects and designers could play in it.

“I’m an ’80s kid,” says Wai. “I’ve grown up with tech, since before web1, since before dial-up modems. I’ve always been intrigued by virtuality, but what never convinced me was that it was always stuck behind a screen. I find it’s not as rich an experience as materiality.”

But Wai’s experience with Journey suggested otherwise, and he became convinced of the metaverse’s potential when the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, alias Beeple, sold an NFT work of art for US$69 million (about S$98 million) at a Christie’s auction in March 2021. NFTs—non-fungible tokens—are unique digital files encoded in a blockchain that can be used to certify the authenticity of a digital object, and the total global value of NFT trading soared from US$82 million in 2020 to $17 billion in 2021.

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Above The Quiet Hours, a series by Ghilic-Micu created with Midjourney, pictures liminal spaces that play with light, proportion, texture and colour
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Above Tan’s Civilization series was inspired by the hit animated film Wall-E

“That shook me in a way that was like, oh wow. There’s a certain economic value placed on virtual objects. That was fascinating,” says Wai. “Our studio has always come from a place of storytelling, of concept first. We work with brands that can support design in service of storytelling. [Beeple’s NFT] was a good piece of storytelling, whether you like the art or not.” As a designer, it was a sign that he could actually do something tangible in an intangible world. “We had the opportunity to go back to pure storytelling without being encumbered by production cycles. It was incredibly liberating for the practice.”

Wai is not alone. Three decades after the term metaverse was coined by American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, architects and designers around the world are asking what virtual reality means for them and their profession. In some ways, it’s nothing new. The online multimedia platform Second Life created a sprawling metaverse nearly 20 years ago. And architects have already been creating virtual spaces for years.

“All the physical spaces we design—interiors, buildings, campuses and cities—are born as meta spaces,” said Brian Jencek, director of global planning for architecture firm HOK, in a research paper published earlier this year. “We just call them 3D models. We’re already using many of the tools that game designers use—including Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity and Twinmotion—to create realistic-looking virtual environments.”

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Photo 1 of 6 Ghilic-Micu’s Post-Nature series, created using Midjourney, combines equatorial weather with tropical architectural elements
Photo 2 of 6 Ghilic-Micu’s Post-Nature series, created using Midjourney, combines equatorial weather with tropical architectural elements
Photo 3 of 6 Ghilic-Micu’s Post-Nature series, created using Midjourney, combines equatorial weather with tropical architectural elements
Photo 4 of 6 Ghilic-Micu’s Post-Nature series, created using Midjourney, combines equatorial weather with tropical architectural elements
Photo 5 of 6 Ghilic-Micu’s Post-Nature series, created using Midjourney, combines equatorial weather with tropical architectural elements
Photo 6 of 6 Ghilic-Micu’s Post-Nature series, created using Midjourney, combines equatorial weather with tropical architectural elements

The difference today is that with the rise of blockchain technology and everything it made possible, from NFTs to cryptocurrency, there is more money and attention being lavished on the metaverse than ever before. And the technology surrounding the metaverse is becoming ever more sophisticated.

Designers have been astonished by the output of artificial intelligence tool Midjourney, which can quickly create remarkable images based on just a few keywords, raising the possibility that virtual spaces can be entirely self-generated. Meanwhile, companies like the Metaverse Travel Agency are working on new tools like VR helmets—astronaut-like contraptions they call “metahelmets”—to create a more fully immersive digital experience.

“I feel like these virtual worlds have been coming at us in waves, and every wave gets us closer to something that could be a usable solution for the way we live,” says Razvan Ghilic-Micu, chief editor of The Singapore Architect magazine and a senior associate with global design firm Hassell. Today, while much of the current conversation around the metaverse is “focused on the marketing and monetising of things,” he says, “architects could bring a social, cultural and environmental lens to it.”

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Photo 1 of 7 The Biophilic Workplace series, generated with Midjourney by Ghilic-Micu, explores the design of futuristic workplaces
Photo 2 of 7 The Biophilic Workplace series, generated with Midjourney by Ghilic-Micu, explores the design of futuristic workplaces
Photo 3 of 7 The Biophilic Workplace series, generated with Midjourney by Ghilic-Micu, explores the design of futuristic workplaces
Photo 4 of 7 The Biophilic Workplace series, generated with Midjourney by Ghilic-Micu, explores the design of futuristic workplaces
Photo 5 of 7 The Biophilic Workplace series, generated with Midjourney by Ghilic-Micu, explores the design of futuristic workplaces
Photo 6 of 7 The Biophilic Workplace series, generated with Midjourney by Ghilic-Micu, explores the design of futuristic workplaces
Photo 7 of 7 The Biophilic Workplace series, generated with Midjourney by Ghilic-Micu, explores the design of futuristic workplaces

Ghilic-Micu is skeptical about the possibilities of purely digital worlds—“the current version of the metaverse just looks like a [crappy] version of a Wii game,” he says with a laugh—but he is enthusiastic about the ways it might enhance the physical world. “I see a lot more potential in augmented reality as the first step into virtual reality. The role architects could play is to bring that excitement of virtual new possibilities that enhances the real world. Could you test architectural strategies or placemaking strategies in an ordinary mundane building to uplift the quality of the experience?”

Calvin Chua is doing just that. The founder of Singapore design studio Spatial Anatomy is currently working on a project called Beauty (Meta) World, which is part of a broader investigation into the future of Singapore’s shopping malls. Chua explains the goal is to find real-world ways to rejuvenate ailing malls, while also seeing if their spirit and culture can be recreated in virtual environments.

In this case, the focus is on Beauty World Centre, a mall that opened in 1984 on the site of a much older open-air market. Through a user-owned virtual universe called Decentraland, the project takes input from local stakeholders and transforms it into lively reflections of Beauty World’s past lives “as a vice-laden amusement park for the rich opened by Chinese businessmen and the Japanese during World War II, as a popular but chaotic open-air market in the 1940s, and as a fresh resettlement mall that drew in regulars from the western and northern region of Singapore,” says Chua.

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Photo 1 of 4 Beauty (Meta) World, a virtual mall in Decentraland designed by Calvin Chua of Spatial Anatomy
Photo 2 of 4 Beauty (Meta) World, a virtual mall in Decentraland designed by Calvin Chua of Spatial Anatomy
Photo 3 of 4 Beauty (Meta) World, a virtual mall in Decentraland designed by Calvin Chua of Spatial Anatomy
Photo 4 of 4 Beauty (Meta) World, a virtual mall in Decentraland designed by Calvin Chua of Spatial Anatomy

“The metaverse opens up exciting theoretical possibilities of recreating and reliving the different histories of a place over time that can be pieced together with input from the community,” he adds. It’s a way to harness the collective imagination into something that feels real, even if it isn’t strictly speaking tangible.

That sense of shared purpose is an important aspect: no virtual world can exist without inhabitants. “Belonging to something, a collective or a community, that’s what really makes a space,” says Eric Wong, a British architect interested in speculative architecture and virtual worlds. “That’s probably why NFTs are so big, because you have an opportunity to connect to others.”

And in another sense, community is how architects can contribute to shaping the metaverse. “Architects are strangely self-indulgent people,” says Wong, who worked with Japanese filmmaker Mamoru Hosoda to create a virtual world called U for his 2019 animated film, Belle. “We’re not very business-minded, but we collaborate a lot.” 

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Photo 1 of 3 Concept art created by Eric Wong for animated film Belle
Photo 2 of 3 Concept art created by Eric Wong for animated film Belle
Photo 3 of 3 Concept art created by Eric Wong for animated film Belle

Malaysian architect Edmund Tan, who runs research studio Platform Null, says that while architects don’t necessarily have the ability to actually craft digital worlds—coding should be left to coders, he reckons—their training gives them a broad-minded ability to think about space and experience in multidimensional ways. In his view, one of the most disappointing things about the virtual worlds that currently exist is that they essentially try to replicate the real world, something known as skeuomorphism. “There are lots of possibilities, like when gravity is removed from the situation,” he says.

It’s something that gets Hunn Wai very excited. “When the language of architecture is delinked from gravity, from building laws, from square footage, it’s a tabula rasa,” he says. “Anything is possible. I can turn a cube from glass to water to gas, just like that. [But] in a world where you can have any effect instantly, how do you control yourself so you don’t go overboard? That’s when it comes back to a mature sense of aesthetics and design principles.”

Wai is increasingly focused on designing new virtual spaces and experiences for his clients—the next-generation version of concept stores and window displays. But he’s also committed to spreading the gospel of the metaverse. “Do we need another coffee table? Another chair? Every time I go to Milan, I say I want to stop designing [objects] because there’s so much stuff,” he says. His goal now: “Dig deep and develop tools to onboard the next million architects into the metaverse. To create a paradigm shift in the industry.”

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Photo 1 of 5 Tan’s Civilization series imagines robots attempting to restore the natural environment on Earth hundreds of years in the future
Photo 2 of 5 Tan’s Civilization series imagines robots attempting to restore the natural environment on Earth hundreds of years in the future
Photo 3 of 5 Tan’s Civilization series imagines robots attempting to restore the natural environment on Earth hundreds of years in the future
Photo 4 of 5 Tan’s Civilization series imagines robots attempting to restore the natural environment on Earth hundreds of years in the future
Photo 5 of 5 Tan’s Civilization series imagines robots attempting to restore the natural environment on Earth hundreds of years in the future

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