Balloons and render ghosts

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Balloons and render ghosts

Long before buildings become physical entities, they enter the world as images
yet the messages implicit in these visualisations are rarely interrogated or decoded.
James Bridle ventures into that realm of unachievable hyperreality that is
architectural rendering.
Architecture / James Bridle

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James Bridle

Architecture

Published
27 February 2013

Keywords
3D model, architectural rendering, architectural

Location
London

representation, BIM, Building Information

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Modeling, DOMUS 966, Michael Graves, Paper

Plane, rendering, Squint/Opera, Visualisation

This article was originally published in Domus 966 / February

2013
At the beginning of the 1990s, Norbert Kottmann erected a
construction sign on the then wasteland of Potsdamer Platz,
affirming it as the site of the future erection of Tatlin's Monument
to the Third International. Tatlin's Tower was originally
conceived as both the headquarters of, and monument to, the
international socialist revolution, but it has long been deployed
in art to denote a range of hopeful utopias. Kottmann named his
version the "Parliament Building for the United Nations of

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Eurasia". Despite these visions, within a few years there arose

instead the Sony Centre and its attendant, decidedly more
commercial towers. While Tatlin's Tower is doomed to be
reappropriated by artists forever, while remaining unbuilt, the
renderings of today's architectural visualisations exist for the
same, and frequently more successful purpose: to call into being,
and physicality, the buildings of the imagination.
These renderings might also be considered the most visible
public, legal, urban art of the 21st century. Displayed on
hoardings throughout the metropolis, they confront us every day
with a kind of digital futurism, a pixelated vision of what is to
come. As such, an entire industry has sprung up within and
alongside architecture and construction to facilitate their
creation.

The London-based architectural visualisation studio Picture Plane creates images that go beyond photorealistic representation and create painterly
images that convey something of the intangible. Top: the Darklass settlement in Scotland, designed by Nall McLaughlin Architects. Above: a housing
development in South London, designed by John Smart Architects

Architecture has always had a relationship with

visualisation, as separate from plans and schematics. While
blueprints describe the functional requirements of a building,
sketches and drawings convey an impression of the final
structure which is as important in getting it built, negotiating not
the material constraints of nuts, bolts and materials, but what
Dan Hill calls the "dark matter" of planning, environmental and
legal processes, and the unstable ground of public opinion. In a
recent essay in The New York Times, Michael Graves wrote,
"Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought
process of architectural design. Drawings express the interaction
of our minds, eyes and hands." What concerned Graves was that

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designing entirely digitally "is analogous to hearing the words of

a novel read aloud, when reading them on paper allows us to
daydream a little, to make associations beyond the literal
sentences on the page". That something important is being lost to
the computer is something a new generation of visualisation
studios might contest.
A screenshot from a design presentation video
produced by Squint/ Opera, a London-based
agency with offices across the globe.
Squint/Operas architectural communication
employs filmic and, to a certain degree,
advertising language, with a preference for
moving and interactive images

Visualisations are produced for a range of purposes, but

it's almost by accident that they surface in public. Most often,
they are commissioned at an early stage for competitions and
briefs, to give clients a first idea of an architect's vision. Later,
they may be produced to illustrate massing or sightlines, to prove
the suitability and sympathy of a new building to its
surroundings.
Jrg Majer of Picture Plane, a London-based architectural
visualisation studio, trained as an architect himself before
becoming interested in the possibilities of software to simulate
the atmosphere of unbuilt buildings. Working with a range of
techniques, Picture Plane produces imagery of a startling
ethereality, with all the ambiguity of art.
Picture Plane's images are intentionally on the side of the
aesthetic, and in many cases are intended to evoke mood and
atmosphere rather than literal views. With the increased power
and sophistication of 3D software, most renderings, says Majer,
"aspire to the photograph, rather than the painting, but when
you are creating spaces that do not yet exist, the painting is more
powerful".
In a series of images of a proposed South London housing
development by John Smart Architects, Majer first constructs the
base buildings in 3ds Max and inks them with physically
accurate material maps and lighting effects drawn from a range

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of libraries. There are libraries of trees, and people, too, with

which to populate the surroundings and the street. But the
rendered model is then moved into Photoshop, and the texture of
the final image is taken from classic English landscape painting:
the colour palette and the clouds in the sky are based on the
paintings of George Stubbs; a cyclist stands astride his bicycle
much as the romantic painter's horsemen do. Another image,
produced for a proposed settlement in Scotland by Nall
McLaughlin Architects, flattens out the perspective to produce an
effect akin to naive painting, evoking innocence and a simplicity
of living.

What was once the domain of the architect is now

performed by the visualisation artist

Some of the imagery leading up to the 2012 London Olympics, developed from 2008 onwards by Squint/Opera. The Squint/Opera film was chosen by
the leading television broadcasters (BBC, Sky, CNN) to show the architectural project to the public

Picture Plane's work is deliberately, explicitly painterly:

the views are subjective and far from the "verified views"
requested by planning departments, legally binding documents
specifying the exact relationship of a new structure to its
surroundings. Before a building is fully planned, it is necessary
to suggest, rather than define, and the production of renderings
involves much toing and froing between architect and visualiser
to establish the correct mood. This process in turn feeds back into
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the architects' design, perhaps filling the gap in process that

Graves identifies as being created by the death of drawing.
But many visualisations define the work even more strongly. As
the power of the architect wanes, and planners and developers
become more powerful in the process, the visualisation may
come to form, shape and define the final outcome more than any
sketch did before. The trend in visualisation is towards the
photoreal, ever more achievable with software. And what was
once considered the domain of the architect is now performed by
the visualisation artist, or even by the software itself. Ryan
Lintott, Associate Director at Squint/Opera, a "creative content
and communications agency for brands and the built
environment", describes how incidental material in large-scale
visualisations bleeds through into the final design, and the
world.
At the higher scales, visualisers work from barebones blueprints
to fill master plans for malls and public squares with foliage and
furniture in order to produce convincing walk- and fly-throughs
for large multinational clients. But these images, populated with
off-the-shelf details and default objects, are so convincing that
they are hard to shake, and become fixed in the project, approved
at every stage: a lorem ipsum architecture, or the visual
equivalent of marketing-speak, strip-mined of meaning and
value.

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Views of the Olympic Village in Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Games developed by Squint/Opera, commissioned by AECOM, which entered and won the
competition for its master plan

Recognising the increasing importance of such

visualisations, and the way they slip over into materiality, the
Vitra furniture company offers free downloads of 3D models of its
wares for use in rendered images, hoping that seeing them in
their future offices will encourage companies to follow through
and purchase the real thing. But with the increased prevalence of
visualisation in the public sphere, there's also a growing
awareness of how Perma Blue skies and sunshine are other tricks
used to distract, if not to outright lie, in gaining approval for new
buildings. Curbed NY, a website dedicated to architecture and
real estate in New York, runs regular "Rendering Vs. Reality"
features, which are rarely forgiving: cheap materials, unreal
lighting and much reduced green space are recurring complaints.
While a little bit of Photoshopping is not unique to the
architecture and construction industries, there is growing
concern that visualisation and standardisation will increase the
levels of "software determinism" in architecture. As architecture
and planning become more integrated digitally, there is a
movement towards Building Information Modeling (BIM)
processes complete digital records of facilities from conception
to operation which many believe will eventually become law.
Many of these workflows formalise visualisations as part of the
design process to such an extent they are drawing complaints
from architects who feel that image-making is replacing creative

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and material rigour in building design. While Michael Graves

worries that "something is lost when [students and staff] draw
only on the computer", perhaps he should in fact be concerned
that another kind of unachievable hyperreality is being born.
James Bridle, writer and artist based in London

Author

Sections

James Bridle

Architecture

Network
Like on Facebook

Keywords
3D model, architectural rendering, architectural
representation, BIM, Building Information
Modeling, DOMUS 966, Michael Graves, Paper

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Plane, rendering, Squint/Opera, Visualisation

Location
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