The cadre of high-design firms creating on-demand virtual architecture in the metaverse has grown recently with the announcement of PLP’s upcoming 5,000-piece NFT skyscraper collection, which they debuted earlier last month with help from VerseProp, a virtual property platform.
Ostensibly in keeping with trends indicated by its expanding digital client base, the London-based firm says its collection is meant to “bridge the gap between those interested in both digital and physical real estate.” An opportunity to design your own building alongside a PLP staffer is on offer as well, and they promise each building will have a “valuable commercial utility.”
Up for grabs are the owning rights to a digital token derived from a concept building design that PLP says will come embedded with exclusive content such as webinar access and even physical artworks. The firm is pitching this as an exploration into not only the digital design of buildings but also the application of alternative sales structures and instruments like smart contracts that are going to become critical to architects and designers as the technology and use of metaverse spaces continue to evolve.
Towards that end, PLP says this new foray into NFTs and the metaverse, which was produced through its research arm PLP Labs, “raises key questions such as: Can design services be tokenized or distributed through smart contracts? To what extent is the metaverse a space for real-world designers?”
“Exploring NFTs and the metaverse isn’t as different from traditional architecture as you might be inclined to first think,” the firm's Head of Digital Technology Richard Woolsgrove offered in a press statement, adding: “A lot of an architect’s work is digital, we always have one foot in the virtual world. So where do these worlds cross, and how should we be engaging with them?”
The answers to these questions will come soon enough, as tokens are expected to be minted and placed on the marketplace later in the summer.
5 Comments
The blandest of corporate giants delving into NFTs ...
From their website: "We believe in and we practice an engaged architecture capable of creating transformative spaces that are genuinely socially and environmentally sustainable."
I'd be interested in hearing them justify the bandwagon jumping into NFTs considering its reliance on extremely harmful blockchain tech. Something here doesn't jive, and it smells like money taking priority over morality and ethics.
Here, I assume, is where you get a running start and take a flying leap into NFT wonder. It is how they see the future.
Up for grabs are the owning rights to a digital token derived from a concept building design that PLP says will come embedded with exclusive content such as webinar access and even physical artworks.
I have read this several times and still struggle to understand what it actually is and what it offers that we don't have already, other than a new venue for speculation, the exchange of $. Obviously I am unenlightened, but its nothingness seems to be a large part of its value, its charm.
All that is solid melts into air. . . .
VR could be a place greatly different than the real world. A place for fun, escape, imagination without the constraints of commerce and physics. The jerk offs are making it into a second rate replica of reality. A place to dump the lousy ideas that didn’t make it in the real world.
Indeed. The lack of technical skills and imagination shown by these architectural ventures - and their real estate clients - has been disappointing. I'm pretty sure game designers have a better skillset for this kind of stuff. What is the point of dumping their old Rhino/Maya models into an empty virtual space and calling them NFTs?
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