Capturing the Imagination

I’m interested in the distance between the experience of designing architecture with CAD software and the experience of being in architecture.

I recently came across this walkthrough of a building designed by Cutler Anderson Architects. that made me want to dig into this topic a bit.

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The architecture shown in this video is sensitive and beautiful. The way it’s introduced to the audience is lovely and I think reflects something about the way Jim Cutler thinks about creating the experience of architecture.

One thing that struck me immediately was how the design of this building only makes sense because of the wider context in which the building exists: the site, the foliage, the water, the pathway leading through the woods to the front door, the materials, the mechanisms used to open the building to its environment, the change in light, and the change in seasons.

All of these things are essential and integral to the design — and yet none of them exist within the CAD software that was likely used to design this building. This seems odd, especially in an age where computers are so capable.

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I can’t help but think about the amount of skill and imagination required to be able to look at design drawings and be able to visualize what the final experience will be. Is there an upper limit to the level of complexity a trained architect can visualize? I’d imagine there must be.

What happens when non-architects need to do something with the designs? What happens when clients need to understand drawings, or the people who will be constructing the building need to refer to the designs? What happens if these parties misunderstand the drawings? Lots of potentially expensive and avoidable errors can occur.

Being able visualize a design is essential for architectural design software, if for no other reason that it takes a lot of people to turn the idea of a building into a real building, and they all need to understand what the end product will be. The more complex the design is, the more important it becomes to have rich, flexible, expressive, and immersive ways to visualize designs.

This leads me to wonder:

Why doesn’t architectural design software make it easy to get a sense about what the experience of a building will be?

This seems like something that architectural design software should be good at doing, just like it’s good at making drawings. There’s a good deal of evidence to support that this is technically possible, but we haven’t yet found a way to fully connect the dots between designing and visualizing in architectural CAD software.

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How architectural designs are visualized today:

There are a number of ways to visualize architectural designs if you’re motivated enough and are willing to put in a good deal of work.

Since CAD files are schematic in nature, getting a design ready for rendering requires adding high-quality materials, lights, props, furniture, foliage, terrain, sky, weather, surrounding buildings, people, etc.. A design essentially needs to get dressed, much like a set is dressed for a film.

Here’s a video that shows three of the commonly-used architectural visualization applications and the effort required to dress up a design and render it:

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Once a design is dressed, it needs to be shot from a number of different perspectives, and if an animation is to be made, then the camera and models need to be animated as well. This work is labor-intensive enough that there are limits to how much of it can be re-used if and when a design changes, which again limits how often designs make the transition from schematic representation to photorealistic rendering — or beyond.

Over the years, there have been a number of visualization tools that have streamlined parts of the process of preparing designs to be visualized. Enscape, Twinmotion, Lumion, and D5 are examples. Some have incorporated game engine technology, which has evolved to be able to deliver interactive photorealistic pictures at real-time frame rates.

Where it used to take minutes to hours to painstakingly simulate the path of photons as they bounce from surface to surface, materials to camera, game engines through a series of novel tricks and specialized hardware, can get the generation of detailed photorealistic scenes down to small fractions of a second.

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Dedicated design visualization tools have evolved ways to streamline the ingestion of CAD data, and some have come up with novel ways to substitute high quality 3D assets and materials for the schematic symbols that comprise a CAD design. This is an improvement, but still contorts around a set of immovables that are a consequence of CAD designs being closely bound to proprietary file formats.

In some cases, these visualization tools are now fast enough to run while CAD designs are being modified, allowing architects to be able to see the impact of the design choices they are making in real time. This can be especially useful when an architect is collaborating with people who may not have the ability to understand design drawings. Here’s an example of this in action:

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Having the ability to visualize designs adjacent to where designing is happening is much better than not having it at all, but I think that the division between designing and seeing that’s been present in CAD from the outset prevents us from understanding that the ability to see, feel, interact with, and inhabit a design is actually fundamental to the creation of complex things meant to exist and function in the real world.

It’s worth noting that all of the contortions and effort people have to go through to supply schematic CAD models with all the things that bring a design to life would largely go away if CAD software had the ability to incorporate them in the first place. It seems strange that architects should have to do the virtual equivalent of moving into the design just to convey a sense about what it’ll be like in real life. We can do better.

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Today’s CAD Software is Remarkable and Not Nearly Enough

When AutoCAD was invented more than 45 years ago, the pitch was that it was better to draft and design with computers than on paper.

The computers of 1982 were far less powerful than those of today, Lines, shapes, and symbols were all these computers could manage. This wasn’t a shortcoming because humans had been perfecting the design of buildings through schematic representation for millennia. There really is no more succinct or definitive way to describe a building — Design drawings are a kind of lossless compression.

As computers became more powerful and sophisticated, CAD evolved to treat the design of buildings as a system of interconnected relationships that can be easily updated. Models for designs began being represented in three dimensions. This was a significant improvement.

By any measure, CAD software has been wildly successful. Take a look at any building under construction today and it’s a guarantee that it was designed through drawings and simplified 3D models. It’s clear this works pretty well.

But is it enough? Does this level of visual fidelity make anyone feel something about the spaces they’re designing in the same way they would if they were inside those spaces? Does it inspire? I don’t think so, and I think this needs to change.

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Capturing the Imagination

Software for the designing of buildings should be able to place architects in and around the structures they are designing, so they can feel them, learn from them, and react to them. It should also be able to do the same for the people who commission architectural designs.

The commissioning of an architectural design can represent a huge investment of money, time, and patience. The period between when design starts, and when it’s realized can take years. That’s a helluva lot of delayed gratification.

Sometimes design work can be speculative and the goal is to inspire. Being able to engage the imagination is an essential tool that architects employ. It’s the way they buy time and marshal the resources needed to turn the idea of a building into a real one.

I love this image of Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile-high skyscraper drawing.

The scale and position relative to the audience was clearly designed to encourage a viewer to look up and imagine what it would be like to see such an incredible structure in real life. This is the thing that architectural design software needs to enable.

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So Much Room to Become More

One of my favorite sources of architectural visualization inspiration is Visualizing Architecture. Their visualizations are hand-crafted meditations on the buildings they’re portraying. They’re staggeringly beautiful.

It’s hard to imagine that the architecture firms that commission these visualizations don’t come away surprised by what these artists manage to express about their buildings. I especially love that they’re not entirely photorealistic — they’re illustrative. They leave room for the imagination of the viewer to do some work, to inhabit the space, to see it clearly. They convey a clear point of view, they command attention, they stand out. They’re memorable. They elevate the designs, the architects, and the people who commissioned the work.

When design visualizations happen early enough in a project, the ability to explore and express what’s important about a design can help clarify the design itself. This is one of the reasons creating architectural models is such an important part of the process.

The cheaper and easier it is to visualize a design from within CAD software, the more opportunities there are for architects to evaluate what they are making.

This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s fundamental to the practice of architecture. It’s something that can make the difference between a clumsy design, and one that accurately reflects and represents its purpose and context.

The software tools for architecture shouldn’t just be tools for manipulating the shapes and symbols that eventually result in a building. They need to become much more. They need to become tools for capturing the imagination.