Alexandra Lange is the guest on the latest episode of Curbed's podcast, The Curbed Appeal (Yes, Curbed has a podcast! Yes, I just learned about it too!), and she's talking about the world of architectural renderings—from how critics should approach them, their inacurracies, and how they are made. Renderings have become a kind of currency in architecture—the way buildings are hyped, reviewed, and sold and it's a fascinating look into a side of architecture I've honestly never considered.
In the episode, she mentions how young architects will do simple Google image searches for "grass" or "people walking" to grab and silouette out for the renderings. Lange suggested someone could literally track back to the origins of different parts of renderings which reminded me of James Bridle's project, The Render Ghosts, where he does this same thing:
I spoke to architects and visualisation artists, trying to track down the original identities of the Render Ghosts. I photographed them, collected them, wrote stories about them. Occasionally some would come to light: a set of photographs of the advertisements for a new marina on the Medway was revealed to be populated entirely by papped celebrities – Olson twins and Hollywood starlets with children in tow wandering through the sunlit unreality of a small English town. Most, however, are more obscure, their origins lost. I spoke to one visualiser who described the images they deployed as “lorem ipsum architecture”: placeholder things and people, pulled at random from vast databases to populate imaginary places. Others talked about them fondly, had their favourites, created histories and back stories for them, placed them with thought and care into their new, albeit temporary, surroundings.
Bridle went on a search to find the real people he kept seeing in these renderings. When I sent this to Lange, she shared a parallel project from Failed Architecture. I first heard Bridle talk about his project in his talk last year for the Walker Art Center's SuperScript conference, but he's also written about architectural renderings for Domus back in 2013:
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 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.