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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture
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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture
Tiktok
Vol. 1
Letter from the Editor -
Davis Richardson
Reclaiming 432 Park Ave - Kamila Diaz Calderon
Ultrathin Worlds -
Anyi Liranzo-Payamps
Finance Over Function -
Jared Britton
The Housing Shepherd -
Kacper Kowal
Livestream Dystopia -
Jake Haenggi
VR Architecture -
Ryan Barbour
Metaverse Architecture -
Danny Gavino
From Fi-Fi to De-Fi -
Scott Gleason
Realistic or Reality? -
Stephan Argent
Dubaifying Saudi Arabia-
Rasha Labibidi
NEOM’s Sustainability Mirage - Andrew Lazarte
Living in the Model -
Bryan Tome
Planting the Illusion -
Lauren Taravella
Critical Regionalism -
Nolan Aucone
About
Order
CGZ-VOLNO1-ARCH5602-FA2025-E6
Metaverse Architecture
Metaverse Architecture
Danny Gavino
Lately, the metaverse has been hyped as a wide-open digital playground. Companies like Meta have pitched it as a brand-new frontier—go anywhere, build anything, live by your own rules. Sounds promising, right? Spending time in places like Roblox, Fortnite Creative, or Meta Horizon Worlds reveals that it all starts to look familiar, however. The real world shows up in the digital realm. Private ownership, branded zones, monetized creativity, and a web of platform rules — these end up shaping how these digital worlds work.
The metaverse is a blueprint for neoliberal architecture. Digital space is supposedly endless. There’s no land to buy, no physical materials, no real-world labor. Yet these platforms copy the old physical-world systems—property, scarcity, irrationality of such phenomena in an online world. Thinking of Zaha Hadid Architects’ Liberland Metaverse and following theorists Alexandros A. Lavdas, Galo Canizares, and Ryan Scavnicky shows how virtual worlds reflect the economic and political pressures shaping design today. The metaverse promises new worlds, but most of the time, it just rebuilds digital versions of old neoliberal values.
The Metaverse as a Private Urban System
The first thing you notice in the metaverse? It feels a lot like a privatized city. Take Roblox as an example. It looks like anyone can design whatever they want, but of course, the company behind it calls the shots. The tools are free, but Roblox controls what gets published, how money moves, and who actually profits from user creations. In a way, it is a completely privatized city where a single company acts as the government. Their policies, terms, algorithms — they decide what you see and what you don’t.Fortnite Creative isn’t much different. You get to build all sorts of wild maps, but the platform decides what gets featured or monetized. The interface encourages you to build stuff that matches the platform’s own style, as most of the tools used in order to make these sandboxes use the same items and looks for everyone. Meta Horizon Worlds ostensibly prioritized open community, but like Roblox, Meta owns the rules, the markets, and the social codes. The public square is actually a private digital space.
Keller Easterling, in her book Extrastatecraft, calls this “infrastructure space”—power doesn’t appear as flashy buildings but as hidden rules and systems that quietly shape everything. This is the current reality in the metaverse. The architecture isn’t just about looks—it’s about the economic and technical rules that control how everyone moves, builds, and interacts.
Digital Real Estate and Manufactured Scarcity
Here’s something weird: digital real estate is now a thing. In places like Decentraland and The Sandbox, you can actually buy virtual plots of land, just like real estate — except online, space theoretically never actually runs out. This only makes sense within the concept of scarcity, the logic that drives real estate in the physical world. These platforms set artificial limits, turning artificial land into an investment.It is a pattern borrowed from cities developed by financial speculation. Land gets valuable not because it is special or in a great location but because of hype and the hope of future profits. In the metaverse, that logic is even clearer. A piece of digital land is valuable because the platform says it is or because investors hope others will buy in.
Ryan Scavnicky discusses how games expose the hidden rules of real-world systems. When players buy, sell, and develop digital land, they’re playing out a stripped-down version of capitalism. But these digital worlds could have worked differently. Instead, they doubled down on familiar ideas about property and profit that define neoliberal society instead of creatively imagining a more interesting alternative.
Zaha Hadid Architects and the Liberland Metaverse
The Liberland Metaverse by Zaha Hadid Architects is an example of architecture as a direct result of neoliberal ideas. Liberland itself is a self-declared libertarian micronation sitting on disputed land. There’s no real territory, but it dreams up a future where personal freedom and minimal government rule everything. The metaverse allows this ideology to come to life.The virtual city shows off ZHA’s trademark sleek, futuristic designs, but underneath, there’s a clear political message. The metaverse gives Liberland a national identity without any physical markers. Citizenship, land ownership, personal participation in the economy — it all happens online. It’s a libertarian dream of self-governance and privatization.
Lavdas has critiqued the aesthetics of the metaverse. He notices how these digital spaces rely on clean lines and perfect geometry, creating a sense of flawless order. When everything looks smooth and seamless, it’s easy to believe the systems behind it are just as tidy and perfect—even though, in reality, they might exclude or be built on exploitative practices.
Liberland is a great example of how digital architecture can be leveraged as a sales pitch for political ideas. The architecture doesn’t question what it stands for— it normalized those values through design.
Computational Aesthetics and the Role of Software
Both Lavdas and Canizares dig into why the metaverse looks and works the way it does. Lavdas says digital space pushes designers toward geometric perfection, which can hide deeper agendas. Those smooth surfaces and perfect shapes don’t just look clean — they send a message that any mess or conflict has been solved by design.Canizares goes further, arguing that architecture today isn’t built from bricks or steel but from software. In the metaverse, gravity or weather aren’t considerations—menus, templates, and code are. This results in an architecture which is both super flexible but also hollow. It rarely connects with deeper social needs or the messy realities of community life. Because software guides how designers think, the metaverse ends up full of streamlined, repeatable templates. Like all kinds of digital trends and algorithms, these templates spread quickly, defining what the digital world “should” look like. Instead of bold experimentations, the metaverse fosters a feedback loop of the same old designs.
How Play Teaches Neoliberal Values
Virtual worlds teach you as you play. In Roblox, kids discover how to make money from selling their own creations. In Fortnite Creative, popularity follows platform trends with players tweaking their maps for maximum buzz. Even basic choices — where to put a building, how to decorate — are influenced by value and competition.The metaverse doesn’t just platform neoliberal values; it reinforces them. Users internalize rules about property, optimization, and competition because they live them. They build, mess up, tweak, and try again. Over time, it becomes common sense, second nature, unquestionable. Play, in this world, becomes practice for real economic life. The metaverse turns into a training ground where people learn to navigate private, market-driven spaces — long before the real city shaped by the same forces.
Architectural Labor in the Age of Platforms
The metaverse also changes how creative work happens. In the real world, architects train for years and build physical structures over long periods of time. Online, anyone with a platform can design. On one hand, this seems democratizing and empowering, but there’s a catch: users create value, and platforms cash in on the surplus. In a Marxist sense, this is textbook exploitation.With Roblox, millions of young people make games and worlds that keep the whole thing buzzing. Their imagination is real work without pay. The platform rakes in money from all that energy, through subscriptions and in-game sales. Design becomes another resource to mine. The line between user and worker blurs. Creativity turns into a commodity — one the platform gets for free.
The Neoliberal Fantasy of the Metaverse
The metaverse sells itself as a totally new phenomenon, but it mostly recycles old systems. It promises freedom while actually delivering controlled, managed spaces. It claims endless creativity but rewards what can be sold. It promises new worlds but quietly rebuilds the same ideas about property, scarcity, and profit.Even digital land — ironic in and of itself — is unquestioned and natural. The metaverse reinforces that space must be owned. The metaverse doesn’t just mimic the real world; it reifies it, making privatized digital life feel inevitable.