PIERCING THE RENDERING

Architecture Master’s Studio 2025–26, sem 3
Pieterjan Ginckels

Engagement: Mediating Tactics

This year’s studio invites students to step into the shoes of previous participants and continue the investigation into the blurred boundary between rendered architectural images and their physical realization. We explore how visual prefigurations—renderings, collages, virtual models—shape our environments and expectations, and how their seductive clarity often fails to translate into built reality.

Context & Problem

Architects are surface makers. Images are our products, inhabit our mental universes, represent our theoretical landscape. The rendered image, a catch-all term for computer images, virtual models, collages and other prefigurations, is architecture’s bottom-line product, and it is a slim, thin piece of paradox: we are ever better at creating these images, but in a visually overloaded world seem ever more easily fooled by the promises that such images entail. The result is a ‘Tantric Urbanism,’ an effortless implosion of interior, building and city, as planned, narrated and hyped by media, developers, architects and its users.

These images of our interiors, buildings and hoods shine so brightly that their realized versions always disappoint. We excel in consuming the rendered reality in such a way that the places in which we live seem only remnants of a lesser reality. When we collide with the limits of this delusion, face to face with drywall and concrete, we ask the question: is the realized render more real than its unrealized counterpart? Did our two-dimensional dreams really wash away our three-dimensional needs? Have we rendered or are we being rendered?

This studio calls out the dynamics of this ‘Render-Culture’ and positions architects as both agents and victims of this phenomenon.

STUDIO STRUCTURE

Phase 1: Calling Bullshit*
WEEK 1-3

We begin by building critical literacy around the Rendered Reality. What is a rendering, and how does it shape our spaces and futures? Through the use of tools like RenderBender and RenderBINGO, we will fact-check and reconstruct images in physical environments, learning to detect and articulate the disconnects between image and reality. These disconnects may be architectural, ecological, social and political. Recently materialized Brussels sites will be chosen as our testing grounds. This phase mixes desk research with field work and collective reflection.

Phase 2: Scanning, Scratching, Mining
STUDY TRIP – WEEK 4

Our research culminates in a three-day field trip to Berlin’s Europacity, a vast, recently completed urban development that remains deeply embedded in its rendered identity. Europacity was studied in two previous Piering the Rendering studios. Building on the knowledge from previous years’ mappings, interviews, and field work, we will design and execute targeted action research—assuming roles, enacting situations, and embedding ourselves as double agents within the site. From a central basecamp, we will make solo and group interventions to scan surfaces, scratch spaces, and mine materials, with which we will construct a digital/analog archive on Europacity as a Realized Rendering. This performative research is intended to produce after-shocks, shared with local collaborators such as visual artist Bernd Trasberger and architect Oana Stanescu.

Phase 3: F*ck the Rendering**
WEEK 5-12

Each student develops a critical design project centered around a physical workpiece: the dumb model. These models are deliberately scale-less, ambiguous, and materially direct. They are not representations of buildings or environments, but speculative artifacts—fragments of an après-realized rendering. They emerge from a position, a critique, and a narrative that reflects on the inevitability of Render-Culture’s crash.

Your narrative will guide the making: whether it accelerates the rendered condition, hacks its logic, exposes its failures, or renders what cannot be rendered. The model may be accompanied by text, performance, video, or other media, but the physical artifact remains central.

We will study the work of Isa Genzken and read J.G. Ballard’s High-rise. Together, these references support the development of narrative sculptures. Depending on your position, these may be developed individually or in collaboration.

EXCHANGE WITH “STUDIO GLITCH”

In parallel with our studio work, Manou Van den Eynde will collaborate with first-year master students to explore the concept of the glitch, particularly in relation to rendered realities. Central to this investigation are bodies—both as subjects and as sites of transformation. Through the reading of cyberfeminist literature, especially Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, the group will critically engage with these ideas, expanding them by becoming glitched avatars themselves. This embodied approach will allow students to interrogate and reframe the conditions of our rendered environments.

Midway through the semester, we will participate in a collaborative exchange, sharing our methods of piercing the rendering and engaging with their techniques of stretching, encrypting, stitching, and glitching the bodies that construct and inhabit these realities. This exchange will serve as a catalyst for both the material and narrative development of your individual projects.

EXPECTED OUTPUT

Collective: “Rendering magazine”
a visual-critical database of the rendered reality

Students team up to investigate both local (Brussels) and international (Berlin) cases. You execute field work following studio methods such as SoDoSoPa and RenderBender, while also developing new ’piercing methods’. We will process and combine the registrations, souvenirs and reflections of these actions in a print publication.

Individual: “F*CK THE RENDERING”
a series of narrative models

Your design work responds to the revelations and your experiences of the first phase of (action) research. Central to your design trajectory is conceiving and building a series of physical models, starting with on-site small-scale versions in Berlin. You will develop a narrative that explores the rendered realities’ futures, which will influence the ‘surface strategy’ and model evolutions throughout the semester.

TIMING

FURTHER READING: see online list

Image: Sodiq Babatunde Rajee, Piercing the Rendering 24-25