How daylight representation in architectural competitions images can lead to an erroneous interpretation of projects

Bernard Paule,Joshua Pereira

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2042/1/012079

Abstract

The digital world we are living in today offers viewers an experience of buildings before they even exist. This experience is no longer just geometric or descriptive, but also sensory. It generates emotions through fixed or animated images of 3 dimensional objects inserted in an urban context. These images are produced by specialized agencies with specific tools allowing them to generate visual artefacts with a striking impression of realism. The light that bathes these scenes is carefully worked out in order to capture our gaze. We believe that, in some cases, this may generate errors of appreciation and that these representations can lead to questionable choices when they are used in architectural competitions. This paper proposes some keys to analyse these sublimated images and aims to give the reader the possibility to interpret architectural projects in a more realistic way.

Highlights

Architectural production is nowadays largely impacted by the generation of hyper-realistic images
We will try to identify the main biases of representation contained in the images that are proposed in the usual architectural competitions
A glazing seen from the outside most often appears as an impenetrable visual barrier

Summary

Introduction

Architectural production is nowadays largely impacted by the generation of hyper-realistic images. We have only shown here the first 6 images proposed by Ecosia for each keyword, but a closer examination carried out with the keyword "architecture" shows that out of the first 24 images proposed by Ecosia and Qwant, 18 were similar and that the first 3 were identical and displayed in the same order in both browsers. In our view, this shows how architectural representations are subject to trends associated with very marked pictorial repertoires. They are representative of real conditions and it is interesting to compare them with virtual images

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Discussion

Conclusions