Architectural Renderings

CityLab had an article recently titled, “The Worst Architectural Renderings of 2015.” Contextualizing the piece was the submission phase of the potential Guggenheim Helsinki building where apparently tons of bad renderings were submitted. The point of CityLab was to convey that even if the actual design was worth pursuing, the rendering itself was poorly done.

For the most part CityLab focused on specifics, the type of which would have been taught in a college-level class. For example, they warn against needlessly “shroud[ing] in fog,” or “It looks like a blackout at dusk, and Marina Gate is the only building with juice. This rendering packs in way too much detail. Whatever it looks like in the evening at nighttime, it won’t be this.” In another article, CityLab has also talked about how the people often shown in renderings tended to be rich and young and white — and implored designers to think more critically about their actual consumers.

What’s interesting though is comparing this article on the worst of 2015 with another CityLab article that came out on the specifically the renderings produced for the Guggenheim. This, too, is clickbait-y. The thesis of the piece is: “Individually, some of these designs look just fine. Taken all together, though, they create the impression that architecture is a funhouse of frivolous forms,” and can be further summarized by commentator Charles Wingate as:

Art museums of any prominence these days are stunt buildings whose primary message is “modern art inside” (to steal a line from Tom Wolfe). The purpose therefore seems to be, first of all, to aim an aesthetic fart in direction of the supposed philistines who disapprove of these blots on the civil landscape. One supposes that the end result will be a compromise between the curator types who at least want a place to hang the paintings and display the installations to some effect, and the (sub)cultural mandarins who want to make the freakiest architectural show, just so nobody thinks that they find a Thomas Kincaid inside — except as an ironic gesture, of course.

Harsh.

But we should be taking a harder look at all of these entries. As another commenter states,

It seems 70% of these were formal masturbation, a result of the Bjarke Ingels nonsense that the media seems to love. It’s a valid critique, but dig a bit deeper when you are glibly mocking others hard work. If you aren’t part of the solution, well... There were some good ones, though lost in that odd grid interface. My advice is to see how this progresses. I applaud the Guggenheim for opening up the competition instead of hiring the usual four suspects. Perhaps there is an intelligent one there… but it’s up to the jury to find it.

Is there really no space for the under-experienced to challenge convention? The first article goes a long way in pointing out simple, fixable, flaws in design. The second includes criticisms such as, “Did they melt that building in a microwave?”

The second commentator continues on:

Look at great cultural institutions: what do they have in common — public engagement and public space. Many of these proposals have those elements but they don’t stand out. This post comes off as cynical about the power of architecture — one building.

I have very little experience with architecture, but I don’t think that such cynicism deserves a place in any field or that the media publications of said field espouse this cynicism. Props to CityLab for teaching people mistakes in rendering design, but we can do better in the elitism department.

I want to end with another comment that is supposedly describing the imaginative building designs in the article: “These are the architectural equivalent of the selfie — with no taste to dilute the egotism.” I think the second half can be applied to the author of the piece.