New Frontiers In Visualization

New Frontiers In Visualization

For as long as there have been buildings, there have been architects. Sure, the mudbrick dwellings of yore didn’t have a set of architectural plans or a building permit; the ancient architects had a very different role than those of 2025. Think about it—the Great Pyramids? There were Egyptian “royal architects” on the pharaoh's staff for dynasties. The Pantheon? Those Roman architects designed a dome that even today is considered the largest (concrete) dome in the world.  
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Fast forward to today, in a firm in Downers Grove, and the role of an architect looks immensely different in some ways and strangely steadfast in others. Our clients are not rulers of empires, but just as a pharaoh cares about the look of their future tomb, our clients care about their home design suiting their lives, needs, and style. I would go as far as to say that the personalized nature of architecture hasn’t changed nearly as much as one might first assume; care and consideration of who you are designing for is timeless. One of the day and night differences in the field, however, relates to technology. Until recently (comparatively), everything was drawn and drafted by hand and, through the invention of programs like AutoCAD, not only is the burden of time dramatically shortened, but the level of detail available has exponentially grown. 

​As a homeowner/client, these advancements offer you the advantage of shorter turnaround times on revisions and streamlining the work needed to ensure a safe and structurally sound home. But this is Studio Pages! I would be remiss if I didn’t throw in just a little bit of pizzazz—pizzazz that doesn’t come from discussing construction documents. No technological advancement says pizzazz more than tools for visualizing your design before it’s built. At Studio21 Architects, we employ a handful of tools for the purpose of visualization at every stage and in the Design Phase, these tools become ever more crucial for a couple of reasons: your design must be approved before moving forward, and  the classic “blueprints” simply are not the most conducive to a fully-fledged vision.  

To the untrained eye, like mine for example, the two-dimensional floor plans that our architects create look like a bunch of lines. Sure, with some extra attention, those lines begin to contextually make sense, and sizes of rooms and spatial relationships begin to appear, but they still feel a bit like those hidden picture stereograms—maybe if I keep looking long enough, that 3D home will appear! Of course, it is a crucial responsibility of our architectural team to explain the plans and help bridge that gap in visualization. A word that we use often here at Studio21 Architects is “translating”, whether that be translating the 2D plans into layperson terms or translating the design into reality through construction. Translation helps a lot, but as they say: a picture is worth a thousand words...and that’s where the renderings come in. 

Producing a rendering follows similar steps to how one would paint a picture. First, you must start with a sketch. In the drafting world, that sketch is the aforementioned 2D floorplan, which can be modeled into 3D using software like Revit. That initial iteration—the adding of a dimension, if you will—is what we call a whiteboard rendering. As you can see from our whiteboard example, it is quite a leap from our 2D plans, albeit not perfectly realistic just yet. Whiteboard renderings serve as a way to understand the interplay between light and shadow in a space, just as shading does for a painting. ​

Whiteboard vs Photorealistic Renderings (same project)

To take a painting to the next level, you would add color! A whiteboard rendering includes your “heavy hitters” like windows and doors (light) and significantly sized objects (volume), but as the name suggests, they are totally monochrome. Adding color to a rendering brings life and mood into the mix and helps to visualize the intention. Do the dark cabinets make the kitchen look smaller? Are the selections we’ve chosen complimenting each other as a whole? Adding color isn’t where it ends; for a painting and a rendering, your final step towards realism is all in the details. Details like artwork, textures, and even small items like tchotchkes can be added into the renderings to make the spaces feel lived in and therefore, more realistic.  

For the most current advancements in the realm of renderings—that we employ—your home’s design can now be taken from static images to animate walkthroughs. Similar to the dollhouse feature that has become more common on real estate listings, this dynamic level allows the viewer to move between spaces and look around the modeled home, just as you’d do in real life. Since I cannot print video (as cool as that would be), check out our website for an example of a walkthrough rendering, which you can see by clicking the button below! 

See the Walkthrough

Now, I’m not sure how rooted in science the concept of “left versus right-brained" is, but the principle is very applicable here. Visual learners, auditory learners, left-brained, right-brained—each of us is different, and so it stands to reason that each of our minds works differently as well. For our architectural team, the end goal remains the same no matter if you are on one end of the visualization spectrum, the other end, or somewhere in between. The end goal? To offer whatever it is you need to have that “a-ha” moment. 

If I could boil down the Studio21 Architects philosophy, two things would remain: instilling confidence and delivering a positive experience. As I see it, you cannot have one without the other; having confidence in your choices, design, and team has a beneficial ripple effect on your overall journey, in turn leading to a positive experience. There are many bits and pieces sprinkled through our process with the main purpose of instilling confidence. For visualizing and, of course, the “a-ha” moment, 3D renderings do that job quite well.  ​

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By: Emma H. 

Emma works as the Marketing Manager for Studio21 Architects. She is the writer behind (almost) all of our newsletter articles, and she works hard to make sure all of our marketing materials reflect an architect-approved design quality!