Archinect - News

Minecraft's crowdsourced NYC design is insane

2022-03-11T13:03:00-05:00

Two years into the project, they construct the city in short and mobile sprints. “We circle around different districts,” explained Minefact. “We work one week in Chinatown, then one week in Tribeca, one week on Bowery and then come back to Chinatown. We always work on multiple districts at the same time to keep things interesting.”

The crowdsourced design-build was begun by a German user named MineFact who had attempted a similar project the year before for his hometown of Frankfurt using rendering software that incorporated data taken from Google Maps.

Incorporating a replacement for the obsolete Mercator projection maps they call Airocean, an impressive workforce of over 2,700 Minecraft users started at the 9/11 Memorial Site and has to date completed mostly exterior versions of different New York area landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, and Brooklyn Bridge.

Related on Archinect: An army of gamers is building a Minecraft version of New York's state capital. (Image via Reddit User GeoffHenderson.)

The New York City group is a spinoff of a larger consortium called Build the Earth, which has recently completed digital versions of other important sites across the Tri-State Area. Users don’t have an exact anticipated date of completion just yet (the city has approximately 1 million build...

An army of gamers is building a Minecraft version of New York's state capital

2022-01-21T12:43:00-05:00

Minecraft lovers may soon be able to wander around a virtual Albany. A voluntary group of builders associated with Build the Earth Northeast USA is building the city and other parts of the Capital Region into the game.

The organization is made up of thousands of volunteer gamers who have produced successful virtual versions of other cities distributed across regional networks. Building in the hugely popular MMOG has seen a renaissance of late thanks to a mod intervention which produced construction techniques that lead to the ability for designers to create taller and taller structures using something called cubic chunks. The groups ask applicant designers to construct a virtual Long Island test home as part of their official vetting process.

The Albany build is being overseen by a splinter called Build the Earth Northeast USA. The group says it is currently in the process of constructing the state’s capitol building (itself designed in tandem between 1867 and 1899) and has already finished former Governor Nelson Rockefeller's obsessive dream Empire State Plaza and the marble Erastus Corning Tower and has preparatory plans for the New York State Museum to follow. Project managers say they have st...

Facebook is using Minecraft to train a multi-tasking AI assistant

2019-09-10T15:30:00-04:00

Arthur Szlam and colleagues at Facebook Research have begun work on an AI assistant that can learn from its interactions with humans and then perform a wide range of tasks on request. The more it learns the more it can do. The team has chosen Minecraft, the best-selling 3D sandbox video game, as its medium to develop this new AI.

"Instead of superhuman performance on a single difficult task, we are interested in competency across a large number of simpler tasks, specified by humans," the team said according the the MIT Technology Review. The video game environment allows the AI to interact with countless human users, creating a feedback loop of heightened performance and learning.

The team's hope is to eventually create a self-improving AI that does not need to be "trained" by a human.

Graphics update for Minecraft has been canned...

2019-08-16T14:00:00-04:00

Minecraft has come a long way since its introduction a decade ago. It remains one of the top paid mobile games in Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store, while Minecraft: Education Edition has become a popular way to teach kids things like computer coding, engineering, architecture, urban planning and math.

The popular sandbox video game, Minecraft, known for enabling players to craft worlds, structures, objects, and pretty much anything one can imagine within its framework, has been due for "a major update since 2017."

The "Super Duper Graphics Pack was expected to bring more lighting effects like shadows and fog, new motion for some game elements like leaves, and new textures...," but Microsoft deemed the endeavor to be "too technically demanding."

It looks like players will have to enjoy the game in its current state for the time being.

Watching a real Architect tour his dream house built in "Minecraft"

2018-09-11T14:12:00-04:00

While normally used by online gamers to create a generated world for exploration and combat, the world-building computer game Minecraft has been noted for its architectural capabilities. BlockWorks, a design studio in the UK, uses the game as a design tool to create materials for marketing, media, and education; a competition in Australia a few years back invited students to design a national park using the block-building program; and Bjarke Ingels has proselytized at length that the architecture field should become more like the game as well.

Providing an online platform to build the world we want to inhabit, Minecraft's great distinction is its offer of complete freedom from real world constraints—there's no clients, no engineers, and no financial restrictions. Testing those limits, architect and designer Andrew McClure of Nomad Design set out to build something using Minecraft. Educated on the program by his young cousin, McClure picked a site in the desert, laid out a foundatio...

This studio illustrates Minecraft's architectural capabilities to create imaginary worlds

2015-08-17T16:34:00-04:00

The BlockWorks studio proves, yet again, that architects can use Minecraft as a design tool to produce rather magical results with impressive detail. The team of architects, designers, and animators envision mystical cubic worlds in response to what they refer to as "Briefs", which include commissions from YouTube personalities, gaming networks, museums, and film studios as well as original submissions to actual Minecraft design competitions.

Although the designs are largely fictional, BlockWorks draws inspiration from real-world buildings from throughout history and even structural details by today's starchitects. As expected, the team's growing portfolio is pretty spectacular, and surely retains one's attention for a good amount of time.

You can check out more of BlockWorks' projects in greater detail on their website. Also, sneak a peek at some their project trailers below or on their YouTube channel.

All images via. H/T Kotaku Australia

Primary school kids could design Australia's next national park via Minecraft

2015-04-24T20:50:00-04:00

Australia’s next national park could be designed on the video game Minecraft – and by primary school children – if a new venture by the [NRAMLR] goes to plan. In a move worthy of Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation, pupils from the Adelaide Hills area have been invited to design their 'perfect national park' using the block-building game, with $8.9m allotted to bring the winning student’s design to life.

Do video games belong in fine art museum collections?

2015-02-09T15:33:00-05:00

The popularity of video games shows no sign of waning, and museums have ramped up their interest in the medium. [...] “Sorry MoMA, video games are not art” was the headline on Jonathan Jones’s blog [...] after New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced the acquisition of 14 video games, including 1980s classics “Tetris” and “Pac-Man”. “All hell broke loose in an interesting way,” said Paola Antonelli, a senior curator in the museum’s department of architecture and design [...].

Tate Museum Creates Minecraft World Inspired by Famous Paintings

2014-12-01T15:57:00-05:00

Tate Worlds are exciting Minecraft ‘maps’ that present virtual environments inspired by artworks from Tate’s collection. The maps allow players of Minecraft to explore a range of paintings and sculpture, undertaking various activities and challenges that relate to the themes of the artworks, or exploring how they were made. Tate has teamed up with some of Minecraft’s best known mapmakers to create these virtual artworks, offering a unique combination of art, history and adventure.

The first two maps were released by the museum on November 24th and were based on two famous paintings of urban settings: Andre Derain’s 1906 painting of London, The Pool of London, and Christopher Nevinson’s 1920 painting of New York, Soul of the Soulless City.

André Derain, the influential Fauvist painter, depicted the bustling port of the Thames at the turn of the century. In the new Minecraft version of the painting, the bright colors employed by the painter are reproduced on an immersive scale. Gamers can wander the imaginary city and explore such historic sites as the Tower of London.

Christopher Nevin's futurist-influenced painting Soul of the Soulless City depicts New York in the 1920s, as it began to emerge both economically and architecturally as a modern metropolis. Fittingly, the experience of the corresponding Minecraft maps begins on a train that hurtles you into the city, just as Nevin's painting utilizes train tracks to convey its convoluted sense of perspectival moti...

The secret of Minecraft; And its challenge to the rest of us

2014-07-25T14:33:00-04:00

People often compare Minecraft to LEGO; both support open-ended creation (once you’ve mastered the crafting table, you can build nearly anything) and, of course, they share an essential blockiness. But I think this comparison is misleading, because a LEGO set always includes instructions, and Minecraft comes with none. Minecraft is a game about creation, yes. But it is just as much a game about secret knowledge.

Equator launches architecture competition that will be conducted inside of the video game Minecraft

2013-07-15T14:08:00-04:00

Swedish architecture firm Equator, in partnership with Mojang – the creators of Minecraft, invited players of the popular video game to submit their ideas for an architecture competition that would be held within the game itself. The Minecraft design competition, which runs until July 31st, is in line with a 2023 housing project by HSB Stockholm in Kungsbroplan. The housing company is holding an architectural competition for the project and wants to see ideas related to the future of housing.

Equator and Mojang invite all minecrafters to a Minecraft Competition July 1 to July 31.

HSB Stockholm has chosen a site, at Kungsbroplan in Stockholm, for its future project in 2023, where they want to see new ideas about housing in the future.

But a good city is not just about housing, it should have other exciting features as well. Therefore, we at Equator and Mojang would like to invite all minecrafters to a Minecraft competition where you`d get the chance to come up with ideas about how Stockholm could look like in 2023.

The Minecraft challange is to design a tall building on the chosen site with housing and your amazing ideas! Come up with ideas about what you`d want to see in Stockholm 2023.

From July 1 to 31, there will be a server: ksf.so opened for all interested minecraft builders.

On August 8, Equator chooses three winners who will get fine Mojang prizes. The ideas of the three laureates will be presented in the Equator Stockholm architectural proposal fo...