The BlockWorks studio proves, yet again, that architects can use Minecraft as a design tool to produce rather magical results with impressive detail. The team of architects, designers, and animators envision mystical cubic worlds in response to what they refer to as “Briefs”, which include commissions from YouTube personalities, gaming networks, museums, and film studios as well as original submissions to actual Minecraft design competitions.
Although the designs are largely fictional, BlockWorks draws inspiration from real-world buildings from throughout history and even structural details by today’s starchitects. As expected, the team’s growing portfolio is pretty spectacular, and surely retains one’s attention for a good amount of time.
You can check out more of BlockWorks’ projects in greater detail on their website. Also, sneak a peek at some their project trailers below or on their YouTube channel.
“In this extended short, City Beautiful takes on the old school classic SimCity from the perspective of a professional planner 20 years later. Along the way, City Beautiful provides pertinent observations of game play versus reality. — theurbanist.org
Urban Design Ph.D student Dave Amos circles back around to the game that sparked his passion as a kid playing computer games. An advocate for sustainable living and diverse cities, Amos plays through the old school SimCity game providing relevant insights learned over the years in his career.
While normally used by online gamers to create a generated world for exploration and combat, the world-building computer game Minecraft has been noted for its architectural capabilities. BlockWorks, a design studio in the UK, uses the game as a design tool to create materials for marketing, media, and education; a competition in Australia a few years back invited students to design a national park using the block-building program; and Bjarke Ingels has proselytized at length that the architecture field should become more like the game as well.
Providing an online platform to build the world we want to inhabit, Minecraft’s great distinction is its offer of complete freedom from real world constraints—there’s no clients, no engineers, and no financial restrictions. Testing those limits, architect and designer Andrew McClure of Nomad Design set out to build something using Minecraft. Educated on the program by his young cousin, McClure picked a site in the desert, laid out a foundation, and built his contemporary dream home, cantilevers and all.
Minecraft – or, specifically, the Minecraft Bedrock Edition series of titles – has now received dedicated servers for players across the board. Unfortunately, this feature has arrived on every platform other than Nintendo Switch.
Dedicated servers allow players on Windows and Linux computers to set up their own server at home, or host their server using a cloud-based service. From here, other players owning a Bedrock edition of the game can join in, giving those in your specific server the power to configure your world however you like with your own unique settings, modes, server life cycle, and more.
An article on developer Mojang’s support page has confirmed the fact that Switch owners cannot take part in this new feature.
Q: Who can play on my dedicated server? A: Anyone playing on the bedrock editions will be able to connect to the server, with the current exception of Nintendo Switch users. Also, players on Xbox One will only be able to connect through a LAN connection.
The “current exception” part of that statement provides hope that Switch players will be able to join in the fun at a later date, but the lack of explanation behind the move is a little frustrating. Hopefully, Mojang is busy working behind the scenes to implement the feature on Nintendo’s console, too, but we’ll just have to wait and hope for an official announcement on this in due course.
Do you play Minecraft on Switch? Would you like to jump into dedicated servers with your friends? Let us know below.
After architect Andrew McClure received a lesson from his cousin on how to use Minecraft, he went to work making a slick looking house in the sandbox game in just two hours.
The beauty of Minecraft is that it’s an absolute sandbox in which you can accomplish just about anything your brain can dream up. Gamers have taken on massive architectural projects in the game, like a realistic Japanese city, the world of The Witcher 3, the area seen in Spirited Away, and many other impressive feats. Minecraft can turn anybody into an architect, but what happens when an actual architect tries building a house in the game? That’s what BuzzFeed decided to test in a new video, and the results are interesting (via Geekologie).
Andrew McClure, a designer who specializes in custom high-end residential design, approached this endeavor as a self-described Minecraft noob, so his hope was that some of the software he uses to design homes for work would have some overlap with the tools available in the game. He was given two hours to build whatever he wanted, and he approached it very much like a real job.
He began by surveying the area, its lighting, and other factors that are important to consider when designing a building IRL. Once he got a lay of the land, he got to work, explaining parts of his process on the way. What resulted from this experiment is a modern, nicely designed house with a focus on light, function, and aesthetic. If anything, this video reinforces the fact that Minecraft is a versatile space and can be used for silly fun or more seriously thought-out projects.
What do you think of this Minecraft house? What’s the best thing you’ve ever built in-game? Let us know down in the comments!
