Hasta La Ideas

French visual artist Benoit Challand has combined the visual language of Le Corbusier‘s houses and Santiago Calatrava‘s sculptures to form a vision for a futuristic self-sustaining house on stilts (+ slideshow).

Named Roost House, the conceptual residence is depicted in a set of photo-realistic renderings in a remote location in Scotland. It would be raised several storeys above the ground on an angular scaffolding structure.

Benoit Challand designed the building to reference Villa Savoye and Cabanon, two of the most famous houses by modernist architect Le Corbusier, as well as a series of artistic sculptures by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

According to the artist, the house would generate all of its own heating and electricity. “Using a bunch of new technologies, in terms of building engineering and environmental resources, this house is intended to be fully autonomous,” he said.

Walls both inside and outside the house are pictured clad with timber. Protruding floor plates form balconies around the perimeter, while a vernacular pitched roof is topped with solar panels.

Residents could access the building by climbing a vertiginous ladder (not shown). There would also be a wind turbine attached to the undersides of the lowest floor.

Spaces inside the house are visualised containing a selection of iconic furniture designs, including the LC4 chaise lounge by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand, and the LCW chair by Charles and Ray Eames.

Background photography is by Alexis Raimbault.

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This series of images by architectural rendering studio Hayes Davidson envisages how London‘s skyline might look in 20 years time.

Over 200 towers with a height of 20 storeys or greater are planned in the UK capital over the next two decades and Hayes Davidson has visualised how these new buildings will appear alongside existing skyscrapers such as Renzo Piano’s The Shard and Norman Foster’s The Gherkin.

The images were created for an exhibition opening later this year at New London Architecture (NLA) entitled London’s Growing… Up! which will chart the growth of tall building construction in London since the 1960s and look at the impact skyscrapers will have on the city in the near future.

“As London’s population gets bigger and bigger, and new development for London takes place within the constraints of the green belt, we have to increase the density of the city,” said Peter Murray, who is chairman of NLA and the exhibition curator.

“This results in our buildings getting taller. The huge number of towers in the pipeline will have a significant impact on the look of London.”

New buildings such as the so-called “can of ham” by Foggo Associates and The Pinnacle by Kohn Pedersen Fox are featured, along with nearly complete structures such as the Leadenhall Building by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Rafael Viñoly’s Walkie Talkie at 20 Fenchurch Street.

The exhibition opens to the public on 3 April 2014.

Here’s more information about the exhibition from NLA:

London’s Growing… Up!
The rise and rise of London’s tall buildings

London’s skyline is currently going through a massive change. Over 200 towers are planned in the capital in an attempt to meet the needs of the capital’s growing population. So how will London’s skyline change in the next 20 years?

This April, New London Architecture (NLA) – London’s Centre for the Built Environment will explore this new skyline with London’s Growing… Up! Through the use of images, video, models, CGI’s and visitor interaction, the exhibition will present a past, present and future view of London’s skyline as the capital’s developers focus on building upwards rather than outwards.

There are over 200 towers, each more than 20 storeys, currently planned in London, around 150 of them new residential blocks. London’s Growing… Up! offers a timely exploration into this hotly debated subject.

Since the emergence of skyscrapers in London in the 1960s, the capital’s skyline has changed irrevocably. Visitors will explore the history of London’s high­‐rise architecture through images, models and construction videos, witnessing how iconic structures such as the Barbican and Centre Point set a precedent for the future of the skyline. A series of panoramic views of London chart the ever­‐changing landscape, from the 1960s through to the modern day and demonstrating how London will appear in 10 years time.

Famous structures including Canary Wharf, The Gherkin and The Shard are examined in the exhibition, looking at their context, their economic raison d’etre and the impact they have on our understanding of the city.

The exhibition will also explore the significant growth in high‐rise residential development. High‐rise residential was once only seen on council estates and glass skyscrapers were reserved for the business world, but the growing trend of luxury towers is currently providing the majority of new developments in the capital. Areas such as Nine Elms, Waterloo and White City will be explored, looking at why these new areas are attracting high­‐rise development and how luxury and affordable residential can coincide in London’s new vertical city.

Visitors will be able to have their say on what should or shouldn’t be in the London skyline. Touch screen will enable guests to rewind time and fast­‐forward to the future to see how London has, and will be, developed. Visitors will have the opportunity to remove or change the location of buildings they don’t like and even add buildings from other cities, making their own metropolis which will be posted onto the NLA’s Twitter feed.

Thursday 3 April – Thursday 12 June 2014
NLA, The Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT

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in new visualisations appeared first on Dezeen.

News: the images in most kitchen, bathroom and bedroom catalogues are computer-generated but “no-one has realised”, according to a leading CGI artist (+ slideshow).

“Many furniture manufactures are using this medium to put together their catalogues and such,” said Richard Benson, creative director at digital imagery studio Pikcells. “The technology can now make these wonderfully realistic images as good as photography, and in some cases better.”

He added: “Most kitchen, bedroom and bathroom companies now use CGI to create their marketing material and no one has realised.”

Last summer flat-pack furniture giant Ikea announced it was starting to use digital images in its catalogues and online galleries, predicting that up to a quarter of all its images would eschew traditional photography by this year.

But Benson said that things have moved faster than even Ikea predicted. “It’s not just Ikea,” he said. “We design a lot of the [digitally created] spaces ourselves for some of the world’s biggest homeware brands.”

Benson said the rapid advances in digital image-making were leading to the mass closure of photography studios that specialised in interior and product shoots for brands. “It’s quite a big deal as lots of photography studios have been uprooted,” he said. “Over the past five years, there’s been a few studios that have really come to the end of their time doing room sets and have seen CGI coming through and packed up shop and called it a day really.”

Other photography studios have embraced CGI and turned themselves into digital studios. He added: “We’ve been brought in to produce what the photographer was doing anyway. The end if the same but the means is different.”

He explained that rendered images offer clients greater speed and flexibility than photographs, plus lower costs. “With photography, you’re always going to be restricted by what you can build and what materials you can use and what furniture you can get a hold of, whereas with CGI there are massive 3D libraries now where you can buy really high quality digital models and textures and drop them straight into your images.”

Computer renderings also allow sets to be re-used and adapted easily, Benson said. “In photography, people build massive sets and then they just throw it all in the bin afterwards, whereas we can reuse the sets over and over again. They’re just stored in the computers so we can pull them out and make quick changes and reissue images.”

Car brands have been using computer-generated imagery for advertisements for years, he added: “A lot of the adverts you see on TV [involve] CGI cars,” he said.

Magazines try to avoid publishing CGI images, Benson said, but they often published them unknowingly. “We’ve had loads of our stuff in magazines,” he said, including a recent interior that Pikcells developed from scratch for wood and laminate brand Kronospan. “A kitchen from the Fresh project was featured in Grand Designs in the future kitchen section and I don’t think they knew it was CGI.”

Leading architectural visualiser Peter Guthrie spoke to us last month about how architectural renderings are now “indistinguishable from photos,” and Benson says that producing renderings for catalogues requires even higher photo-realistic qualities. “In the work we produce, the images have to be really photo-real as they are sitting alongside existing photos in many catalogues,” he explained. “Architecural visualisation doesn’t generally have this issue. The expectation is lower as most people realise it’s CG, because what they are looking at is not built yet.”

An example of this is a Swiss studio that created a computer model of an unbuilt Zurich theatre designed by Jørn Utzon in 1964, to show that the building “could be built now”.

Today, most furniture brands use CGI instead of photography for the room sets in their catalogues, Benson said. “I would say 80 percent of the furniture manufacturers out there are using CGI for kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, living rooms, etcetera. It’s sort of happened in the last five or six years. It came at the right time, when the software was good enough and when the hardware was affordable enough to process the power needed to render these images.”

Ikea led the way with digital images of its kitchens, which are relatively easy to generate, given that they feature hard, flat surfaces with predictable reflections. However, Ikea has still not mastered the art of creating realistic bedroom images, Benson said, due to the complexity of computer-modelling bedlinen and soft furnishings.

Even that is changing, with software and processing power now able to create convincing fabrics. “Soft furnishings and fabrics [are] becoming extremely realistic to the point where we’ve started to use CG bedding and cushions and things,” Benson said.

The only items that studios like Pikcells still struggle to render are flora and fauna. “To create flowers for each image would take a long time as opposed to going down to the florist and photographing stuff. As soon as the software is ready to use in that department, I don’t think there would be anything else that you would be missing.”

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News: Swiss studio Virtual Design Unit has created a computer model of an unbuilt Zurich theatre designed by Jørn Utzon in 1964, to show that the building “could be built now” (+ slideshow + interview).

“We saw the project that Utzon did in 1964 and we were curious if this project could still be there today, or would be better than all the suggestions that have been made [for the site] in the last 20 years,” said Susanne Fritz of Virtual Design Unit. “It could be built now.”

Utzon, the Danish architect best known for the Sydney Opera House, won a competition 50 years ago to design the Schauspielhaus on the spot next to the Kunsthaus in Zurich, Switzerland, but after a decade of planning the project was abandoned.

Local opposition to David Chipperfield’s proposed extension to the Kunsthaus on the same site prompted Virtual Design Unit, co-founded by architects Fritz and Patrick Schöll, to revisit Utzon’s design in the hope of demonstrating that the building could still be an icon for the city today.

The images show the building as it would appear today, with a slightly weathered facade as though it had been build ten years ago. Fritz said the images could help show the people of Zurich how the building would fit into the cityscape – something Utzon was unable to do at the time.

“It’s a theory that [Utzon’s] project wasn’t successful because the people of Zurich couldn’t imagine what it would look like,” Fritz told Dezeen. “There was a wooden model built but I think [digital] visualisations make architecture assessable for many people. The visualisation shows, in a photorealistic way, the building in context where it could be.”

The project is the first known example of an unrealised architectural icon from the past being resurrected in this way. In a recent interview with Dezeen, rendering expert Peter Guthrie said 3D visualising techniques made architecture easier for the public to understand. “It makes un-built architecture more immediate and allows for greater conversation about the built environment,” he says.

Virtual Design Unit’s reconstruction was based on documents from the city’s archives and plans belonging to Utzon’s family. They knew the son of Utzon through a friend and he helped to advise them on details and put them in touch with the project manager who worked on the original design.

“We were detectives putting things together and building this thing in 3D,” said Fritz, who created the 3D model in Cinema 4D and rendered in V-Ray, then the post-production work was done in Photoshop. “We had to have a lot of creativity in the interior; we still don’t know how the interior would look because they didn’t go too much into the detail on the plans.”

The team made decisions about how Utzon may have designed the auditorium based on details of the Sydney Opera House, and chose lighting and fixtures based on knowledge of suppliers who were around at the time.

The most striking feature of Utzon’s design for the Schauspielhaus is the wavy concrete roof. “He was always a fan of these concrete shells and he was always trying to get the climax of the diameter of the concrete,” she said. “His shells were kind of the same concept as in the inside of the Sydney Opera House: they were very good for the acoustics.”

The building was designed to step up gradually from the plaza so the entrance was on the same level as a park on the opposite side. “It’s a very horizontal building but I think this platform is the main attraction of the building – that you were on another level of the city, above the ground and a bit in another world.”

Virtual Design Unit is now talking to Marianne Panton about creating a “virtual refurbishment” of the famous canteen designed by her late husband Verner Panton for the Hamburg headquarters of the publishers of the Spiegel magazine in 1969. “The difference this time is that we have photo material showing what it actually was, so there’s less interpretation about the furniture they used,” Fritz noted. “There is a desire to revisit this building and this way you could revisit it virtually.”

Here’s a transcript of the interview with Susanne Fritz:

Rose Etherington: How did the project come about?

Susanne Fritz: In Zurich there is a political discussion about what is going to happen to this place – whether it’s going to be an extension of the Kunsthaus museum – and then we saw the project that Utzon did in 1964 and we were curious if this project could still be there today, or would be better than all the selections that have already been made in the last 20 years.

We had been digging into the city’s archives and we found all these plans for the competition but no detailed drawings. Then, knowing the son of Utzon, we called him to ask if it would be okay to give us more information and plans out of their archives. He did so and put us in contact with the project manager who worked on the competition but lives in Turkey now.

They gave us more detailed information about the building and helped us out. We were detectives putting things together and building this thing in 3D, then we showed them the images and they liked it.

Rose Etherington: How much detail was included in the archive material? Did you have to use some creativity and fill in the blanks?

Susanne Fritz: We had to have a lot of creativity in the interior. We still don’t know how the interior looks because they didn’t go too much into the detail of the plans. Looking at the interior of the Sydney Opera house, we came to some conclusions about how we could have done that. Then let’s say for the lighting, in Scandinavia there weren’t so many lamps available compared to today so it was kind of an interpretation thing but it was signed off by Jørn Utzon’s son.

Rose Etherington: Do you think this building would have been a better building for the site than the one that is being proposed?

Susanne Fritz: Well it would definitely be a very interesting building but the problem is that Utzon didn’t pay a lot of attention to the site and the whole restructuring of the whole area would be necessary and demolition of buildings which are under protection.

So I think the architectural project is great but you also have to pay attention to the people who are quite conservative. They don’t want to demolish buildings which are of heritage or historical value and I think if you are an architect, you have to pay attention to that sensitivity in the project. From only an architectural point of view, I think it would have been a great building in the right position.

Rose Etherington: Is that why it wasn’t realised at the time? Because it wasn’t right for the site?

Susanne Fritz: It was because they wanted to spend 27 million on the project and then he changed the building so they had to reorganise the traffic. First they tried to put the traffic underground and then through the building, it got a totally different dimension, and suddenly it was more than twice [the budget] and it got really expensive. The demolition of these old buildings was also an issue.

There was this rumour from Sydney. What happened [with the Sydney Opera House] was that Utzon couldn’t finish the project and started changing things. He wrote a letter to the minister and said that he can’t work under these conditions and the minister thought that this was him resigning from the project and obviously quit with Utzon and hired another architect.

All the other architects were against this and voted for Utzon but of course there were also people who thought it was his fault, that he didn’t have the capacities or the experience to do that large building, so there was some stress and some people thought that he couldn’t be trusted.

I think it was a combination of a couple of things [that led to the Zurich project being abandoned] and no one knows for sure. We don’t know what the City Council talked about in their session. They suddenly abandoned the project after seven years of planning.

Rose Etherington: Can we talk about Utzon’s design? What his main idea for the building?

Susanne Fritz: He was always a fan of these concrete shells and in Sydney they thought that it couldn’t be possible to do such a big shell. He is always trying to get the climax of the diameter of the concrete. Concrete shells were his speciality and he applied that [with the Schauspielhaus] again. His shells were kind of the same concept as in the inside of the Sydney Opera House: they were very good for the acoustics. He said that he wanted to transfer the image of the wave to this building.

Rose Etherington: Are there other features that are distinctive to his work in this building?

Susanne Fritz: The original idea that the Zurich people liked was the main hall was not a hierarchic interior, where you have different levels and then the balconies. He skipped the balconies and ended up with one big floor, and there’s no social distinction between the first and second balcony.

Rose Etherington: What would it have been like for the visitors of the building?

Susanne Fritz: I think for him how you approach a building was very important, so the building kind of slowly rises and steps over the place and there’s a little hill with a park on the other site. So when you go up to the entrance you would have been on the same level as the park opposite. I think it would have been very a very nice view and also you’d be above the ground and a bit in another world. And then you could wonder in this building into the different halls. It’s a very horizontal building but I think this platforms is the main attraction of the building – that you were on another level of the city.

Rose Etherington: It looks like there’s a waterfall coming off the edge of the roof.

Susanne Fritz: Yes that’s an interpretation. We thought that could be nice, but we don’t know if it was planned.

Rose Etherington: Have you always been a fan of his work or was it this particular project that got you interested?

Susanne Fritz: I really love his work and I really love concrete architecture. I mean Utzon was also a great engineer. Of course he worked with Ove Arup, but all the architects gave up because they couldn’t solve this big shell problem. Because he was always studying bionics, he looked at nature and he took the static rules of nature and translated them into building. He was one of the first architects to do that and that’s really admirable.

Rose Etherington: What capabilities do realist rendering techniques give us now?

Susanne Fritz: The greatest possibility is that you can make these designs accessible to everybody. It’s a theory that [Utzon’s] project wasn’t successful because the people of Zurich couldn’t imagine what it would look like. There was a wooden model built but I think [digital] visualisations make architecture assessable for many people.

Some say that these visualisations don’t leave room for interpretation, which is true. With a sketch you can have much more interpretation and I’m sure if he made detailed imagery it might have had the same effect. But the visualisation shows, in a photorealistic way, the building in context where it could be.

Rose Etherington: Do you think if Utzon had access to these kind of visualisation techniques at the time that the project might have been successful?

Susanne Fritz: I think it could have been a way, because people are open to many kinds of aesthetics and architecture. I think [Switzerland] is a really progressive country in terms of architecture and there could have been more people who supported the project because the people of Zurich have a voice and they will raise it and they will raise issues if they want something or if they don’t want something.

Rose Etherington: What will you do with the images now?

Susanne Fritz: We are planning an exhibition but we want to wait a bit because we have another project in the pipeline. I met Marianne Panton, the wife of Vernor Panton. The famous Spiegel Canteen [designed by Panton for the Hamburg headquarters of the publishers of the Spiegel magazine in 1969] is not there anymore and there are lots of images for it, but actually the project isn’t documented very well. So we want to get out the plans again and work with Marianne Panton to get books and information. We might also rebuild this building, and the building was once there and it’s not there anymore, so we’re doing a virtual refurbishment. We thought we could do both things and then make an exhibition about both things.

Rose Etherington: Is there anything different about doing a virtual refurbishment rather than a virtual build?

Susanne Fritz: The difference this time is that we have photo material showing what it actually was, so there’s less interpretation about the furniture they used etc. Right after we heard about it, they rebuilt the canteen in an exhibition because the canteen is so famous. That proves that there is a desire to revisit this building and this way you could revisit it virtually.

Rose Etherington: Have you ever recreated a building from the past?

Susanne Fritz: No, the Schauspielhaus by Jørn Utzon is the first. Normally we’re creating architecture which we know is never going to be built, though. There are companies who want to place their product in a context of architecture, so we design the architecture for them virtually and place the product and shoot a photo which they use for marketing purposes. We act as architects, we draw plans, we built it in 3D to be built. We’re working on a catalogue. We would also write the text for it. We’re acting as art director and visualisation and text provider.

Rose Etherington: Did you want to try and make the Schauspielhaus appear as if it was new or as if it had been there since the 1960s?

Susanne Fritz: If you look at the images now it looks like a concrete building after a facade clean. We don’t make it look old or used. The the way [the images] look now is as if it was built 10 years ago, but if it would have been built in the 1960s, it would look different.

We talked about if we wanted to make it look like in the 1960s, rendering cars and people from the 1960s, but we wanted to put the building in today’s context rather than looking at the past because we think there’s a discussion about what to do with this place. There’s different money going into different studies and competitions, so you could pull out a super nice project and it could be built now. I mean they would have to modify it, but yes it could be built now.

Rose Etherington: Do you think renderings need to look a bit dirty to seem real?

Susanne Fritz: A lot of people do lots of renderings that look sleek and clean. They all look the same because the building standard is similar. You have parquet flooring, furniture that is minimal, Modern architecture with big windows – beautiful architecture -but I think they all look the same. The most difficult thing to do is render old bricks. It’s really hard to make it look real. Or natural textures and surfaces, or even furniture. I love furniture but in all the magazines we see, vintage is mixed with modern furniture and it often makes something special, because there’s some heritage in it. I think that’s the most difficult thing to render.

Rose Etherington: How do you think architectural rendering should change?

Susanne Fritz: The human level in renderings – nowadays they put a ball in the image with shoes lying around, but people have decided now to create blankets. I think there will always be beautiful stills but I think it’s moving more towards moving image and animation. We are close to really super nice animation where rivers flow and people walk around.

I guess that you can walk around interactively in a rendering and thats not possible now, because it has to be rendered in real time and nobody can provide that in the quality that you want. But that’s something I always hear from clients. They want to walk around in the rendering. Not on a path that somebody sets for them but interactively and nobody can do it. They render for hours and hours but if you have a rendering that you can walk around in room, your eyes capture thousands of images in seconds, the designer would have to render all these thousands of images per second when you look at it and there’s no computer that can do it. In ten to 20 years you can look at it in a really photorealistic quality as if you looking at your room now.

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resurrected by Virtual Design Unit appeared first on Dezeen.

Interview: renderings are now as convincing as reality and are changing the way people perceive architecture, according to architectural visualisation artist Peter Guthrie. “It allows for greater conversation about the built environment,” he says in this interview. “Most people are familiar with computer images but would find it harder to interpret a line drawing.” (+ slideshow).

London-based Guthrie is widely regarded as the leading exponent of hyper-realistic imagery, and has produced image sets for projects including a Suffolk house by Ström Architects and Claesson Koivisto Rune’s prefabricated home.

“I try to make atmospheric, memorable images without using too many post-production tricks,” Guthrie says. “Other visualisers perhaps take their inspiration from film and video games, but that isn’t an aesthetic I’m drawn to.”

When asked whether we’ve reached the point where renderings are indistinguishable from photographs, he replied: “I think we have… The 2013 Ikea catalogue has a surprising number of visualisations in it and most people are none the wiser.”

Guthrie believes that people are now so used to computer imagery thanks to movies and computer games that they can “read” architectural renderings more readily than line drawings or sketches. “It makes un-built architecture more immediate and allows for greater conversation about the built environment,” he says.

He adds: “Most people these days are incredibly familiar with computer generated images (although they are usually in the form of feature films or computer games) but would find it harder to interpret a line drawing or watercolour of a proposed building.”

Boundaries are now becoming so blurred that skilled visualisers are now being employed to make it appear that unbuilt projects were actually realised, he said. “I’ve even had architects in the past ask me to render unbuilt house designs from their archives,” he says.

Here is a full transcript of the interview:

Ross Bryant: How did you get into visualisations?

Peter Guthrie: I studied architecture in Edinburgh and worked for Richard Murphy Architects for about five years after completing my degree. During that time I became more and more interested in both photography and visualisation and eventually decided to make the switch.

Ross Bryant: Are there other visualisers that have inspired or informed your work?

Peter Guthrie: Within visualisation I’m inspired by people like Alex Roman and Bertrand Benoit for their pioneering techniques. You need to have a healthy interest in all the technical geeky things in 3D visualisation and it’s important to stay up to date. Most of my inspiration for making images of architecture though comes from architectural photography.

Ross Bryant: How would you describe your visualisation style? Does it differ from other styles?

Peter Guthrie: I hope it is seen as being closer to architectural photography, that’s what I am aiming for anyway. Other visualisers perhaps take their inspiration from film and video games, which still results in captivating beautiful images but it isn’t an aesthetic I’m drawn to. I still try to make atmospheric, memorable images but without using too many post-production tricks.

Ross Bryant: What software do you use?

Peter Guthrie: SketchUp because it’s so quick, easy and so suited to the changeable nature of architectural design. Making the model myself builds familiarity with the project and I think that is a very important part in the whole process of coming up with good compositions, a bit like a photographer walking round a building to get an idea for what he wants to shoot.

3ds Max is the main base for a whole raft of plugins such as V-Ray. The raw rendered images are then treated much like a raw file would be in digital photography – imported into Lightroom to work on colours, exposure, dodging and burning as well as graduated filters etc.

This post production process is probably very different to the vast majority of people working in 3D visualisation and I think this reflects the fact that I have a background in architecture and photography – it’s just a workflow I feel comfortable with.

Ross Bryant: Why go to so much trouble with the images? Where’s the value?

Peter Guthrie: Because I enjoy it. For me personally, I just like making good images that I’m proud of and that I can look back at in a couple of years’ time and still enjoy. For some clients, like for example Ström Architects whose Suffolk House project you featured on Dezeen back in August, there is a lot of value in making images of as yet un-built designs to help them establish their practices.

There are projects I have worked on which never actually got built in the end, so the renders then become even more important as a record of the design. I’ve even had architects in the past ask me to render unbuilt house designs from their archives. It’s true that on some of my older projects I could have got away with a lot less and my client probably would still have been perfectly happy, but often I use a project as an excuse to learn a new skill or develop a new technique.

Ross Bryant: How long does each image take you?

Peter Guthrie: Typically maybe a month for five or six images of a house. The museum project I worked on with Thomas Phifer & Partners in New York lasted three months but we ended up with 24 images in total.

Ross Bryant: Are high-end visualisations lucrative?

Peter Guthrie: They can be, there are a lot of visualisation studios around these days and there seems to be a lot of work for freelancers. It can be tricky finding the balance between interesting work and work that pays well.

Ross Bryant: Do you think that we’ve reached the point where visualisations are indistinguishable from real photos?

Peter Guthrie: I think we have, but certain types of shot are more successful than others. You can get away with a lot if the overall image has a photographic quality, if the composition and lighting are convincing. The 2013 Ikea catalogue has a surprising number of visualisations in it and most people are none the wiser.

Ross Bryant: Can renderings look better than the finished building?

Peter Guthrie: Photographs of a completed building often look better than the building does in real life. Whether or not renderings do is part of the same argument isn’t it?

Ross Bryant: Architect and visualiser Henry Goss introduces real world imperfections into his architectural visualisations. What’s your view on this?

Peter Guthrie: I’ve always been interested in materiality in architecture so it is important for me to spend time working on making materials look realistic. Taking materials to the next level is about introducing the variety of texture and lack of uniformity that you see in real life situations. You can take the realism of individual materials to a very high level without resorting to making things deliberately worn and dirty as you often see in video games. I’m yet to meet an architect who wants their new design to look weathered before it has even been built!

Adding small details can also add greatly to the realism of an image. It sounds crazy I know, but I like to model double glazing accurately so that you get the subtle double reflections that you see in real life.

Ross Bryant: Do photorealistic visualisations and the way they are published on the internet change the way people perceive architecture?

Peter Guthrie: I’m sure it does, at least in that it makes un-built architecture more immediate and allows for greater conversation about the built environment. Most people these days are incredibly familiar with computer generated images (although they are usually in the form of feature films or computer games) but would find it harder to interpret a line drawing or watercolour of a proposed building.

Ross Bryant: Do you think that the big architectural firms will begin to use photorealistic renderings to illustrate major proposals?

Peter Guthrie: They already have that capability, but good designers will know what is appropriate to the current stage of the design they are showing. It really depends how fixed the designs are, and how much time they want to invest in renders. Sometimes architects are deliberately hesitant about showing too much detail as it can make planners or clients question how much scope there is for making changes.

Ross Bryant: Where is architectural visualisation heading next?

Peter Guthrie: Actually I’m not even that comfortable with the title architectural visualiser as architectural visualisation is too often seen as a service industry where the most valuable aspect is how quickly images can be produced. I think as the industry matures we are starting to see more distinct styles develop. Companies and individuals have the confidence to lead the artistic direction of an image, and clients are employing them because they can offer something different. Thankfully these days potential clients are more aware of the type of work I do.

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