Extending the Playing Field
The next generation of architects grew up playing immersive world-building games like Minecraft and Roblox. Can it make them better designers?
By Diana Budds
It isn’t surprising that some of the most successful architects trace their interest to toys and games: Charles Renfro, a partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, told the New York Times a Kenner Girder & Panel building set he received at eight years old crystallized his career path; Bjarke Ingels, founder of the Danish firm BIG, tinkered with LEGO bricks as a child, and today uses them to make models for his block-like buildings; and the Dutch architect Francine Houben named her firm Mecanoo after the endlessly reconfigurable British toy Meccano. The connections extend to the way we talk about architecture, too: The critic Paul Goldberger said Sir Norman Foster’s early work sports the look of an Erector Set, albeit more elegant. (Can you guess what the architect played with?) There’s even a whole book about how children’s construction kits influenced modern architecture.
Each generation’s games shape how it learns to see and build its environment, but a major shift is now underway, as today’s youngest architects came of age in an entirely different landscape: virtual worlds. Sandbox games like Roblox (launched in 2006) and Minecraft (initially released in 2009, with a full release in 2011) invite creative construction like their analog predecessors, but with more immersiveness, open-endedness, and flexibility.
History has shown how play seeps into practice, and these digital arenas are no different. It’s starting in architecture schools, where the shift is already visible in how educators teach and how students think about creativity and future jobs. “It used to be that every admissions letter would be about LEGOs, and [over the years] it shifted toward games like Minecraft or Roblox,” says Stewart Hicks, an associate professor and associate dean at the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts at The University of Illinois Chicago.
With 151 million daily active users, Roblox is arguably one of the most popular video games of all time. Minecraft also has an immense audience, with 204 million monthly active users. Institutions nurturing the next generation of architects are looking to borrow some of that momentum: This past January, Sir John Soane’s Museum, a historic house-turned-archive in London, launched an educational program called Portals to the Past in Minecraft. In the game, players hunt through a re-creation of the museum for time-travel portals where they complete quests—like assembling ancient Greek columns—before creating their own buildings. Within the first month, it attracted 41,000 players, a far higher figure than the 1,500 school children the education program typically reaches in a year.
“As a popular national museum with limited capacity, it is a challenge for us to physically get large groups into the museum to learn about the collection and the architecture, so going digital made perfect sense,” says Tallulah Smart, a learning officer at the museum (and Minecraft player since 2011). “In an increasingly digital world, it’s important to acknowledge how technology can enhance learning and creativity. When the opportunity came up to render the museum in the Minecraft Education world, it felt perfectly aligned with the ethos of the museum: to increase knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of architecture and the collection.”
While architects of the past may have derived formal references from Erector Sets and LEGO bricks, Minecraft players are less inclined to take away stylistic influence. It’s more about opening the door to creative expression.
Dominick Concepcion, 21, a fourth-year undergraduate in Penn State’s architecture program, is one future architect who grew up playing Minecraft after school. Ten years ago, he and his friends began creating a world within the game. “We’ve built cities,” he says. “It’s very expansive,” he says. There’s a casino—complete with a playable poker table—a Pokémon battle arena, and lots of skyscrapers. He and his friends have all entered creative fields, from music to film and architecture. (One now has a multi-million-dollar career designing maps in Roblox.) “It leads you towards thinking in an experimental way rather than being very rigid,” says Concepcion. “There are genuinely infinite possibilities.” He intentionally tries not to let the orthogonal qualities of Minecraft seep into his work.
Tiam Schaper, a 26-year-old architectural designer at Gensler, started playing Minecraft with his friends around the time of the game’s full release. He says, “There’s a creative aspect to the game where you can do anything.” This is quite different from the actual work of architecture and all the constraints and specific conditions that come along with designing in the real world, he notes, but the experience of space planning helped him understand some basic architectural principles. “You can conceptualize space in a very real way,” he says. “I need to build a house. Where do I want the living room? Where do I want the bedroom?”
Schaper still plays Minecraft today, drawn to the creative freedom it offers (even if it has nothing to do with the game’s actual survivalist objectives). He recently built a Corbusian house with a Japanese garden. “You can be successful in terms of ‘beating the game’ by just building a box and putting all your shit in it and putting a door on it,” says Schaper. “You don’t get any benefit from being creative. It’s just for your own pleasure.”
Palmer Purcell, an industrial designer based in Philadelphia, continues to play Minecraft for similar reasons. He started when he was around 10 years old and loved the open-endedness of the game. “There was a lot of back and forth online about people finding out how to make new things,” says Purcell. “You want to go back in and start experimenting more. There’s this feeling of discovery that always draws me to it.” This influences how he makes things today, from seeking out new materials and techniques to creating objects that spark a sense of wonder.
But the culture around the game might just be its greatest contribution to young architects. Concepcion says the game’s collaborative spirit prepared him for the field. “It trains you because in the workforce, you’re never doing anything by yourself,” he says. “Everything is a joint venture, especially in architecture where you’re working with consultants, other architects, landscape designers, and construction teams. Having fun with your friends translates to this field very well in that regard. I think it’s important to trust your friends and allow them the freedom to do their thing.”
Gaming is only growing in popularity: Globally, the industry is expected to reach $350 billion by 2030, and architects see an opportunity to contribute to it. “There’s not enough work out there for everybody, but a lot of architecture schools are still stuck in producing people who make buildings,” says Ryan Scavnicky, an architect and assistant professor of practice in Marywood University School of Architecture. “We need people who design buildings, but we also need architects who are comfortable taking that skill and moving into different arenas.”
As Scavnicky, who is 36, writes in his recent book Architecture and Video Games: Intersecting Worlds, “the space of a video game is the space of architectural thinking.” Buildings start out in 3D digital models, which are akin to the immersive virtual worlds in gaming, he continues, so “it makes sense that examining video games as architectural works requires only minor shifts in the application of core architectural ideas.”
This perspective informed the Bachelor of Virtual Architecture program he established last year at Marywood. The first program of its kind in the United States, it trains students to design for film, gaming, and extended reality—an umbrella term that includes augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. Some of the lessons, especially in introductory classes, are similar to those found in traditional architecture school. But instead of asking students to draw a plan from photos of the Villa Savoye, as Scavnicky’s professors instructed him to do when he was in school in 2007, Scavnicky tells them to draw a video game.
Gaming is creeping into architecture curricula around the world, too: The New Jersey Institute of Technology offers a track for Game Design through its College of Architecture & Design. Last fall, The Bartlett School of Architecture at the University College of London began offering an MArch degree in Cinematic and Video Game Architecture.
But that trend doesn’t automatically translate to the technical skills required in architecture, according to Scavnicky, especially since the popularization of tablets. “I’ve seen a lot of students struggle with the transition between software-like iPad games, or even Minecraft, and computers,” he says. “Where are you saving your files? Are you using a cloud? Do you back up? Do you have copies? There is a real computer literacy issue.” Scavnicky feels like his peers had more aptitude with architectural software because they grew up with computers as their primary devices. (Back then, he was a gamer too—he played Final Fantasy and Armored Core, but also noodled around on his parents’ Photoshop software.)
A student’s success from the screen to the real thing might just depend on their ability to engage with a game beyond just playing it. Concepcion and his friends downloaded third-party modifications for Minecraft, for example. “You have to get into the backend workings of your computer to figure out how to do that, and that tech literacy kind of, I think, extends to design software,” he says. Like Scavnicky, Concepcion downloaded Photoshop when he was in elementary school. He also experimented with 3D design tools including Blender, Maxon, and Unreal Engine. “All of these things were a natural creative progression from Minecraft,” he says. “I was able to come into architecture school already having fluency in this software.”
Phillip Bernstein, deputy dean and professor in practice at the Yale School of Architecture and a former vice president at the software company Autodesk, is skeptical about the impact of gaming for multiple reasons. “I’d say the coefficient of friction to learning technology’s gotten lower, but no one’s a better architect because they played Minecraft when they were nine years old,” he says. “You may have a high degree of comfort as a digital native, but you still can’t drive the Ferrari or the Mercedes-Benz that we’re giving you until we give you a few driving lessons. And it’s not just because the tools themselves are sophisticated. It takes a long time to learn the language of architectural exploration and of architectural expression.”
The school—which primarily trains architects who pursue licensure and professional practice—limits technology for undergraduates and instead emphasizes hand-skill instruction. “You need to develop the kind of haptic sense of what it means to represent an idea and think about three dimensions like a designer,” says Bernstein, who himself practiced for two decades before spending nearly as long at Autodesk. “That’s not exclusively a digital phenomenon.”
It might be too soon to tell what the impact on the field will be, but the way these sandbox games nurture creative exploration, collaboration, and the expectation for hard work to be rewarded all seem like positives for architecture—if the field can attract and retain people who share those values. “I have some hope in my generation for maybe making some things better and correcting some of the mistakes that maybe the baby boomers and the millennials have done to the field, but I’m not sure,” Concepcion says. “My dream is to be a multidisciplinary designer, able to do any type of design I want whether that’s architecture or something much smaller or more sculptural. I’m not sure yet. I’m still finding my way.” ⌂