Virtual Architecture Contests

New World Notes has a post about a virtual architecture contest for the design of a Second Life office for publishing house Meltemi Editore, an Italian firm. The english translation of the contest rules suggests that the prize is 5000 euros, and submissions must be made by May 20, 2007. The goal is to design their SL office in a 4096 square metre space with only 937 prims. Interesting in that this publishing house has released a book called Second Life by Mario Gerosa (it's on the front page). Feedback loop?

There's another architectural contest in SL: First Annual Architecture and Design Competition (via Virtual Suburbia and Inman). The deadline is Sept 1, 2007. There's no design limitations, and winners will be documented in a book, a real world exposition, and an SL hall of fame. The contest organizer is a real world artist and organizer (Stephan Doesinger) who contributes to magazines and books and apparently has a new book coming out, "Learning from Sim City". I've always thought that today's city planners and engineers and more importantly, politicians, should play Sim City to get a more fundamental grasp of urban planning. Maybe they should play and design in SL as well?

Architectural Machinima

BldgBlog has an announcement of machinima being shown at the Silver Lakes Film Festival, particularly architectural machinima. I've always had a fascination with architecture (real or virtual) so this is exciting news. Will we see more stuff like Falling Water (see previous post) which are recreations of real world buildings or more virtual architecture such as the stuff in Second Life or any other user-generated 3D spaces/buildings?

Architectural Recreation in Half Life

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, an architectural masterpiece that has been voted the best all-time work of American architecture, has been recreated in Half Life (from Blues News). It was finished in 1939 for the Kaufmann family and molds itself around a natural waterfall. You can view a video walkthrough of the project (at Videosift), or download the map and see it for yourself (at Cstrike Planet).

A few things spring immediately to mind. One, this is a great way for the world to view architectural masterpieces in a far more intimate way than merely flipping through a coffee table book or looking at postcards. Increasingly there are examples of these recreations in places like Second Life and having the world's great buildings, museums, and archaeological sites available in this way is a great use of virtual resources. Two, although recreating real world sites in virtua is fine, how about creating new forms of architecture and design? I suspect this is already happening but is anyone documenting this? Three, I can see machinima picking up on this and having documentaries, either entirely in-game, or via a combination of in-game and real world video. We've seen recreations of ancient battles using the Creative Assembly's Total War series on the History Channel's Decisive Battles. Is it only a matter of time before we see the "World's Great Architects", or "Masterpiece Buildings from the Ancients" using game engines like Half Life or Second Life? Four, with a proper tour guide in place it would be like a real world visit (hey, you could use Half Life's in-game voice icons to add speech similar to how some museum displays are designed!). Take in the Louvre, The Guggenheim, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art all without leaving your desk. Plus, you could have entire events recreated at any time. Miss out on that display of Egyptian art treasures that came to town for only two weeks? You could just choose to see that version of the museum or art gallery.

Are there any museums or galleries doing this now?