As cities change, generations of buildings will eventually "age". At present, There are more than 20 million square meters of historically protected buildings in Shanghai, and how to protect them is an important issue related to urban renewal.
Zheng Shiling, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an expert in architecture, once said that good building protection is not to blindly repair them into memorial halls and let them only have the appearance of space for people to admire, but to restore the historical environment at that time and reshape the interactive function of buildings and people.
This seems difficult to fully achieve. At the "Closing Ceremony of the 7th Hudak Architectural Heritage Culture Month in Shanghai and NFT - Architectural Heritage 'Immortality' Discussion Forum" held today, the experts presented a new solution: the first step is to "rebuild" these buildings in the virtual space; the second step is to give them a second life.
Let the virtual world go from "moving" to "living"
When people enter the Internet age, the virtual world is born together. Nowadays, many well-known buildings can be found on the online platform. For example, at the China Pavilion of the Shanghai World Expo, a team restored the "Qingming Upper River Map" in a three-dimensional modeling way; not long ago, the "National Architect Cthuwork" went a step further and restored the "Qingming Upper River Map" in the game "Minecraft" for players to visit for free.
"Map of the Upper River of the Qingming Dynasty" by the Chinese Pavilion
However, rather than manipulating the characters in the game to walk to the bridge of the Qingming River map to see the scenery, people are more inclined to walk into this Northern Song Dynasty dream and immerse themselves in the interior of the building to experience and feel. As Hu Jie, a professor at the School of Advanced Finance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and an executive member of the Blockchain Committee of the China Computer Society, said: "When people see a mummy, they are eager to be in the history of Egypt." ”
To create a virtual space where you can live, socialize, and parallel to the real world, the Metaverse offers this possibility. Moreover, it is not impossible to make a historical building carry its past function in the "metacosm".
In Hu Jie's view, the city is composed of the interaction of three elements: space, crowd and rules, and architecture is the carrier that links the three elements. The reason why the virtual space in the past has not been able to fully "replicate" the real world is mainly because the virtual world has not yet been able to directly carry out economic activities, and prosperous economic activities are an important catalyst for the development of civilization.
"Blockchain solves the economic problems of the virtual world, allowing people who don't know each other to independently support orderly economic activities." Hu Jie judged from this that the "meta-universe" will develop rapidly, attract people from all over the world across the real space, carry out related cultural creation and economic transactions, and form a civilization community in the virtual space. And the network activity it forms will be thousands of times that of the previous Internet world.
Building another "Greater Shanghai" in the "Metacosm"
Buying land, building houses, renovating, renting, the construction boom in the "meta-universe" is also the same as the real world. Not long ago, in the virtual world platform Decentraland, a piece of digital land was sold for 2.43 million US dollars, equivalent to 15 million yuan. Someone became a "meta-universe construction team" to create virtual scenes according to customer needs.
Liao Fang, a national first-class registered architect and assistant to the president of shanghai Shutu Blockchain Research Institute, said that urban architectural heritage can also be immortalized in this way. Over the years, Shanghai has given new life and connotation to historical buildings in urban renewal, coupled with the rapid development of digital technology, it has become possible to build a "digital Shanghai" in the "metacosm".
The reason why Liao Fang is optimistic about the development of the construction industry in the "meta-universe" is based on two reasons: one is copyright protection, and the other is to break through the imagination. "The rights and interests of content creators in the Spring and Autumn Period will also be fully protected and respected." For example, he said, using blockchain technology, a surveyor of an excellent historical building can chain surveying and mapping data and convert it into digital assets through technologies such as NFTs for circulation in the "meta-universe". In the process, the boundless virtual space will give birth to a new form of spatial experience, thus driving the development of architecture.
At the forum, the first NFT product of Hudak Architectural Heritage and Culture Month, 49 cultural month scene memory maps, was permanently uploaded to the blockchain, and the Hudak offline architecture science popularization activities held for seven consecutive years were also "immortalized" in this form.
Author: Shen Xiangsha
Editor-in-Charge: Ren Tsuen
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.