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With renderings, architects can direct the show

Many software-savvy architects help other designers present their work digitally in renderings and animations. For the past several years, well-heeled firms have commissioned 3D animators to design virtual walk-throughs and videos of their projects for promotion, presentation, and other purposes. New York City visualization firm IOMedia has created intricate movie presentations for Polshek Partnership’s Clinton Library in Arkansas and Gehry Partners’ Guggenheim Las Vegas Art of the Motorcycle exhibition to help raise funds and generate publicity for these works. The Boston firm Neoscape helped the New York 2012 Committee give colorful, 3D previews of its event sites to the United States and International Olympic committees. Many architects, like Friedrich St. Florien, who commissioned Providence, R.I., firm Advanced Media Design to create digital renderings of his World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., appreciate the ability of computer models to give clear visual indications of how projects are advancing.

Digital renderers trained in architecture recognize their work is often limited by the visions of the architects they work with. Yet many of them say they don’t miss the tedium and constraints of their old profession. “I found out architecture was all about wall sections and roof details, not schematic designs,” says Adam Kruvand of Studio 2A, a digital design firm based in Kansas City and New York, which recently completed 3D renderings for the new Soldier’s Field in Chicago. Kruvand had worked previously for Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum’s HOK Sport.

Entry for ACADIA design competition, 2001 As an example of how technology shapes form, designers Sean McCormack and Andrew Karlson looked at the wave pattern generated by that most annoying of digital-age sounds—the screech of a modem as it connects to the Internet—and transformed it into a virtual structure of glass and steel. Its zigzaggy shape conveys a zealous (if off-kilter) energy, much like the noise that inspired it.

His creative outlets, he says, include collaborating with firms to put together the 3D conception of a project: choosing colors, lighting, textures, and camera views for renderings. “I gravitated to 3D stuff because that’s where I could actually use my art and design skills to affect the way things looked,” he says.

Peter Korian, president of IOMedia, sees the digital renderer as an extension of a firm’s skills and a vital way to promote projects. “Every architecture firm should have 30 additional people who do what we do,” he says. Calling his contemporaries “technologists” instead of architects, he says that using 3D technology to make creative, emotional presentations of a project is every bit as creative—and satisfying—as designing a building in bricks and mortar. “If Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier were around today, they’d be doing what we’re doing,” he says.

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