Rendered speechless

2 minute read

A glimpse into property renderings then and now.

Whilst recording a film about Wordsearch’s history with our Life President, Peter Murray and our Director of Strategy, William Murray, we spent hours scouring shelves stuffed with dust-covered books to find some of Wordsearch’s oldest and most seminal work.

Alban Gate was picked out, and as William leafed through the pages to look at one of our original placemaking projects, he stopped on a double-page spread featuring the first renderings we ever created, almost thirty years ago. The crew around the room stopped in disbelief as the process of production was explained: no Mac’s, no CG specialists, no nothing. Simply a paper cutting of a building model which had been photographed and painstakingly pasted onto a page. It was that rudimental, but still looked good!

As William explained “I remember going into a basement in Clerkenwell where Wordsearch’s first office was – I can’t remember how old I was…and I saw computers the size of washing machines churning out an image, which was effectively a physical model photographed and placed in a photograph. This was the first time that anybody had done anything that came close to a rendering of what a building might look like in place. And I have to say, it still looks surprisingly good today”.

So it was a fitting when Charles, Director of Wordsearch Beijing got in contact to share some recent images he’d taken of the Guangzhou K11 skyscraper in Guangzhou, China, which serve to highlight the incredible skills which exist today in the field of CG technology.

When Charles got back to the office after his visit to Guangzhou K11 he was struck by how well his photographs match the renderings which were produced years earlier. Take a look below to see how precisely digital predicted real life.

Photograph of a lobby in Guangzhou K11.

Rendering of a lobby in K11.

Photograph of the exterior of Guangzhou K11.

Rendering of the exterior of Guangzhou K11.

Photograph of the entrance to Guangzhou K11.

Rendering of the entrance to K11.