Modern Houses

The beautiful thing about Minecraft is how you gradually improve as a player, honing your craft, slowly developing your skill – and your personal taste often follows suit. Small, dirty shacks becomes beautiful villas, simple cobblestone is replaced with jungle tree or terracotta, and that pile of sand blocks you threw on the floor instead of building a bed becomes an actual bed.

This is all to say that there comes a time in every Minecraft player’s life when they suddenly want to take their house building skills to the next level. Perhaps it’s time to try out a whole new design? One that incorporates a feeling of both style and luxury. I’m talking, of course, about building a tacky castle entirely out of gold! Wait, that’s not it. I’m actually talking about modern architecture!

Two of the most popular building styles in Minecraft are modern architecture and contemporary architecture. The difference? Contemporary is the architecture of its time, using innovative approaches and minimalist design choices to make the house of tomorrow – today! Modern architecture on the other hand is – despite its name – quite old. With concrete-heavy creations such as Fallingwater or Villa Savoye, it dates back to the early 1920’s. What unites the two styles is how good their themes fit into the game.

“The reason modern and contemporary houses seem to lend themselves to Minecraft probably stems from the fact that we build with square blocks,” says Andyisyoda, a professional YouTuber and aspiring architect, known for his skills with these styles. “Many modern houses have a lot of clean-looking straight lines, a relative lack of diagonal lines and a strong horizontal composition. Just place blocks in simple rows, add some carefully placed windows and a few vertical elements and you already have something that looks like a real-life house.”

Obtaining necessary materials like concrete requires you to be close to sand and gravel. In order to create concrete, you need to mix these two ingredients – including the colour you want to dye the block with – to create concrete powder blocks. Once you place the blocks, you have to expose them to water to make them solidify. However, according to Andy, these builds can incorporate any colour, depending on their location.

“Bright white builds can stand out nicely in a suburban setting, but if your build has lots of landscape around it you might want to reflect that with your block choice. Choosing some natural looking materials will be more restful on the eye. For contemporary builds pretty much, anything goes! I have seen black houses, white, red, totally wooden and even brutalist all-stone designs and they all looked amazing. Use your imagination!”

Building a modern or contemporary house in-game is no small undertaking. It needs to have plenty of light, a decent amount of space, and plenty of blocks of the right materials. One of Andy’s latest builds, “Pheasants”, consists of 2800 polished granite blocks, 1500 smooth quartz blocks, 1300 light gray concrete blocks, as well as over 500 glass panes. But that’s not the only option if you ask Andy.

“A more modest two bedroom modern house I found on my server has 2000 snow blocks and 1500 jungle planks as the main ingredients.”

3500 blocks in total? I play Survival! How am I going to collect them all? I guess I know what I’ll be doing during the holidays. Going back to building dirt shacks suddenly doesn't sound so bad after all...