Fifty years ago, architectural illustration was a pen and paper art. Today, it has evolved into an imperative technological function of the building sales and marketing world.
At first, architectural illustration was a simple hybrid of architecture and art, joined to provide classic renderings of a home or other structure for potential buyers. It had unique representative characteristics that incorporated color, light, shadow, and some degree of texture and tone—to render viewable such elements as space and distribution by way of careful and well crafted perspective, blockouts, and entourage elements.
The architectural illustration artist — the renderer — worked alone in a one-person office and communicated with the potential buyer in-person.
Much has changed — drastically and rapidly. The architectural office is staffed by as many as a hundred, has an internal architectural illustration group, and/or is a major architectural firm with more than scrolls of blueprints tucked into quiet cubicles. Networked systems of computers replace or supplement the hand-drawn renderings, and internet communications replace the walk-in.
The method of creation of architectural illustration has been completely re-vamped. With the design and delivery to the mainstream architect of such technology as AutoCAD and computer graphics programs and platforms that followed, perspective rendering was the click of a keyboard button away: verticals now could be made parallel with one motion; landscapes and spatial relationships could be depicted accurately with the pasting and minor cropping and editing of one photo. Traditional goache and tempura paints were traded in for CGs; Cel paints were replaced by 3-D animations. The results: realism of rendering a once static property into a moving sound and light fantasmagoria that today has potential buyers online, in the comfort of their own current living spaces, doing fly-throughs of rooms and over properties that have the dimensions and properties of a movie. The only thing missing is smell.
While the masters of architectural illustration debate the assets and liabilities of traditional versus computer-generated renderings (arguing one for the expressionist warmth, the other for the 3-D virtual solutions reality), the private, corporate, or other potential home buyer is advancing his or her user skills online. And the demand for realism, for action, for interactivity becomes as real as the stairwell the renderer shifts to the right side of the room with the click of a computer button, as real as the sound bytes with the fountain trickling in the yard, as real as the customer who once walked into the one-person architectural office to buy a home.
