This year, while the images generated by TTI software invaded our social media feed, among the criticism about copyrights and the debates of bias and censorship, ZHA in collaboration with Refik Anadol Studio has been using its pre-public access to DALL-E 2 through its project “Architecting the metaverse” in order to experiment the prompt engineering and partially automate the process of interpretation of 2D images generated in 3D spatial scenes.

The Row is a project by Every Realm, a place where artists like Daniel Arsham, Alexis Christodoulou, Misha Kahn, Andrés Reisinger, Six N. Five, Hard have been invited to imagine architectural and artistic structures in a world where physics poses no limitations: “no gravity, no climate, no construction materials.” The only law The Row has seems to be that of sales.

The Argentinian designer Andrés Reisinger had already experimented something similar when, in 2021 in a NFT online auction entitled “The Shipping,” he sold ten virtual pieces of furniture made in a surrealistic and impossible style. The pieces were sold as .obj and could be placed in any shared 3D virtual space or metaverse.

BIG, Bjarke Ingels Group, designed new virtual headquarters on Decentraland for the Vice Media Group that was named “viceverse.” The initiative is one of the many experimental projects by Virtue Futures, the innovation branch of Virtue, Vice’s creative agency. The white and sinuous building was designed to work as a virtual lab for innovation and experimentation on topics like NFT, DAO, and web 3.0 for the agency teams distributed over 25 countries around the world.

The explosion in the demand for digital spaces gave the chance to “lay” figures to explore the world of architectural design. That’s what happened to the Italian interactive design studio Monogrid during the creation of the DMAT Virtual Showroom and of the digital venue for the WIRED NEXT FEST 2022. During this project, the studio took the “chance to express a vision of virtual spaces unthreaded from the limitations and restrictions that physics imposes on offline architecture.”