Towards a Virtual Museum of Ephemeral Architecture: Methods, Techniques and Semantic Models for a Post-digital Metaverse

We present the latest results of an experimentation, between research and didactics, on the theme of the Virtual Museum (VM), reflecting on the workflow and semantic models used for the realisation of its Metaverse, in the awareness of the potentialities today offered by post-digital techno-cultures. Since its beginnings in the 1980s, the interdisciplinary idea of VM, following the technological conquests of the times, has explored multiple conformative dimensions of digital space, experimenting with various visualisation systems and different forms of interaction, both online and offline. From the now historical Virtual Museum commissioned by the Guggenheim Foundation in 1999 to the studio Asymptote Architecture (Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture), to the great theme of the preservation and exhibition of digital heritage (cf. the 2003 UNESCO Charter for the Preservation of the Digital Heritage)—e.g. the exhibition Archaeology of the Digital Heritage curated by Greg Lynn in 2013 for the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal—up to today's proposal of the Virtual Museum NFTism by Zaha Hadid Architects, a fascinating adventure of ideas emerges, which above all finds its reasons for being a living space in representation. Considering the complexity of the subject, the multiplicity of projects that characterise it and the construction technologies involved, in order to summarise the results of the research carried out, the essay has been divided into three main thematic areas: