A Reflection on Rendering
Jack Murphy’s piece for PLAT 2.0, “Command R: Thoughts on Digital Rendering,” explored the evolving role of digital rendering in the architectural design process. Here, he revisits the topic focusing specifically on the question of entourage.
Despite the ever-increasing varieties of representation open to designers, the render reigns supreme. It offers both an attempt at some flavor of realism and a scene which the viewer can enter. Setting aside other aesthetic issues, a single decision shapes the political consciousness of this image: with people, or without?
Omit people, and a render goes flat, approaching photography. (Even so, there are always at least two people in an image: its creator and you, its viewer.) In past years, a certain elegant vacancy has set in among student projects worldwide, with elaborate interior stagings suggesting occupation without the people themselves—as if someone stepped out to take a call, or the scene was immediately post-rapture.
Include people, and the image inevitably turns social, risking a trial over the entourage’s believability. Conversations can quickly be derailed by the selected figures, who attempt to convince viewers of the project’s ideals beyond form through their positions and identities.
Consider an in-between offering. To populate the shallow distances of axonometric views that collapse space, Shinji Miyajima and I landed between the poles of vacancy and population, settling on the surreal solution of including parts of people: a floating head at lunch, and hands holding forks, kettles, and persimmons. The zoomed-in vignettes illustrate how the objects of this food hall’s chaotic interior might pile up to create intense culinary experiences. The strange scenes are one attempt to thwart the false realness of the rendering while still offering images that give a sense of life.
