Reply To: Lets nuke the computer whiz. . .

1. I’m inherently mistrustful of renderings. They more often than not give all the wrong answers to all the wrong questions about a project. As far as I’m concerned, one of the most damning indictments of an architectural process is the statement ‘looks just like the renderings’. How often have you heard that one – quite often from the architects themselves – can they not see the corollary?

2. It’s a dead end within an office (who really *wants* to be the ‘viz guy’?) I didn’t spend five years busting my ass in college to blindly produce images of a design I have no input into (apart from the colour of the glass and the number of people lifted from ‘vogue’ I place in front of it).

3. It’s horrifically time consuming and expensive, either in house or sending it out to a bureau. I’d rather spend the fee on design hours.

4. Clients get hung up on them. Planners believe (and demand) them. Partners redmark them and think that counts as design input. Woeful.

Ban ’em, I say. There was a fashion a while back in architectural competitions to prohibit models, the thinking being a larger office would have more resources and thus an unfair advantage over the smaller. The same can be said for renderings.