“This is one of our main reasons for taking great care over our own digital portfolio,” Delaney says. Minecraft’s sharing culture is vital for maintaining a healthy creative community, Delaney says. “These fictional worlds empower people with the tools to transform their own environments. “More than 100 million people populate Minecraft, where they can build their own worlds and inhabit them through play,” he says in the film. This is a concept that Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, founding principal of the firm BIG, asserted in his film Worldcraft, which was screened during the annual Future of StoryTelling summit in New York in 2014. In essence, Minecraft can encourage a more democratic, populist approach to making architecture. Courtesy of Rowan Van Tuijl and BlockWorks. Built for the Planet Minecraft “Underwater Wonderland Contest,” the Faberzhe Palace blends fantasy and Slavic architectural styles. Online sharing is a hallmark of the millennial generation and reminiscent of current architectural tools such as Building Information Modeling ( BIM), which allows designers, clients, and end users to exchange performance information to a much finer degree than ever before. The emphasis on and capability for real-time collaboration are also critical elements, Delaney says. It helps that Minecraft designers operate from what Delaney calls its “human perspective,” building as they move through and inhabit a space. He believes there is an ease with which people can begin building in this platform (counting kindergartners among its users). To Delaney and his colleagues, Minecraft is actually a computer-aided design tool. As we began to take on work, we expanded the team to cater for this demand.” Built as an entry to the Planet Minecraft “Industrial Revolution” competition, the BlockWorks team was able to show their work process in the form of a Minecraft build. We started working within the gaming industry and creating game maps and worlds for Minecraft players. “We began to build on a larger scale and level of detail, and it soon became apparent Minecraft had potential as a serious design tool. “The team evolved from four of us playing creative Minecraft online as a game,” Delaney says. Directed by James Delaney, currently an architecture student at Cambridge University in the UK, BlockWorks was launched in 2013 and now has 41 builders from more than 10 countries, ranging in age from 14 to 44. BlockWorks, for one, is a global team of architects, animators, and other designers using Minecraft in a wide range of projects within the realms of gaming, media, and education. Courtesy of BlockWorks.ĭesigners have taken notice of the phenomenon of Minecraft architecture. Asked by the Guardian newspaper “to build a modern vision of urban living in a clean and sustainable city in Minecraft,” BlockWorks created Climate Hope City using existing green technologies and prototypes for a sustainable design that is also achievable.
In addition to their own free-form fantasy worlds, Minecraft users have replicated nearly every famous building in existence, including the Taj Mahal, the White House, and the Burj Khalifa. The crude, cubist platform creates a pixelated landscape that looks like a rustic version of a LEGO set. Could a video game actually change the way architecture is taught and practiced?įor those who aren’t familiar with the architectural game (or who don’t have school-age children), Minecraft allows users to build houses, cities, underground bunkers, and whole virtual worlds using 3D textured cubes that represent different materials. Today, the world-building platform has also garnered the attention of architects and designers. Since it burst onto the gaming scene in 2009, Minecraft has become one of the world’s most popular video games-so much so that Microsoft bought the game and its parent company for a whopping $2.5 billion in 2014.
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