Traditionally known for their visionary 2D drawings and models, "paper architects" can now render 3D designs in the metaverse. While 3D design has been a standard practice for architects and product designers for quite some time now — including virtual "walk throughs" to understand a project's physical scale — Web3 pushes the boundaries of conventional practices and opens up new business models.
Our Twitter Space guests and their colleagues in the Web3 space are now ushering in a new era of "paper" architecture that enables architects to be compensated for this type of work along with their more "practical" IRL creations. We spoke with Shoshana Kahan, founder of @unbuilt_gallery and Maria Castillo Irribarren and Santiago Braby Brown, cofounders of Forma Rosa Studio, to learn more.
Edited excerpts:
Yes, at a certain point in my career I had to memorize the distance between every stairwell and elevator. There are health codes. There are zoning codes. A lot of real-world cases to a building. I saw the other day on Twitter a series that showed an architect's proposal. It was a nice looking building. Then, it showed the design at the client meeting; it was kind of pared down. And then it said, "This is what actually got sold." And it was just like, you know, a very normative building. It's funny, but it is it is definitely liberating to design for a virtual realm.
In order to design a space for Mona or a similar type of [metaverse world] platform like Decentraland, Crypto Voxels, Somnium Space and other platforms, it uses a specific technology that forces the model to be extremely low poly. What I mean by "low poly" is that there's a very tight budget on the triangle count that you can have in your model and a lot of other technical requirements for the material textures you can have. It does get pretty tricky for a traditional architect to try to design for a space like that. An analogy might be like taking a very heavy PDF file and trying to truncate it and email it. The images are too big and it's this fine line between quality and file size. That's definitely a difficult thing for traditional architects to do because of the way they design and the software that they're using.
So what we're at Unbuilt is going a high-poly avenue and using something called pixel streaming, which essentially makes it so that there's basically no limit to the triangle count on these models. So you can get these great sweeping curves and beautiful, realistic materials and amazing lighting. And it's rendered real time on a virtual machine. Pixel streaming basically allows you to access the other virtual machine in the cloud, and you're basically streaming it like a Netflix movie. But instead of just watching something you can actually interact and move around like a like a game.
[Editor's note: Santiago Braby Brown and Maria Castillo Irribarren joined during the second half of the conversation when we unfortunately experienced technical issues on the transcription side of things. You can hear their contributions by listening to the full recording of the conversation (linked above) on Zealous!]
For more insights, listen to the full conversation with Shoshana, Maria and Santiago.
This is not financial advice. If you don't want to spend money investing in crypto or Web3 — you don’t have to. The intent of this article is to help others educate themselves and learn.
