Superarchitectural: Challenging the Architectural Design of the Metaverse

The metaverse is an immersive virtual realm that allows millions of users to interact with each other, both described by the social intricacies of the everyday and unrestrained by the physical limitations of reality. Yet despite the creative potential to disrupt how the built environment is represented, the metaverse tends to simulate the architectural conventions of physical reality. By visiting the virtual reality sites of 30 interiors, buildings, and plazas within popular metaverse platforms, we identified outliers in convention to curate a `Metaverse Design Catalogue' of architectural features that were uncommon or unrealistic in physical reality. We thus challenged 21 architectural experts to use the catalogue as a catalyst to design an architecture that goes beyond convention to become `superarchitectural'. Based on their redesigned and reimagined floor plans and perspective drawings, we inform the design language of a superarchitectural metaverse through the dimensions of architectural diegesis, mutability, and asymmetry.