On Rendering

A couple days ago I was informed a group of students from my alma mater had swept the podium in a design competition. This is more prestigious than it sounds. Some professors deliberately assign projects that precisely meet the criteria for submissions in a particular competition and then encourage their students to enter. I see nothing wrong with this strategy - it gives the students something impressive to put on a resume, it brings prestige (of a limited sort) to the school, and it makes the professor look good. Three birds, one stone. Efficient. In fact, the only thing I have against it is it's efficiency. Anyway, I looked through the entries to see for myself what it takes to win competitions these days and, while flipping through (or paging through, whatever the correct internet terminology) I immediately spotted the winner. I was looking at the entries page, not the results but I had absolutely no doubt. One project practically leapt off the screen screaming "Professional!"

What made this project so spectacular was the quality of the panels - everything about them was top notch, the composition, the drawings, and most importantly the renderings. I don't know what software the winning team used (my guess is 3D Max with an add-on rendering tool like V-Ray) but the results were spectacular. The effect was like finding an image by a professional photographer mixed in with a bunch of cell-phone pics taken by (slightly drunk) people. That is kind of demeaning to the other competitors but, trust me, the difference really was that dramatic.

I pride myself on being intelligent at least once a week so I'm not embarrassed to say it took me two days to start wondering whether really excellent rendering (and graphic design) is sufficient to win an architecture competition. Or rather, if it should be sufficient. And since this is my smart day I can say the answer is not as clear cut as I would like it to be.

Architecture is, as I wrote in an earlier post, something that is either a) built or b) not really architecture. Completed buildings never look like their drawings. Ever. I know of some cases where the differences are very slight. I have a friend who can model the world with a degree of precision I find frightening. More frequently, the differences are huge. At the very least, images are deliberately constructed to show the proposed building in the best possible circumstance. And then they are edited to make both the building and the world just a little more perfect (a scary and fascist idea when applied to the world). In school I heard a professional renderer give the odd bit of advice, "add more cats." Apparently, in his experience people associate cats with happiness. He also advocated including a lot of children holding balloons (something of a cliche now). What that lecture drove home in a very un-subtle way is potential clients can be manipulated by rendering tricks into approving buildings of dubious architectural merit. If an image of a building requires a truckload of cats and large groups of ethnically diverse children holding balloons to convince a client, the building itself can't be very convincing. And it is the building that ultimately matters. It will be there, occupying space in the real world, with or without cats and balloons, for a long time. If it is ill-conceived and poorly designed the world is measurably worse for its existence. Architecture should stand on its own merits or not at all. Tricks used to make buildings more attractive are under-handed and unsuited to (what I consider) a noble profession.

On the other hand. Architecture is a business. It is the business of getting people who often know almost nothing about architecture to pay millions of dollars for a building. Reading orthographic drawings is not a talent; it is a learned skill. And not a skill people engaged in the earning of millions of dollars are likely to acquire. The design, the ideas behind it, its architectural merits have to be communicated to the client one way or another. This used to be done with models and perspective drawings but both of these have one major drawback when compared to computer models - they are difficult to edit. Once a physical model is built any changes to the design result in the necessity for a new model. But a digital model can be altered (and any number of new images generated) in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.

I think architectural models are beautiful objects. If I owned a firm (and had sufficient money to do so) I would have models built for every project. One of my former professors used to build models from brass - gorgeous sculptural objects I lusted after. I also think the very best computer renders are beautiful objects; the friend I mentioned above can create amazing images that look like the work of an incredibly skilled photographer who happened to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment.

The contradictory demands made on architecture by its twin nature as art and business are problematic to say the least. Selling architecture is a good thing. Convincing people good design is worth good money is a good thing (stop me before I write something controversial). The manner in which architecture is currently sold can be very bad for the profession. No building can be summed up in a single image. Even the simplest building is too complex. Whether the image is hand-drawn, a photograph of a model, or a digital image doesn't really matter against the ruthlessly reductive impulse to present a building with a single iconic image. That one image, reprinted again and again in advertisements, is what the building becomes in the public mind. Architecture periodicals and books combat this by the (perhaps ill-conceived) remedy of printing many images. The strategy is still reductive - buildings judged by how well they photograph. But I don't know a better way to do it. Until 3D smell-o-vision is a reality, this is what we have. And if completely immersive virtual reality does become a reality, touring libraries isn't going to be high on the list of things people use it for.