The metaverse has divided opinions since it rose to prominence this past year, with critics describing the immersive 3D worlds as resembling a “late capitalist technocratic nightmare” replete with bad behavior and questionable aesthetics. Still, Wall Street remains bullish on the metaverse and predicts it will one day be worth trillions. The Web3 world-building platform Mona will soon look slightly better thanks to The Alexander Team and Everyrealm, which is launching The Row, a members-only virtual community with homes designed by the likes of Alexis Christodoulou, Misha Kahn, and Andrés Reisinger.
The Row will feature a limited-edition series of 30 architectural landmarks—each sold as a one-off NFT—that can be deployed across numerous metaverse platforms. “When designing for The Row, I considered how my sculptures would appear from inside this unique piece of architecture,” says Daniel Arsham, who serves as Everyrealm’s creative ambassador and designed one of the properties to reference his Fictional Archaeology series. Kahn, meanwhile, dreamed up a folly based on his own “illogical and irreverent” ceramic works.
Everyrealm is headed by Janine Yorio, an industry veteran who previously worked with André Balazs at Standard Hotels, and who envisions Mona as a world-building platform that gives designers free rein to bring their visions to life. “The metaverse has no physics, no weather, and no limitations other than human ingenuity,” she says. Development will be underway until late 2022, but expect the venture to fetch big numbers at launch: The celebrity-favorite Alexander Team is the highest-grossing residential real estate brokerage in New York and Miami, and secured the country’s largest residential sale.
