Space Popular: Architecture’s Role in Building the Metaverse
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Episode Summary
While architects have had so much influence on how our cities, buildings and social spaces are constructed, their influence has not quite reached the virtual world. In fact, existing spaces in the Metaverse have mostly been created by engineers, 3D artists, and increasingly involve product designers.
Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg of Space Popular are pioneers within the architectural field, having developed curiosity for what virtual reality will emerge to become years before anyone was talking about the Metaverse. They integrate their expertise in traditional architecture with speculative and conceptual work to help people imagine where the future may be headed. Their perspective is unique, especially for the world of consumer tech, and helps create a completely new paradigm for thinking
Architectural Point of View
Architecture has historically been about creating physical buildings, many of which will outlive the architects themselves. As a result, one can never be in full control of how a space will be used, and it forces architects to be open minded and considerate towards all the scenarios. Instead of designing spaces to solve specific problems, Lara and Fredrik see spaces as the background that, without noticing, helps create the context for opportunities to emerge.
They maintain the same perspective when it comes to building for the Metaverse. It feels like people are rushing to problem solve and to define clear use cases, but it is more likely that there simply aren’t clear problems to solve yet, and it’s okay to just observe and understand what people are trying to do overtime, and create spaces that enable those possibilities.
At the same time, Lara and Frederik believe the bedrock for successful Metaverse adoption is to create a familiar value system that people can latch onto. They’ve created a manifesto that emphasizes the importance of recognizability, symbolism and relatability as core design principles to follow to ensure that people feel comfortable, welcomed and informed as they participate more and more in virtual worlds.
Architecture at the Speed of Spoken Word
When asked where the Metaverse is headed, a visionary insight from Lara and Frederik is that in the future architecture will happen at the speed of the spoken world. While this might seem thought provoking and far fetched, there’s a strong rationale for it.
The evolution of media has exponentially increased our ability to communicate and express. As it relates to architecture, the field has always been a way to communicate culture through distinct styles. Historical landmarks are remnants that help tell us stories about past times and cultures.
As mediums of communication improves, the way we convey style becomes more rich. When the printing press and books were invented, books that help describe places so people no longer needed to travel to see them. Objects like tapestries that were traded acted as USBs that provided downloads of the style of the cultures it came from.
Moving to the modern age, visual platforms like Pinterest help homeowners convey their personal style for home renovations before they have words to describe it. In social online spaces such as VR chat, people change their avatars or update their environment just to express themselves and how they are feeling in the spur of the moment. Now with the evolution and increased sophistication of AI, technology will progress to a point where communication and expression will become extremely rich and real time. In that future world, architecture will no longer become an expression of past generations, but a dynamic real time download of your thoughts and feelings.
The Evolution of Portals
Prevalent design patterns of the existing internet are derived from the format of paper or a 2D screen, just thinking: hyperlinks, opening new pages or tabs, commenting on media. For Lara and Fredrik, the marked difference for the metaverse will be ‘pushing past the screen and entering into a new realm that doesn’t belong in the traditional paper, but in the tradition of buildings’.
We’re already living in a disembodied world where our minds are constantly teleporting from one virtual place to another while our bodies stay still. Anticipating the velocity of movement and shifts in environments that will take place in the Metaverse, the design challenge becomes how to help people with these transitions, hence their intensive work on portals.
Lara and Fredrik believe that portals will become one of the most common design elements in the same way cars have been in the past era. It will be crucial to help provide people with anchor points, and to create recognizable and understandable ways to communicate that a shift is about to happen. To create context so people can understand where they are, and where they are about to transition to.
Portals are not a new concept, and Lara and Fredrik have analyzed a database of over 1000 portals in fiction from the last 70 years to examine what function or narrative they served in (i.e. means of escape, privilege access, infrastructure) and identify some key archetypes that they fall into (i.e. inviting, scary)
If you happen to be in London, you can actually visit them at their upcoming exhibit called The Portal Galleries between June 29 to Sept 25, taking place at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.
About the Guest
Space Popular is a research driven art, design, and media studio that explores the future of spatial experience through virtual reality, film, exhibitions, speculative writing, as well as buildings and objects. The studio is directed by architects Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, both alumni of the Architectural Association in London (2011). The studio has completed buildings, exhibitions, public artworks, furniture collections, and interiors across Asia and Europe, as well as virtual architecture for the immersive internet.
Clients, collaborators, and commissioners include national institutions such as MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, Italy; The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design –ArkDes, Stockholm, Sweden; Royal Institute of British Architects, London, UK; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; as well as independent galleries such as MAGAZIN, Vienna, Austria; and Sto Werkstatt, London, UK.
Lesmes and Hellberg both have extensive academic experience having taught architectural design studio since 2011, first at INDA, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok from 2021 to 2016, at the Architectural Association in London from 2016 to 2021, and currently at Daniels, Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto sinde 2020, and UCLA Architecture and Urban Design since 2022. Their current MArch design and research studios both at Daniels and UCLA investigate visions for civic architecture in the immersive internet.
Show Notes
[2:40] Architectural school of thought
[9:10] Architecture’s existing role in entertainment, gaming and creating the Metaverse
[15:40] Design principles for creating virtual environments
[21:50] Value assignment
[25:40] Importance of speculative projects
[31:10] Creation at the speed of communication
[37:00] Portals will become the most common design element in the virtual era
[46:10] Enabling human connections as core utility of Metaverse
[51:10] How can more architects play a role in this industry?