Patrik Schumacher is a principal of Zaha Hadid Architects. He joined Zaha Hadid in 1988 and was instrumental in developing the firm into a 500-strong global architecture and design brand. He studied philosophy, mathematics, and architecture in Bonn, Stuttgart, and London. In 1996, he founded the Design Research Laboratory (DRL) at the Architectural Association in London, where he continues to teach. He promotes parametricism as a new epochal style for the 21st century. Recently, he has promoted the metaverse as a key arena for innovative architectural design. The floor is yours. Thank you very much, Patrik.
Hi guys, thanks for the introduction. I will show some studies about the metaverse. We have launched a metaverse called Mettopia, which is the core of my presentation. Parametricism is also relevant to the metaverse. I expect that metaverse design has more time and sensibility for parametricism than the physical world at this point, and I think parametricism will be helped along by the flourishing of the metaverse. So, let me share my screen and kick off.
Great. The metaverse or cyberspace is the immersive internet. It will make the internet more intuitively accessible and real-time, like a city to explore. The technology comes from gaming, but the use cases are much larger. During COVID, we started working on work environments and digital twins. We created a digital twin of our Beijing office and developed collaborative tools. We also did virtual exhibitions and launched the Liberland metaverse, a virtual city for a new settlement on the Danube. Now we have Mettopia, a design ecosystem bringing together architects, urbanists, industrial designers, and more. We have built a city with a Zaha Hadid Architects district of 35 to 40 buildings, and invited other designers like Ross Lovegrove. The platform uses pixel streaming and has about 1,500 invited participants. We also have a virtual design school and incorporate AI chatbots. The metaverse can accelerate ideas that can be brought back to physical environments. For us, the design part is seamless between physical and virtual, though the engineering stack is different. We have several teams working on different aspects. I'm super excited about this and dedicate every Monday to advancing it.
Nice to meet you, too. I'm Theodore Spyropulos. I direct the Architectural Association's Design Research Laboratory in London and co-founded Minimaforms, an experimental art, architecture, and design practice. My work focuses on innovative approaches to architecture and design, exploring how technology and creativity can intersect to create new experiences. Feel free to ask if you're curious.
So by the way, I have a kind of chatbot with all my writings and interviews. We have developed an API connection with ChatGPT to interface and feed agents within our metaverse. We have been productive collaborating with universities, exploring ideas, bringing ideas to the office, letting students participate, and bringing in features like responsive environments and architectural agents. Some of these ideas will develop first in the metaverse and then we can learn to bring them into the physical world. The metaverse design will accelerate and enhance ideas that can feed back into physical environments. We are working on a 3D archive and swarm-like formations of products. This is an idea of interfacing with urban environments like London, Paris, New York to show design disciplines. That's all I'll show. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Patrik, for the inspiring lecture. We now have time for questions. First, I want to thank the four speakers: Andy, Dina, Penelopey, and Patrick. I have a couple of questions. One is directed to Patrick. As principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, you have an overview of what it takes to handle such a practice and deliver architecture. To what extent do you see the metaverse being central in an architectural practice in the future?
For us, we are delivering buildings and spaces for clients. More and more we offer digital twin versions or anticipate use cases in the metaverse. On the design side, configuring interaction scenarios is seamless. The social functionality criteria are continuous. We are learning from the metaverse and bringing ideas from the physical into the virtual, and that will feed back to enhance our physical design. It's a perfect position for a firm to operate across both spaces. The engineering is completely swapped out, but the design part is totally seamless. We have groups working on Unity, Unreal Engine, Mettopia, and digital twin exhibitions. We also worked with Epic Games on a participatory urban development platform to anticipate buildings and co-design with future tenants. Before COVID, we had a VR team and some clients only wanted VR presentations. So we were well placed to jump on this. I'm super excited and dedicate every Monday to advancing this.
Now I have a question for the three speakers. This session is about 'Pixel to Planet'. How can XR connect to the challenge of climate action? There is a paradox: virtual environments can either migrate us away from physical challenges or connect us to them. Dina, you talked about VR creating empathy for the environment. Where do you see the technology as a dystopian paradigm of disconnection or a utopian paradigm of connection?
Shall I jump in? I think it's a choice depending on the creator, storyteller, and audience. It can do both. It's a continuum from our daily existence. We can choose which it does, and both can be informative. It's up to the agenda creators, which could be storytellers, designers, researchers, informed by the audience.
I can jump in. Thank you both for inspiring presentations. I'm interested in the idea that we are moving towards a hybrid situation. These technologies will be more integrated with the physical. There is a need to reflect on how our physical experiences affect digital design and to address ethics, bias, and accessibility in these spaces. The storytelling potential and philosophical potential are interesting. Platforms are not neutral; we need to challenge not only the design but the facilitators. Architecture can contribute to creating fair and ethically responsible spaces accessible to all.
I want to mention a distinction between technologies coming from storytelling and gaming and those framing real-life productive social interactions. Storytelling can be escapist or engaging. I think for most educated people, they feel excited about the real world. There is also a distinction in semiology: designing interaction potentials. I often doubt clients wanting their building to tell a story because the story should be about what happens within, not symbolism. This symbolism can be problematic.
I wonder if the word 'world building' helps connect the presentations. The work by Zaha Hadid Architects in the metaverse has virtual surrogates for social life but also as prototypes that could migrate into the real world. The work in Penelopey's unit reflects on contemporary issues through storytelling but also has a projective aspect. It's not just reflection but projection of what could be.
Possibly do. So I wonder if there is what's commonly binding across a lot of the work is this notion of world building, not maybe not storytelling explicitly perhaps.
I mean, by the way, I was very impressed with the work panel showing. I only saw the second half, but it was incredibly dense, so congratulations for that. Yes, I would accept the idea of world building. Every ambitious client, institutions or corporations, want to build something new, something novel, have a new offering, inviting the public or their staff to join a new kind of form of life, if you like. So that's a sense of world building, projective, and we can do that in the metaverse. We can go a bit further in the metaverse and we have more novelty and more experimental offerings, and we can also quickly adjust them, change them, adapt them if they weren't working. So there's less of a burden of being safe and more of a chance to take more risk and allow for more risk-taking degrees of freedom because you can kind of learn from these environments. It's not as costly and disruptive to make mistakes and correct mistakes. So that's a great chance. I think particularly the way I'm talking about it, or the way I see us going with this, it will have real potential to bring back for the physical environments or the interfacing with the physical environment. We have major clients like Meta itself, for instance, and other cultural institutions, whether it's a university. You can also imagine a purely online university which maybe in the end also settles physically. So these are world building efforts. That means architecture in the best sense, and to some extent, yes, there's an element of telling that story of a future potential of a more satisfying life together.
Yeah, I was just going to go back to the framing of story. I think personally story is a bit of a limiting term. It's one I use all the time because that's what we have, but I think the commonality between what we're talking about, world building, is appropriate as a term, but I think it's beyond that. It's actually what we're all talking about is creating change, whether it's change in behavior, change in perception, some sort of consciousness shift through world building or through the design work or through student work which achieves an outcome. I feel like that's the area where there's a commonality between these different perspectives on XR and how XR and the built environment can come together to create change. So I feel like change is or creating change or creating impact. By that I mean some sort of shift in the user's perspective, because world building could be quite a passive concept, whereas I think the key thing here is about this interactive, whether that be fully interactive or perception of interaction. I think that's the unique opportunity here that perhaps is something we can mine further.
Thank you. I have a question. It's primarily for Patrick, but I thought the work of the three of you was fascinating. I have this pressing question on my mind around the aspect of legislation, curation, what are the drivers and rules if you wish in the metaverse that enable us to dream harder and using it in that provocation David mentioned of being prompt perhaps in the future to bring it to the real world. What are the legislative conditions that drive or prevent us from dreaming harder even perhaps?
Well, this is a very good question. We first thought it through in the case of Liberland, where we were proposing an urbanism as well as a metaverse urbanism as anticipation of a real urbanism. In the real world, in the most advanced countries, I think we have planning paralysis. I was actually in an all-party parliamentary group on leveling up infrastructure and housing, and it is really sad. We have planning paralysis in the advanced countries, in England, which generates enormous problems: explosion in prices, lack of development, pushing people into the outskirts and provinces. In the metaverse, we also have the issue of ordering some overall synergy cluster. I believe in a lot of degrees of freedom but also in some level of curation to frame the self-organization and steer it. So in terms of curated orders, self-collective self-organizing, once you have a certain cluster, those people can collectively set rules for further enhancement so you don't destroy value, you keep accruing value, and also free-for-all zones where you let things be more rough and ready. In the metaverse, it's easier to shift and change, you can put down an asset and maybe shift and readapt that asset. So you're not so constrained. We are thinking at the moment, for instance, in urbanism, a cluster of architectural headquarters buildings where we start with something, lay out a kind of zone, and then invite participants or competitors to come in, and we'll see how we remain an adaptive curator interface. But we obviously don't want to be overly restrictive. The current environment in the real world is very, very restrictive. Usually, there are pre-allocated land use plans where somebody has decided where is residential, where is retail, where is office space. They can connect and combine in a single building easily. You can change your mind and let the market or desire and audiences evolve the use mix. All of that is possible in the metaverse because we will become legislators of some kind of planning structure. That's exciting, and we take that role. Originally, we would be designers, but if there was some other metaverse entrepreneur, by the way, Metopia has been co-founded by Zaha Hadid Architects with the majority share at the moment, and the agenda is Dan Gatawichi from Chicago. So we are doing it ourselves. We become not only urban planners but we become kind of municipalities and real estate entrepreneurs. So we are sitting on the other side of the fence also.
