We used to call them perspectives. There were interior and exterior perspectives, and section perspectives (collected in Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis’ Manual of Section, which has become every student’s favorite cheat sheet). There were slightly outlandish perspectives such as those supposedly drawn from the perspective of a worm burrowing down below the building or an eagle soaring high above. There were sketch perspectives that showed how the designer imagined (his?) life in the space and laboriously constructed perspectives that were supposedly just the facts, ma’am, as they would exist. And, for those three-dimensionally challenged, there were interior and exterior elevations, axonometrics, isonometrics, and other constructed versions of how a design might appear in real life.
Now we have renderings. Correction: we have renders. Just as “good morning” has become “hi” or “yo,” so the complex art of showing what to expect in a building under design has turned into the almost instantaneous productions that roll out of programs such as Revit, Sketch Up, or my least favorite, D5. I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon (though I am sure I do), but these AI-adjacent simulations are as close to evoking real life as their name is to what happens in slaughterhouses.
What is wrong with renders? They give architects and aspiring designers the opportunity to test their ideas in a very fast and easy manner. Theoretically, this means that those using the whizzy electronics could use the software programs to adjust, refine, and otherwise amend their work. The resulting renders also allow those looking at these renders to understand what the proposed spaces might be with a high degree of confidence. As a teacher (currently at Kean University’s Michael Graves School of Public Architecture), I often had to plead with students to produce at least one interior perspective or view that would give both them and me a sense of what they were really imagining. Now they turn out the manufactured views by the dozens.
As always, the best students –and practicing architects—know that this semi-automatic production is just the beginning. They print out the renders, draw over them, rip them apart and reassemble them, then scan them, manipulate them using who knows what sort of program (although PhotoShop is a good start). They not only edit out the hallucinations and elisions that leave tables hovering in midair and ceilings floating free from walls but use those glitches to their advantage to discover new possibilities. They make the renders their own, mess them up, and bring them to life.
For the rest of the (aspiring) practitioners, renders are the highway to design hell. Without thinking, they churn out what are images based on the built-in surfaces, textures, furnishings and construction elements the programs offer. They populate them with the same –generally white, youngish, able-bodied—figures and plunk some standard art (usually a Di Suvero or a Calder) in them. The effect is to make any space, whether it is meant to be an apartment, a restaurant, or a museum, look like one of those Holiday Inns that has dumbed down the later modernist aesthetic of W Hotels and West Elm into a wash of beige plastic.
What is more, the render is always shown from a standard perspective: that of an again able-bodied person surveying the room from a far corner. The lighting is muted by some unseen dimmer and the meeting place of materials is not the birthplace of ornament, as Louis Kahn would have it, but the equivalent of how a Big Mac tastes. This also means that small decisions that would make a great deal of difference IRL, such as whether to roll out the plastic strip that masks where the wall meets the floor or spend the time and money on the slight reveal that a J-bead might produce, are never made.
None of this inevitable, as I note above. Theoretically, even D5, which is the most plastic-forward, standardized, and cheapest of the programs I know, can be a base on which you can then project all the complexities and possibilities inherent in design. In practice, however, it is good enough for most designers, with the predictable result when a render becomes built reality.
The proliferation of the very notion, as well as the practice, of renders is, of course, part of an automation of both the design and the construction process that has been going on for a long time. The next step, which appears to be a fact already in many design offices, is the adoption of AI to get rid of “design” as an autonomous and critical practice and replace it with AI generation that leads seamless through BIM into built form. Beyond the questions this raises of what design does or is good for, this automation begs the further and immediate question of what all my students are going to do when they graduate if they cannot work their way up through the “drafting” room to some sort of supposedly creative, Roarkian perspective in the profession.
I happen to believe that there is still something that design does. It offers a perspective on the human condition, if I may be so grand, that is specific in its organization of social, economic, and physical forces in and shows how a specific place can then provide a framework within which we can develop a critical relation with our world and others. It renders, however implicitly, judgement and triages a dearth of resources into whatever might be a good place.
Rendering what is possible as quickly as possible and from as many perspectives as you can is a good place to start, just as ChatGPT can lay out data and arguments very neatly –subject to checking. What happens next is the difference between design and the mindless recreation of the most dumbed-down aspect of reality we inhabit. Design beyond the render might not be much more than the opening of a glitch in the matrix, but it is one that can affirm our humanity.
What I am calling for, in other words, is agency, even it that might be as grand and outdated a notion as humanity. On a more mundane level, I refuse to let my students pin up renders as they roll out of the machine. I insist that they look at what they have done and then start the actual work of design. I wish I could do the same with the built renders that are closing in on us everywhere.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
