EXPO
LIVING SOCIAL DATA
This project transforms housing crisis data into an immersive architectural experience. By turning numbers into landscapes, structures, and interactive spaces, it challenges the way we perceive information. Rising house prices, scarce social housing, and severe deprivation in New Zealand become tangible forms: mountainous data to climb, towering blocks to feel income disparity, and spatialized numbers to experience, not just read.
Set in the Metaverse, the project invites global audiences to navigate, reflect, and engage. Mona Peters and Sebastián Contreras from guide the experience, sparking dialogue that extends beyond New Zealand, highlighting the urgency of the global housing crisis.
Location:
New Zealand
Category:
Housign
Lead Architects:
Sebastian Contreras
Mona Peters
Project Year:
2023
The project explores various aspects of transmedia, blending virtual reality, infographic design, and spatial experience to build an immersive and interactive environment, its motive is to document, raise awareness, educate, and instigate change.
It poses the questions:
What if data was a landscape?
What if data was architecture?
What if data was an experiential space to interact?
The project aims to investigate how our perception of data changes when it is spatially experienced rather than perseved as mere numbers.
Focused on documenting aspects of the current New Zealand housing crisis, the project employs data to generate the shape of a spatial experience in the Metaverse. Creating the "form" of information.
Four sets of data are utilized, with the first set documenting the drastic rise in house prices from 2015 to 2022. The second set illustrates the availability of social housing over the same time frame. These opposing data sets shape the overall structure of the building.
Upon entering the architectural space, viewers are confronted with the third set of data, revealing that 1 in 50 people in New Zealand suffer from severe housing deprivation.
Additionally, towering blocks outside the building visually depict the vast difference between the average yearly income of a household and average house price.
In the immersive virtual environment, the audience is encouraged to navigate through the space, such as ascending the mountainous structure formed by the rising house prices end therefore experiencing the data in a tactile and visual way making the data more relatable.
The virtual space, located in the online Voxels, Metaverse is accessible worldwide via a simple link. Users can experience the space, and engage in discussions.
The project's creators, Mona Peters and Sebastian Contreras from MTspace studio, will be present in the virtual space and or physically, fostering dialogue and providing insights into the project.
The aim is to encourage a global audience to participate, broaden perspectives, and collectively address not only New Zealand's but the global housing crisis.
Human and Humanitarian Architecture Studio
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