Architect John Marx, AIA, is the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, an award-winning San Francisco - based firm that designs prominent buildings, campuses, and interiors for Bay Area tech companies such as Google and Facebook, laboratories for life-science clients, and workplaces for numerous other companies. In 2000-2007, Marx taught a course on the topic of placemaking in cyberspace at the University of California, Berkley and in 2020 he designed his first project in the Metaverse for Burning Man: The Museum of No Spectators. The following year, John Marx led a design team charged with creating a $500B portal to the Metaverse.
The Museum of Temporal Delight. This image was created, in Midjourney, using 5 language prompts and a few small refinements. Image Courtesy of John Marx/ Form4 Architecture
This article is the seventh in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.
In so many ways the introduction of AI software has created a sense that we live in a world predicted by science fiction novels. We commonly have rested on the assumption that computers will never be capable of designing. That time has now arrived, and with it comes an opportunity to confront the positives and negatives these new technologies offer.
museum of a rainforest. Image Courtesy of Ralph Appelbaum Associates
This article is the sixth in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.
Artificial Intelligence is at the genesis of creating fundamental changes in the way we design and construct buildings and cities. Some of these changes will be abrupt and disruptive to normative practice. Others will take more time to feel the effect of this new technology, but the change will be pervasive. When combined with the Metaverse, AI will also offer vast opportunities for the profession to expand and grow. The kinds of spaces and environments we design in the Metaverse will be, in some aspects, very different from what we currently design in the physical world alone. AI evolves every day, and we are compelled to learn while we innovate. AI has proven it is a powerful tool to assist designers and offers the potential to challenge us to alter our design process. Combining AI with narrative design is one of those challenges.
Illustrations from the Icon, where large structures provide a context for an overlapping of physical and virtual experiences. Image Courtesy of John Marx/ Form4 Architecture
This article is the fourth in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.
Of all the attributes that will define the Metaverse the single most important is that of experience. As we move more deeply into the Anthropocene Era humans seem to be shifting their interests from collecting things to collecting experiences. As the demand for experiences grows more intense and detailed, the need for content, and the clever and effective use of that content, will rise exponentially. From a more detailed perspective, the management and quality of those experiences will determine the initial success of the Metaverse. This is where the concept of a Responsive AI Concierge comes into play.
Project by Form4 Architecture investigating the opportunities for unsolicited participatory interaction in space, like street dancing, something that could be replicated in the Metaverse if its spatial quality had similar depth. Image Courtesy of Form4 Architecture
This article is the second in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.
For architects, one of the most captivating aspects of AI and the Metaverse is that of placemaking. How do we create compelling places that bring people to this new world and enable them to enjoy their experience there, getting them to return once the novelty has worn off? How much of this digital world needs to connect back with our day-to-day physical environs for it to feel meaningful and how do these artificial cities, towns, and neighborhoods come to life?
This article is the fifth in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.
Science fiction writers inspire us with bold and provocative visions of the future. Huxley, Orwell, Assimov, and Bradbury easily come to mind. They have imagined great advances in technology and oftentimes predicted shifts in social structure that were a result of the human need to open Pandora's Box. A large part of the charm and allure of science fiction is the bold audacity of some of these predictions. They seem to defy the laws of nature and science, and then, faster than you might have thought, the spectrum of human inventiveness makes it so.
This article is the first in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.
The Metaverse is currently hard to define. Try to think of it as the bringing together of the abundance of virtual communities we have created over the years on Facebook with the enormous range of leisure opportunities akin to shopping on Amazon. Yet, the Metaverse goes far beyond this and makes a new type of landscape possible by playing on the very qualities of placemaking we know from the cities, towns, and villages we inhabit worldwide. The Metaverse is a transactional space, and perhaps above all an experiential space where unexpected events take place and, importantly, shared events are enjoyed on an individual and communal basis.
A look inside Plethora Project's Common'hood, an immersive multiplayer game focused on building a new community within an abandoned factory after an economic collapse. Image via Plethora Project
This article is the third in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.
"I had lunch on the moon, took a swim in a shadowy lake on Mars, played croquet with the clouds, and chased rainbows under the sea, all in one glorious afternoon" ... how real and meaningful these experiences felt will be greatly influenced by how and where you interact with a Metaverse opening near you soon. While in a fundamental sense, the Metaverse can be seen as a series of overlapping economic intentions, there is a unique and important opportunity for architects and designers of space and place to influence the outcome of these efforts and to create a more humane and vibrant future.
Architecture as a profession today struggles with questions of relevance, with core questions surrounding the issue of whether it can create cultural vibrancy and meaning for the diverse world it serves. Within our own design community, we tend to give a lot of sway to an “exclusive tier” of architects who provide leadership and vision. While this leadership is critically important to the profession, it only corresponds to 2% of what gets built. Take it from Frank Gehry, whose 2014 comment still rings in our ears: “98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure sh*t. There is no sense of design, no respect for humanity."
If we embrace the importance and unique value of all things built on a wider range, we need to ask ourselves: how have we served and rewarded our peers responsible for creating this other 98%? Where should we set the bar for the emotional-artistic qualities of mainstream architecture?
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