Metaverse Meditations
Andrés Reisinger’s Winter House is a minimalist metaverse mansion designed for meditation.
As design increasingly turns towards the metaverse in 2022, the Barcelona-based practitioner Andrés Reisinger has positioned himself at the forefront of this digital remodelling of the field. In 2021, the self-described “unclassifiable” artist and designer attracted press attention with The Shipping, a collection of (largely) impossible furniture designs including an intermittently self-inflating sofa and levitating table. All of the pieces were created for the metaverse and fetched $450,000 when sold as NFTs at auction.
A previous work, the Hortensia chair, was originally envisioned for the digital world, but gained such attention that it was later put into physical production by Dutch brand Moooi – a landmark in digital design that was discussed by Johanna Agerman Ross in Disegno #29. Now, the artist has launched a new digital project: Winter House, a frosty-looking home conceived for use in the metaverse.
With Winter House, Reisinger has grounded his characteristically other-worldly, dream-like design in something closer to physical reality. Not that it will be built in real life – at least, not yet – but it does nevertheless obey the laws of gravity and tick all the boxes of house-ness with its walls and roof. A house on Mars this is not.
Situated in a snow-covered landscape and backed by trees and an icy mountain range, the visuals of Winter House show off its clear geometric lines and pink-toned colouring. There are large floor-to-ceiling windows, to make the most of these digitally rendered views of nature. Winter House is professed to be a refuge from the cold and the real world, geared towards providing all the warmth and calm currently lacking in the digital realm.
Winter House is the first design released under a metaverse-focused architecture company Reisinger is establishing. The designer has upped the scale and stakes of his previous digital projects, exploring the potential of digital design for both real-world and metaverse living.
The project seeks to re-envision design’s relationship with the material, promoting the use of the digital as something of a testing ground for the real, before wasting materials and harming the environment on building without actual demand (although the project does little to acknowledge the environmental impact of the digital sphere). Created in collaboration with Madrid-based architect Alba de la Fuente, the house asks questions about the future of design and its place in the metaverse (whatever form that may take).
Reisinger says he has observed the hesitancy of many designers when it comes to approaching work in the metaverse. In this interview with Disegno, he makes his case for why more creatives should embrace its potential.
Andrés Reisinger (photo: Anna Huix).
Disegno How would you describe the house and the atmosphere you wanted to create with the visuals?
Andrés Reisinger We wanted to have a place where you could relate to the physical world and this warmness that you don't really get in digital spaces. That was the kickoff point. We wanted to evoke warmness and quietness, and the idea of it being a secure place, surrounded by nature, which is also very uncommon to think of in a digital world or the metaverse. You're more used to thinking of the digital world, the metaverse, as totally contradictory to nature. But if you think about it abstractly, you’re often not physically surrounded by nature when using social media. In the coming years, I think you’re going to be in a digital place that you've chosen [when you use these services]. You won't need to be tapping your phone or looking at images on a very small screen, because it won't depend on your screen, it will depend on your context. It's something that works. When scientists started to put images of nature in hospitals they understood that people began to get better faster than those who didn't have any images of nature or windows. That's why all new hospitals have gardens, so all the windows look onto them. A connection with nature is very important for us. But it's not the [physical] connection – you don’t have to be touching a tree – you just have to trick your brain into thinking that you are in nature. If we can do that with the different tools that we have, that’s amazing.
“You don’t have to be touching a tree – you just have to trick your brain into thinking that you are in nature. ”
Disegno Where did the idea come from? How did this project begin?
Andrés We have been thinking about this series of examples of architecture in the metaverse because architects and the design world are a little bit skeptical of it. The press and news about the metaverse is not the best. I felt that these kind of examples, of a very well-designed house in an idyllic place – not a project to be built in a specific place, but a place in the metaverse – can help to bridge that gap for people who don't know what the metaverse is. People think about it as a game that only teens can relate to, which is not the case. I imagine you can invite people in and have an actual meeting with people in there, or use it as a meditation retreat if you want to spend 60 minutes quietly in a different place, rather than just being in a room.
Disegno Given that people aren't going to be physically be living in this house, how did that change the design process and how you approached it?
Andrés I always say that the design of things in digital [spaces] don't have to be inspired by our physical interactions with things. That's how it works in physical spaces, and in our physical connection and interaction with objects. For example, a ceiling: why do we have ceilings, or walls? [In the digital space] we don't need the protection from the elements that we have required since cavemen days. But it's interesting how culture works, and how we feel very cozy in those spaces. So instead of trying to break all the laws of the physical world in order to impose a totally new thing, which would be rejected by design people and architects, I thought of creating a common house that could actually be built [in real life]. So you can relate easily to the idea that this could be your house.
Disegno Your Hortensia chair began as a digital project and ended up being physically made. How does that change with a larger-scale structure like a house? Is that a possibility? Or is this purely for the digital space?
Andrés I propose this idea that with technology and advancements in digital design, we can create digital demand before creating actual physical supply. At the moment, it works the other way around. Brands and architects construct a huge, unappealing building, which has a negative impact on the environment, and which will then be completely empty for the next 15 years. Or houses are built because developers want to make money and then nobody wants to live there. There are plenty of them, everywhere, in every city, because they are not well built or [their designers] didn't do the research and ask how people want to live. With digital proposals creating digital demand, we can actually experiment with how we should make homes happen in the physical world, without having to spend a lot of money, a lot of resources and causing environmental problems in order to test if a building will sell or not. We’ve had these tools for 15 years or more, every one of us, and nobody's using them for something that is actually useful. Which is crazy. I think explorations in the metaverse will lead to better organisation of our society and our cities.
Disegno So is this rooted in creating demand before supply?
Andrés That would be amazing, and some brands are picking up on that. But too often they do it the other way around. They create an object, they create a building, and then they try to find someone who wants to buy it. And if they can't, they have to burn all those objects, or they have to break apart the building. If you start looking when you walk around cities, there are plenty of empty buildings. It's the same for objects. This Ikea thing where you have to renovate your living room, because the objects that you bought are from a past fashion: they’re old and so you just throw them away. None of that is recyclable or reusable at all. You just buy new things. That's crazy. It's [currently] very normal to act that way, and it's linked to the way we have been taught how to live. It's not realistic, from one day to another, to forget about all that stuff and start living consciously. But if we can make the majority of people who need to change things all the time migrate to a digital layer, and start to think more consciously and ecologically in our physical world, that would be amazing.
“We are in a friction stage with technology. That’s why almost all people reject the idea of spending time in the metaverse.”
Disegno You’ve released previous projects in the digital space before the physical. Have you found it to be a successful model?
Andrés Of course. That's why brands are starting to catch up on that. Not only because they are being harassed for wasting materials, but because they are losing money. They have to create prototypes, moulds and machines to create objects which they don’t know will sell. So they start to push people to buy it. It's like a circle that never ends. Then they have to create new ones, because the last ones didn't sell the way they wanted. So it's an infinite loop of creating more waste than the demand.
Disegno You said that the metaverse gets bad press, why do you think people are wary of it?
Andrés We are in a friction stage with technology. That’s why almost all people reject the idea of spending time in the metaverse. Also, because they have seen movies and all that. But if you think about it, in 10 years time you will look back and see how you are scrolling Instagram now, and it will look so funny. It's aggressive: we are tapping screens, with our necks all bent into whatever position. That will change. Even if you don't want to use the metaverse, or whatever you want to call it. Social media - that’s a metaverse - will be used differently. Whatever platform of social interaction you use, you will be integrated.
Disegno And what do you think about the movement of designers and architects into the digital space and the metaverse? Have you seen mistakes being made? What do you think people are doing well?
Andrés I don't think there are mistakes. I was one of the proponents of that movement a few years ago, and I think it's beautiful. It's like a film director creating a genre, then other directors start to fill up that genre. It’s beautiful. And it's also very useful. Because if we don't start thinking of different ways of using spaces and our relationship with them, we are not going to change the way we live, which we agree is not optimal.
Disegno What debates, if any, are you hoping this will generate?
Andrés If I can trigger that discussion, I'm happy. That's why fashion brands are stepping strongly into digital fashion in the metaverse, where they can explore, research and release pieces without having to sell 2m pieces in order to make it successful. They can test culture. We are benefitting from not having tonnes of fast fashion, fast design and fast furniture.
Disegno Overall, what does this project mean to you?
Andrés I hope architects and designers will take an interest, because they are not thinking about the digital world as they should. They reject it out of fear, I think. It's a first step in trying to communicate the benefits that we can bring from the digital to our lives, to the design world and architecture That's the most important part. And I'm happy to be the link between those. I have seen many things happening in the digital world, many successes, many failures. Brands doing it well, brands doing it badly. A lot of artists, a lot of car designers and a lot of digital fashion designers are doing very well. They're proposing a lot of beautiful things and explorations without messing with our world. The design world hasn’t caught up. It's because they have this fear of leaving the material world. A lot of furniture designers, who work with actual physical materials, seem to fear the idea of leaving this material space and material context. Everyone feels fear if someone comes and proposes that you're going to live with two big screens on your nose, everything will be there and you are going to be alone in a room. It's horrible. That will not happen. That's the importance of communicating these ideas well. For me, we are not escaping from the material world. We are just using this digital layer to explore and refine the way we live in this world.
Words Francesca Anderson
Images courtesy of Andrés Reisinger