Source Inputmag
A growing number of traditionally trained architects are designing buildings for the real estate market in the booming metacosm.
In the early 2010s, when George Bileca was in high school in Romania, his dream was to become an architect. But then the car came into his life and he decided to switch to Coventry, England, to study car design.
George BilecaVoxel Architects
After graduating from university, Bileca moved to Germany to further research on 3D modeling of automobiles. There, he met Leandro Bellone, who had worked with Rolls-Royce, BMW and Mini, whose company, CryptoMotors, had designed the NFT digital car series.
Bileca, 25, began designing automotive NFTs for the company CryptoMotors. In early 2020, he and Bellone decided to set up a virtual dealership to sell their digital cars in Cryptovoxels, one of many metaverses built on the Ethereum blockchain. At the time, bileca had no architectural experience other than designing structures in open-world games like Minecraft. They decided to work together anyway, setting up their dealership in the virtual world.
Realizing the potential of this line, they founded a new company: Voxel Architects, focused on designing and building in virtual worlds. "A lot of things contributed to the rise of the metaverse and its popularity," Bileca said. "This is the rise of Meta, COVID-19 and NFT." If Mark Zuckerberg's vision becomes a reality, more than 1 billion of us will end up in his virtual world, or a virtual world that competes with it. They will enter the world with spending power.
This vision has allowed big companies like JPMorgan Chase and Samsung to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on land in existing virtual worlds like Decentraland, Cryptovoxels and Sandbox. But buying land is only the first step: once you own the land, you'll want to build something there so that consumers will come. That's where Other Metacosmological Architects like Bileca and 30-year-old Weronika Marciniak get involved.
Unlike the self-taught Bileca, Marciniak is a professional architect with more than a decade of experience. As an architecture student in Warsaw, Poland, she was hired to work in REX Architecture's New York office. There, she worked at the Ronald O. Perelman Center for the Performing Arts at the World Trade Center and the 20th-century museum in Berlin. Since then, she has been employed by a number of leading firms around the world – most recently at the prestigious Henning Larsen company in Hong Kong.
NFT42 HQ in DecentralandVoxel Architects
Sotheby’s in DecentralandVoxel Architects
Last year, Marciniak noticed that the 3D computer-generated version of the building she used to render was essentially the same software that she could use to create buildings in an immersive world accessed through virtual reality goggles. "I realized that I could actually see my project in virtual reality and explore the metaverse," she said.
She quit her job to start her own company, Future Is Meta, which is now dealing with inquiries for businesses looking to establish a physical presence in the digital world. One of her projects is a proof-of-concept music school — located inside Decentraland or The Sandbox — where visitors can learn how to compose music by interacting with exhibits inside the building.
Weronika MarciniakFuture Is Meta
"My specialty is architecture, but I'm most interested in the interaction layer, which doesn't usually happen in real life," Says Marciniak. She believes she can offer something different than what is already being offered. "Right now, this space is dominated by game designers or people who are interested in 3D design — but not necessarily architects," she said. "Because they don't necessarily think from the user's point of view."
Bileca's company, Voxel Architects, now has 21 employees, including three architects with traditional training. "We have a team of voxel modelers" — those who design objects using cubes or voxels — "and 3D modelers work in the three largest virtual worlds in the virtual world: Decentraland, Sandbox, and Cryptovoxels," he says. Voxel Architects, an official partner of the three companies, has built around 80 projects in the last two years alone – from art galleries to Christmas markets.
Do a roaring trade
Bileca said the business could expand further. "A year in the metaverse is like five years in real life," he explains. When he began designing buildings in the metacosm, the cost of the plot did not exceed $500. It is now impossible to buy a large amount of cryptovoxels land for less than $10,000 (data from JPMorgan's major metacosm suggest that the average land price doubled to $12,000 between June 2021 and December 2021. ）
Bileca employs architects who are mostly in their 20s or early 30s, one of whom recently jumped from the famous Spanish architecture firm Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura. "She said she really enjoyed what we were doing in the metaverse and wanted to join us," Bileca said. "A lot of architects love the metacosm because it doesn't limit creativity."
Design by Future Is MetaFuture Is Meta
Bileca says many early career architects are stuck in designing for "boring old homes." "Not many people have a chance to get this creative engine up and running, and it's hard to create buildings like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid or Ricardo Boffel." It's also what attracted Marciniak to build his own metacosm-based company. "The first thing is the freedom of design, which we can't have in reality without constraints," she said.
In addition to ignoring the promises of physical gravity and government regulations, young architects are attracted to a rising industry and the money it can bring. Like the world of NFTs and cryptocurrencies, the metacosm is on the brink of massive bubble inflation. Crypto management firm Grayscale predicts that metacosm could be a trillion-dollar market opportunity.
While neither Bileca nor Marciniak was willing to share the fees they paid for design projects in Metaverse, Marciniak told the media that she was contacted by a client who spoke to two other meta-universe design firms. "The price for a building that would take a month to design is about $50,000," she said. "It's amazingly expensive."
But as with IRL real estate, what now looks expensive could become very cheap in just a few years.