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This interview and the following piece originally appeared as VIEWS 1 and 2 in Morning File , May 3, 2024 works
A few weeks ago, Chris Lamb and I got to chatting about architectural renderings. Chris is a principal in the Seattle-based firm Encore Architects, and the work he is currently doing is mostly on rental apartments. I’ve also known him for years, because he is my partner’s cousin.
What spurred our chat was images of a couple of different projects, and my surprise that some people seemed to be treating preliminary images, known as massing studies, of proposed developments as detailed drawings, and wondering, say, why architectural elements like windows were missing. (It is possible that the people saying these things were joking around).
Unrealistic architectural renderings, including the notorious “woman hailing a cab from the end zone” one of the now defunct Shannon Park stadium proposal, are a frequent theme here at the Examiner. I figured I’d reach out to Chris and ask him to tell me more about how renderings are made, and their underlying philosophy.
While he did note that some renderings can be “pretty terrible,” Chris did say it is not the job of a rendering to be 100% realistic either.
This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Philip Moscovitch (PM): Let’s start with massing studies. What’s a massing study versus a rendering?
Chris Lamb (CL): A lot of the preliminary work you do in these kind of projects is basically in analyzing what can be done under the regulations. There are zoning regulations that will stipulate how tall something can be and how much square footage you can build. And there are design guidelines that get applied. Those rules or guidelines will shape what the mass of a project could be. So a lot of the time what we do initially is a capacity study: How much can a client build on this particular piece of property? We have a bunch of formulas based on experience of a certain mix of apartment types. You can say OK, based on this sort of rough shape, you can get 200 units on this property, and that’ll give them a ballpark that they can go with. So a lot of those initial studies are just really about the physical mass, the bulk of this thing. Just some abstract shapes, before you start to make it architectural or apply more design language to it. Your first submission is for overall massing. And if you’re allowed to go on to the next step, that’s when you get into more of the actual design of the project — where the windows are, what the materials are, all that kind of stuff.
PM: So what’s the actual process of making a rendering?
CL: The main tool we use is [a piece of software called] Revit. You might be drawing a plan in two dimensions, but you’re actually building a 3D model at the same time. The built-in rendering capability of the software itself is not bad. It’s better than it used to be, and it’s good enough for a quick visualization. But if you want to do something that’s much more polished, that you’re going to use for presenting to a review board and also potentially for marketing purposes, you want something that’s much more refined, and, quote unquote “realistic” looking. There are packages that you can add on to do rendering, and we have people in our office who know that stuff and can produce those kind of images. But it takes a lot of time and a lot of computing power, and it’s not really our forte.
PM: You told me at one point that a lot of that rendering work is done in China, right?
CL: I don’t know how we first got hooked up with the person we use quite a bit. It was before I was even there. It is a woman called Zoe. For all I know it’s a whole team of people. Because of the time difference, we’ll send something out at the end of the day, come back the next morning, and they’ll have a first pass of a rendering.
PM: But sometimes things go awry.
CL: Yeah, so a good example was this project that we had in Beacon Hill, which is an area in South Seattle, and we got the first images back from Zoe — there’s the building, and then there’s what you call entourage. You’ve got to add life to the image. So you have an entourage of people and landscaping. So, we got back this image with all these supercars. You know, Lamborghinis and stuff like that. It’s not exactly a poor area of town, but it’s not one where people are going to be driving a lot of high-end cars around. And it’s like, yeah, we probably need some Subarus in here, or maybe some Hondas or something.
And then, this was an interesting example, because it was eye-opening for me, because it showed my own biases. In the initial thing we got back, all the people they were using in the street scenes were white, and it’s an area of town which has a very high Asian population. The main clients we were working with were of Chinese heritage, and so they’re like, yeah, this looks good, but we need this to reflect more of what the actual people that live in the neighbourhood look like.
PM: And do a lot of these entourage figures come from the same sources?
CL: There are a lot of licensed libraries of entourage figures. You have people in certain poses that work really well, like somebody walking through something. And there was one that looked like my boss’s brother, so I would always put him in the background. “Look! There’s my brother Bill again!” Some of it literally comes packaged with the software. It’s part of the kit that you get, entourage-wise. And so everybody is using the same software, so you end up seeing the same guys, same gals, same people sitting down, reading books or whatever, in the background. People have licensed libraries of entourage figures and cars and things like that. At a certain point, there wasn’t a lot of it available easily or fast. So people made these libraries and were selling them online. But I think a lot of it is now free stuff you can sort of gather together. And there’s also famous stuff like the architect Le Corbusier’s Modulor guy, who kind of looks like an alien figure, and so you’ll see tongue-in-cheek variations on that.
PM: Let’s talk about realism. Because a lot of the criticism of these renderings is that they are not realistic. Power lines are buried in a neighbourhood where the actual lines are not, and won’t be. The sun is hitting the building from two different angles. At best, these seem somewhat unrealistic, and at worst deliberately misleading.
CL: It’s definitely a hyper-realized perfect setting. You show it with mature landscaping, but the trees are also faded back so you can see the building behind them. You’re trying to convey all this information in a kind of composite reality. To go to comics for a second. There was a series of Robert Crumb comics where he was drawing these suburban strip-mall streets, showing all the parking lots, all the power lines, all the stuff that you don’t usually see in those kind of images. Really it was a study of that environment and just how chaotic it was with all this stuff: signs and garbage cans and everything that’s part of the actual environment. That’s the kind of stuff you edit out of these kind of scenes because you’re achieving a realism, but it’s an idealized realism.
PM: How does this compare with how it used to be done?
CL: A lot of them I think, were more painterly, so it was a lot more obvious that it wasn’t trying to be a realistic 3D rendering. So it was very clear that this is not real, that this is not what it really is supposed to be. It’s just an idea of what it’s supposed to be. And we’ve moved away from that a little bit. When [his partner] and I were still at Waterloo and were doing work terms, we worked for an architect, but in a developer’s office in Vancouver. And he was doing this project that was his idea of a European or Parisian apartment building in the Granville district in Vancouver. And he kept talking about old world charm and all this kind of stuff. And he had commissioned an artist to do a set of painted floor plans. He had watercolours done of the floor plan layout of this building. But the actual floor plans were being done in AutoCAD, and so they’re very accurate. And so the developer was always kind of going back and forth with, “These are different than the painted plans!” Because that’s what he was using to sell. Yeah, but, it doesn’t fit. That was an extreme example of going in the other direction.
PM: Can you think of the funniest architectural rendering you’ve seen? Is there anything that you’ve seen that just made you go, oh my God.
CL: Nothing recently. When I was a student and working in an office in Toronto, we were doing some apartment or condo building in Brampton or other smaller town outside Toronto. It was back when we were getting painted renderings. You’d have a regular person you go to. And this was a particular case where they couldn’t get their regular person to do the renderings for this project, or it might have even been that the client had somebody he wanted us to use. And so we got this thing back, and I think the building itself was rendered fairly minimally, but it had this completely overwrought, purplish sky, like there was an apocalypse going on behind it.
PM: I’m interested in this idea of idealized realism. Is it analogous to the idea that a movie set in New York City is unrealistic because the characters find parking right away? Nobody wants to watch someone drive around for 20 minutes in a movie.
CL: Or badly parallel parking. Unless it’s part of the comedy. Like, it’s a Jim Carrey movie or something. It’s part of the shorthand, and if you see enough of it, you understand the shorthand.
PM: But what about the idea that there is something fundamentally dishonest about these images, especially when existing elements are removed or changed?
CL: I guess I can understand the frustration with an image that’s purported to be a realistic representation of the final product, but I think it’s not really that different from many examples of advertising which are all heavily staged and art directed. Does the image of the Big Mac match what you get served? (Maybe not the best example)!
We will definitely simplify or abstract the context around a building in order to highlight the project we’re trying to describe or “sell,” whether it’s to a design review board or a potential tenant, but I don’t think we’d deliberately omit anything significant. Rendered images are also typically only part of a presentation package that will include site plans, surveys and context photographs. A lot of times we will also use a photomontage of the 3D rendering with a picture of the actual site, which will show more of the existing infrastructure like power lines and street lights.
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After Chris Lamb and I spoke, he sent me a fascinating article from ArchDaily on the history of architectural renderings, and how renderings have affected design. The piece is called “From Romantic Ruins to the Ultra-Real: A History of the Architectural Render.”
With technological advances in 3D modeling and digital rendering, this ability to sell an idea through a snapshot of the perfect architectural experience has become almost unrestricted. Many have criticized the dangers of unrealistic renderings that exceed reality and how they can create the illusion of a perfect project when, in fact, it is far from being resolved. However, this is only the natural next step in a history of fantastical representations, where the render becomes a piece of art itself.
Sheng writes that architects have long used “illusion and interpretation to sell their designs and concepts,” and offers up some pretty striking examples, including very abstract renderings that focus on process or other elements, rather than on a realistic view of the final building:
In the 1960s, radical groups were heavily influenced by popular culture and began using collage, photography and juxtapositions of images to create meaning in their representations. Archigram, arguably the most well-known of these groups, used montage, comic strips, and graphic text to convey their projects. Their style evoked a boisterous futuristic city where the familiar and unfamiliar merge. Another one of these radical groups was the Florence-based Superstudio whose concept ‘The Continuous Monument’ was envisaged as a “negative utopia” to warn against what they saw as architecture’s potential future. Consisting of a huge white grid spread across the entire world—a blanket architecture enveloping the planet—it acted as a critique of globalization and the destruction of individuality and local culture. The use of popular media to display their projects created an architecture that was more accessible and exciting to the general public, which was relevant to their intention to use architecture as a tool for social and political critique.
Joan Baxter is one of 140 journalists from 39 media outlets across 27 countries working collaboratively on ‘Deforestation Inc,’ a project of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which looked at the ownership structure of Paper Excellence, its relationship with Asia Pulp & Paper, and how the secretive corporate empires are devastating forests in Canada and around the world.
In 1995, Brenda Way was brutally murdered behind a Dartmouth apartment building. In 1999, Glen Assoun was found guilty of the murder, and served 17 years in prison while maintaining his innocence. In 2019, he was fully exonerated.
Halifax Examiner’s Tim Bousquet tells Assoun’s story on the CBC podcast series Uncover: Dead Wrong. Click here to listen to the podcast.
Read the entire series, plus articles about Glen Assoun's wrongful conviction, on the DEAD WRONG homepage.
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