Is a rendering an Ikea ad?
While watching and listening to IKEA Disobedients I can’t help but see the Ikea magazine, flashed ever so brightly to your faces, as an architecture rendering presented to a client or city. What is being portrayed is the Utopia that Ikea sees their products being used in. Everyone is happy, healthy and young. It is the ideal situation/environment to make one want to purchase their product. They are trying to capture the life that is desired by the ‘average American’, or so they think.
But isn’t this what we do as architects in our renderings? We show our spaces as brand new - without weathering. We add a happy entourage interacting with our spaces as we were taught to do - observing but not touching, sitting but not sleeping. I raise this concern because we are neglecting to show the everyday life that will or will not be produced from our build environments. We show a utopia to our clients which created a stigma against the adaptable daily use of our spaces. Why don't we add pop-up food carts to the rendering of our storefronts? Homeless to the benches in our parks?
If we were to change the story of our designs through our graphical representation could we induce a paradigm shift?
It was interesting when you asked this question, We show a utopia to our clients which created a stigma against the adaptable daily use of our spaces. Why don't we add pop-up food carts to the rendering of our storefronts? Homeless to the benches in our parks?" I wonder why we don't pay attention or tend to ignore these small designs opportunities that can be a catalyst in making a building more purposeful in term of use especially in metropolises. Going back to Ikea, I think it is also funny how they portray all their products. I think as architects, that is when we need to think if we would rather build/make our own furnitures with our hands or buy something knowing that we have the power to make it on our own.
ReplyDeleteBig point here. I don't think we underestimate the use of the space though (homeless, food trucks) but waay overestimate (or exaggerate?) the number of people in the space. After all, it's really easy to throw people in a rendering and and make it come alive, but will it be like that in reality? Probably not. Back to black and white elevations only. Design would improve 1000%.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a great designer, but it doesn't take a great designer to tell when holes in a design have been puttied with entourage. I feel like a good studio constraint would be something like "scale figures only" or, more to Marissa's point, what if your only option for entourage was stuff we normally don't show? What if we could only use stuff like unfashionable people people, bike racks full of locked front wheels whose accompanying bikes have been stolen, water stains, and window AC units? That would be a fun review.
DeleteWell Lee, I believe renderings are important and can sell a project faster than floor plans and elevations would.
DeleteTotally agree and like the linkage you've made with IKEA ads and renderings. Renderings are definitely dangerous in that regard and I guarantee they are plenty of instances where a building appears nothing as the rendering makes it seem. But clients also don't buy into the normative conditions that will likely exist, so it's a double edged sword in a way.
ReplyDeleteCompletely agree.. I was just talking to Mo about the importance of a rendering and how we need them to 'sell a project' since majority of clients cant read a floor plan. Tough situation.
DeleteDouble edged sword it is, indeed. I definitely see it as a dichotomy like you guys pointed out.
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