Software rendered architecture

[entertainment]

The image of the future comes served in blue skies with light clouds, streams of sunlight visible through sublte mist drifting through perfect yet temperate green trees. Within these mathematically rendered sketches of line and color there's a melancholy flatness. Is it accidental? Is it engineered by choice? Is it the inevitable epistemic byproduct of confronting an image we know to be impossible, even inhuman but still perceive as the meaning of the future?

You could talk about AI and surely there's something standardized and homogenised about the humanity projected there, but what the mood of these images make me think of the most is that land that the elves are supposed to go to at the end of The Lord of The Rings.

 

[wektor]

love that shit

 

[line b]

These type of buildings only look good in the software render, if that. Theres a few in my neighborhood that just look like absolute shit. the work of developers trying to pass on the cheapest construction route for the minimalist and modern. They look like IKEA sold entire buildings, with all the grace and structural fortitude that suggests.

 

[Dusty]

I used to do this for a living. Always fascinated by replicating nature in 3D. The setting of the building taking more time than the building itself. Getting the bushes to look good was a particular personal bugbear.

I look down upon the images where 2D silhouettes have been used as a quick fix.

The second one you posted, looks like a tree on the far left is just floating in mid-air. Shoddy.

For better quality examples, ones that really do look like a dream, try the architecture category on CGsociety https://cgsociety.org/galleries/featured?genre=Architecture

 

[chava]

Recently proposed project in my hometown. I am utterly fascinated by how they sell these nature / civilisation interjections.

 

[chava]

As they know in 100 years they will end up somewhat like this :

 

[chava]

Recently proposed project in my hometown. I am utterly fascinated by how they sell these nature / civilisation interjections.

To me it looks as if there's a mountain range in the background although this is in Denmark (the absolute flattest part in fact)

 

[luka]

This was one of the main things which introduced me to the modern world. I keep mentioning the gherkin in London because it was the first building where I saw it and thought, well wait a minute, this isn't really there it's still the computer generated artists impression, it's CGI. It made a big impression on me

 

[luka]

So this was 2004

 

[luka]

We were talking a bit about it a few years ago

i suppose it blurs somewhat into the creation of and representation of purely digital spaces. and again i think this is where it's instructive to look towards architecture, which cant escape its physicality but looks to shed some of the more obvious signifiers of tactility and embodiment eg texture as it aspires to total dematerialisation. opaque glass. trespa. flat blocks of primary colour.

these buildings reflect their digitality in the same inescapable and crashingly obvious way
as computer music reflects its origins and the parameters of its creative programs.

 

[line b]

Jameson makes a point that the interior of these buildings can reflect a kind of rendering and programming. The Bonaventure Hotel in LA is layed out with an exact user path in mind, and if a person steps outside the command line it is so unnavigable that it actually affected commerce of the interior businesses.

 

[chava]

Jameson makes a point that the interior of these buildings can reflect a kind of rendering and programming. The Bonaventure Hotel in LA is layed out with an exact user path in mind, and if a person steps outside the command line it is so unnavigable that it actually affected commerce of the interior businesses.

'Yup it's 'airport logic' as in Marc Augé 'non-places'.

 

[Dusty]

Recently proposed project in my hometown. I am utterly fascinated by how they sell these nature / civilisation interjections.

They build the structure, but the nature will never bloom to the full potential shown in the image. Some half-dead sapling strapped to a two-by-four. It's all about the pitch. Selling you the product, like the photo of mashed potato on a tub of icecream.



There's also a certain amount of dreaming/fetishisation on the part of the illustrators and architects involved... The bigger the scheme and the budget, the more dreamlike the images become. Designed and brought to life by people who won't be able to afford to live in it.

You may notice the same love and attention to detail never appears in the 3D renders of a Wimpy Homes estate. They truly are flat, dead images without a specular bloom or moody God-ray to be seen.



And look at the state of that hedge.

 

[Dusty]

This also predates CGI. I attended an exhibition of modernist planning a few years ago, and the most fascinating part was the utopian nature of the architects initial sketches. (Sadly I can't find any online)

Estates and shopping centres we know full well would become grey, crushing failures, unloved and even feared by their occupants. Yet here they were, gleaming white unblemished concrete, surrounded by green... I wanted those buildings in those pictures.

Without the complications of the people who would live in them, the kids who would graf them, the water that would stain the concrete and corrode the metal, they were amazing. The alluring lie of the architecural render doomed thousands of people to estates like Hulme Crescents.

 

[chava]

Hulme Crescents

Had to look it up. Urgh