Zaha Hadid Architects Designs Liberland, a "Cyber-Urban" Metaverse City

Written by Dima Stouhi
Published on March 15, 2022

Zaha Hadid Architects - ZHA has unveiled a virtual "libertarian micro-nation" in the metaverse titled The Liberland Metaverse, where residents can buy vacant plots centered around a curated urban core, and access them as avatars. The community features hyper-realistic districts that encourage urban self-governance and zones where the absence of urban planning "allows for a spontaneous order via a free-wheeling discovery process".

+ 17

ZHA wanted to ensure that with the rise of metaverse, it is architects who should be designing these sites and not graphic designers. The architectural and urban paradigm that compliments the idea of a "multi-author" urban field is: parametricism, which is why the team predicts that the development of the metaverse will not only boost parametricism, but will also enrich physical architecture since most organizations and clients will have both real and virtual structures, and as long as the world still has physical bodies, physical environments will still be needed.

While virtual and physical environments are ideally designed together, the benefits of creating virtual environments are their global accessibility and their adaptive malleability, two key influences behind the design of the Liberland metaverse. The urban planning and design is a replica of the physical land mass of Liberland, an area situated at the Danube river between Serbia and Croatia. The office used its knowledge and experience in spatial design, particularly in terms of orientation, wayfinding, and the overall aesthetic of social atmospheres, to design the initial stages of the development. The extent of which this virtual town is realistically designed allows it to be physically realized at some point in the future.

Two powerful innovations are coming together in the metaverse we envision: the immersive internet allowing for a new level of life-like spontaneity in social interactions and the internet of value allowing for truly global economic collaboration without gate keepers, no matter which passport participants hold. We conceive of the metaverse as an open platform, based on freely circulating open source insights and technologies, building on and participating in the culture of permissionless innovation that has fuelled the crypto ecosystem in recent years. -- Patrik Schumacher, ZHA Principal

Liberland will function as free standing virtual reality realm with the ambition of becoming the go-to-site for networking and collaboration within the Web 3.0 industry. The project caters to both the community of libertarians and the community of blockchain empowered Web 3.0 developers, who collectively understand the power and potential behind a "permissionless realm of interchange" and "technology powered prosperity".

The project also comes as a response to the world's transformative and emerging notion to end stagnation and push for universal prosperity. The metaverse's open and transparent decentralized autonomous organization will have much greater demand and appeal over centralized corporate ventures, further accelerating this urban transformation.

The project has already been given a positive head start, as it has built up a following of over 600,000 citizens, and can be accessed via Mytaverse, a cloud-based platform.