Stunning architectural visualizations win in the Render of the Year Award 2020

Louis Arlo ·  Feb 12, 21 5:07 AM

beautiful work.  I really like the “time temple” 

Michael Schwartz ·  Feb 12, 21 4:35 PM

Interesting stuff! ArchViz is so wide open, lots of different styles and compositional techniques.

Really like the Winery in Alentejo (Overall Winner), both substance and style. Also really enjoy Education Station: The Village. Very cool looking, aspirational space.

Thomas Dingbat ·  Feb 13, 21 11:42 AM

These are all great. Flooding as Commons my favorite

George Dodds ·  Feb 17, 21 2:27 PM

We seem to have arrived at a point in the architectural academy when drawings of places, spaces, or objects intended for potential occupation, have lost their relevancy, or their imperative, giving way to drawings of drawings of drawings.

Yet, unlike the photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, wherein the maker clearly knows what s/he is doing -- that with each iteration, there is something lost -- in the world of "render," not so much. When students of architecture, uninitiated to the essential techniques of drawing and visualization and unschooled in the difference between copying the world of things as opposed to drawing-out a world one imagines, -- when introduced to drawings as images to be imitated, a rabbit hole of sorts is often created and difficult to avoid. 

A "render" is NOT a PERSPECTIVE, but it ought to be.

For example, all of these "renders" are photomontages, yet NONE of them state as much in their captions, which is disconcerting. And no, a collage is not the same as a photomontage, but the terms are often thrown around interchangeably by architectural faculty, and therefore, their students. No, it's not a
poe-tae-toe, poe-tah-toe, thing. They are fundamentally different. The
former eschews visual or material coherence, the later depends upon
it.

The curious thing I see in these varied images is that they all seem as if they could have been created by the same hand, or, of course, no hand at all.

At the turn of the previous century, Wright in the United States and Muthesius in Germany, both argued (with several caveats) in favor of mechanization being re-conceived as an extension of the hand of the maker. In these images, however, we have the work of handless makers with eyes that seem to visualize the image of an image. This is the World of Simulacrum -- a representation for which there is no original. I'm not sure it should be celebrated so uncritically. Much is lost in that photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.