marketing visuals (un restaurant pas cher où il y a personne; c'est inquiétant)

The problem with architectural marketing visuals is not only how uncool and cringe they are, but also how confused their messaging is. Without forensically diving into why these CGIs fail (I am looking - and cringing- at you, stock image man on his mobile phone, walking into an office building reception and stock image woman sitting with her laptop on an office sofa, with inexplicable glee), marketing visuals for real estate developments punch well below their weight because they are literal manifestations of what the space may look like, so they at best only manage to sell the bricks-and-mortar rather than lifestyle or the experience.

This is the result of the unholy alliance between the conservative approach of many letting agents, who still view space as a building utility rather than a consumer commodity, and the megalomania of many architects, who think the whole world cares about the shadows and the junctions, so these architects instruct talented visualisers to produce CGIs largely devoid of people, where stock image people are only stuck on sparingly to show the scale of the space.

What are these marketing visuals signalling, and to whom?

People identify with people, not with shadow gaps. All other consumer brands create advertising predicated on people not on their items. All other consumer brands sell the lifestyle, not the product. Even outside of consumer goods, if a restaurant appears to be empty, most people would avoid it because it signals the wrong vibe - no matter how beautiful the space is or how delicious the food tastes.

In Luis Bunuel’s 1972 film le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Alice Sénéchal (played by the fantastic Stéphane Audran) quips: “an inexpensive restaurant where there’s no one; this is worrying”.

My thoughts exactly about architectural CGIs.