In my experience in the field most offices rarely go for pure realism (‘let’s leave that to the developers if they want that kind of stuff’) but pick a certain style that best conveys the atmosphere and message of the design. Companies like Vyonyx have become popular because they specialized in selling the concept, strength and vision behind the project, not the factual visuals. It is the same thing with models. You won’t show a model made of perspex or multiplex next to a picture of the end result and then complain they look differently.

That being said. Your choice of projects for example is rather weak. The first one because making a visual for a design like this, where a big part of the essence is a natural phenomena rather than a design, is inherently complicated, and rarely reliable. The discrepancies in the images for the Blur building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro shows this probably even better than your example. Also perhaps you should post a video of the end result instead of just this image next time, there is enough to find on youtube, and it is a more reliable way to show the experience of the result.

The second example is actually worse because it is wrong to compare if even less than 25% of the skin is visible. But yes, the rendering is bluish and has desaturated colors. Just put on the right sunglasses whenever you go there and the thing will look rather similar to the renders. Fortunately we know this in advance so no need to disappoint your self when you go to Hamburg.

Between renderings and realized architecture can happen everything that can dramatically change the quality of a project, such as investors´financial crack, lack of money, etc. etc.

The renderings are at least 5 years older the the authorization designs, costs and even the realization of this project were strongly contested in Hamburg by citizens. It makes a big difference for investors (the project is halt public half private financing) even a “only” 1 million euro more expensive facade, why they can´t sell apartments or spaces that became automatically out if market.

Maybe in a perfect world no one would care about these costs and every architect would realize everything 100% identical to the proposal renderings……….

Rendering is what the client wants to see; thats is what archiCAD and AutoCAD are made for but i do understand that the realized version wont match up at all but architects have to meet deadlines and share their visions!

Even when the actual building is done according to the initial data set used for rendering there might be a big gap between render and real life result…

Often time the client ask to convey some sort of feeling / drama / effect that is hyper real to catch the harts and minds of key decision makers.

If you ask me it’s perfectly ok… as long as all strive to get the best result in the end.

the problem is, years ago, there were just hand drawn images and no one could see how the project would really look like. Now, with the rendering, we often forget, that those projects don´t really exist and we treat them as the built ones. Most of the people don´t have the luck to see all the projects in the reality and we know them just from the magazines, books and internet. In this virtual reality, the rendering are as real as photos (mostly arranged and post processed too). The architecture is an art of space, but we see the most of the projects just in 2D and we can´t really judge the quality of the space ( even though we do that all the time).

In my opinion, you can not compare a photo with a rendering. or, to be more specific a raw photo with an arranged rendering. it is not fair, it´s just as those “before – after, become slim ad” pictures. take HadM completed building, desaturate photo, make some post production and then compare.
but the only way to judge the quality of that building is to go to hamburg and see it in 3D

This article is so short and shallow that you’re getting badly needed lessons in design analysis methodology and journalism from your commenters.

If this is typical of your discipline and diligence, your running a gossip sheet, not a professional publication.

Great topic.

Need. more. examples.

Michael Bierut, from Pentagram, wrote on this topic back in 2004 in an article called “The Rendering and the Reality” for Design Observer.
http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=2497

One thing that stuck out in his article for me was the following paragraph:

“Architects have a real challenge. They have to make people believe in – and accept, and support, and pay for – a reality that lies far in the future. And that reality is built incrementally: all the renderings submitted for the High Line competition, no matter how convincing, are sketches to show general design intent rather than fully developed proposals. Unlike their lucky graphic designer cousins, architects can’t show their clients a same-size prototype with every detail in place. That’s why so many architects compensate with out-of-scale personalities: it takes real personal magnetism to make a bunch of suspicious people give you a lot of money to remake the world.”