These are incredible, I’d like to know what you used to render with. I have some experience with Softimage/Maxwell, but it’s been a while. Nowadays I’m more involved with BIM architecture and modelling at the firm I work for.
Thank you! I rendered them using Cinema 4D 9.6, and did some of the modeling in AutoCAD. You won’t get those colours in any renderer, though - that was all photoshop enhancement and manual recolouring.
I found it interesting what you said about form and function. There are some good examples of the polar opposites. One one side is the fool of architecture, Frank Ghery, who completely tosses functionality out the window. He was responsible for the sweeping, metal Bilbao Guggenheim in Spain, a museum with curved walls.
Some of his buildings look pretty cool, you can see a consistent theme running throughout each development. However, I read that his design approach is to scrunch up pieces of paper randomly and then draw inspiration from the more interesting ones. I don’t think there is enough ‘math’ in his designs. If I were designing a building development, I would make it look as if some mathematical equations were driving the shapes of all of the buildings, so that by looking at one, you can almost predict what the next one ought to be. I was amazed by Rand’s description of Roarke’s developments - it was so close to what I would like to see. Some buildings mimic biological forms - one architect with some very interesting buildings is Santiago Calatrava, who did an amazing planetarium in Spain.
If you think about it, how easy is it to hang a flat painting on a curved wall properly? Not easy. Not to mention his awkward space planning leaves a lot of unusable space inside, as walls come to such strange corners. The building also leaks like mad, representing a breach in understanding between what an architect can design and what a contractor can actually build, i.e. a breach between the mind (the architect) and reality (The contractor).
I can imagine, lol. Interior spaces is one area that frustrates me, because rectangular spaces usually look better. I beleive that interior design is far more sophisticated than architecture - many, many interiors seem to have a great, integrated visual style.
On the opposite side is the Bauhaus, which was an architecture school that brought functionality to the period of silly neo-classicism. Think Roark Vs. Keating. The Bauhaus popularized styles such as New Objectivity (ding ding! Wikipedia that one.) and the modern International style, those glass skyscrapers of very, very simple form. Usually rectangles, from a cynical point of view.
I like the detail and visual richness of neoclassical buildings, but their overall shapes are very silly. Rand got it completely right when she detailed all of the problems with them. Very modern buildings look nice - i have seen some amazingly beautiful variations on minimalist boxes, but they get a bit boring.
It’s interesting what you say about the Sydney Opera House, as one one hand it’s an aesthetic beauty, on the other, it’s a functional nightmare. The acoustics are terrible, which entirely defeats the purpose of having an opera house in the first place. Why have it if it doesn’t sound right?
Good point. In my opinion, one should try to design only beautiful forms, and then ignore projects where those forms cannot be applied functionally. An alternative is to scale up a beautiful building envelope in order to fit the fuinctional space inside. There would be some wasted space in between the 2 layers, so such a building may be more expensive.