Architecture Addiction, The Official Blog of

This memorandum is either way late or way early, but if you should happen to find yourself putting together a portfolio any time soon, take heed:

In his article “Against Architectural Animation,” Neil Spiller discusses the consequence of using animation in the field of architecture. As a person who has looked through many student portfolios in his time, he becomes worried when a student presents him with digital material, as opposed to drawings. Though Spiller himself is a technology enthusiast, stating the many benefits technology has for architecture, he is worried about the use of animation in architecture. He fears that architects are becoming more concerned with making a good animation, rather than creating good spaces.

Architects in today’s world are limited by how new applications of animation are in architecture. The typical animation software was meant for film and graphics industries, not architecture. In a sense, by using this software, and architect is asking an apple to be an orange. This leads to a tendency for those using the software to play around more with the features of the software, as opposed to the architectural forms they are attempting to represent. These users “push all the buttons at once” to see what happens, and labels it as a final product. Such representations do nothing to give another insight into architectural form. They may be pretty to look at, but they say nothing; they are mindless eye candy, rotting away the mind as sweets do one’s teeth.

(And I recommend reading the responses therein as well.)