Architecture, heritage and metaverse: new approaches and methods for the digital built environment

The paper reviews the author’s professional work and academic research as an architect and scenographer on the Metaverse of Second Life, known as a collective virtual shared space, with the aim to establish the role of architecture and heritage in the digital built environment. The research utilised a design methodology that considers historical archetypes of architecture as ‘elements’ individually characterized, which can interact with each other -as in a language- generating new elements. Case studies illustrate these new architectures derived from a critical interpretation of heritage architecture, which developed the sense of memory in the virtual world