Myths and imaginaries in architectural competitions

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an analysis of computer renderings of urban spaces created for architectural competitions to promote the Fjord City redevelopment plan for the waterfront in downtown Oslo, Norway. The renderings are assessed with compositional and semiotic analyses. Drawing from Lefebvre's theory of the production of space and literature on landscape, this paper argues that the renderings submitted to architectural competitions promote the ‘myth of the attractive city’, which is one way of viewing urban spaces. The conclusion highlights the relevance of the analysis and findings to urban theory and practitioners.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban planning
• architecture
• architectural competitions
• urban design competition
• entrepreneurialism
• neoliberalism
• renderings
• images
• visualization
• CGI

Introduction

‘Architects do not make buildings; they make drawings of buildings’, wrote architectural historian Robin Evans (1989). Over the last 25 years, these drawings have increasingly taken the form of computer-generatedimages (CGI), or renderings in architectural parlance, which are now the most widely circulated visualizations of novel architecture (Nastasi 2016). Architectural competitions and parallel assignments are organized to create architecture of the highest quality and have become important and frequently used tools for urban planning. This function is entirely dependent on the underlying assumption that these renderings, along with other images, can reliably communicate in a way that enables judgements of architectural quality (Rönn, Kazemian, and Andersson 2013). Renderings form just one part of architects’ submissions to a competition, but it is the part that is most widely circulated. When used in communication with the broader public, these renderings help make projects socially meaningful. Jones (2009) writes that iconic architecture gives form and social meaning to political and economic projects and renders them meaningful to society. These images are what Lindner and Meissner (2018) call urban imaginaries. They are visions and ideas of how the city will be based on shared and individual mental images of it. Imaginaries are part of what Lefebvre (2009) terms ‘representations of space’, which are one of the three dialectic elements in the production of social space. It is also the domain of architects, planners, and other experts who create and engage with these representations. The two other elements are spatial practice/perceived space and representational spaces/lived space. Spatial practice refers to the relationship between daily routine and urban reality, while lived space constitutes the space that the imagination tries to change. The elements overlap because the goal is to understand spaces in totality rather than as this, that, or the other type of space. The imaginaries, the representations of space, are seen as highly important, as Lefebvre (2009) writes that these spaces are the ‘dominant space in any society’ (39). This shows how the imaginaries created in competitions are both informed by and actively shape how people think of and ultimately produce urban spaces.

By using architectural renderings from four competitions and two parallel assignments, this study attempts to answer two related questions: First, what kind of images of the future city do architectural competitions create? Second, what role do these images play in urban planning? This is done by first considering the way these imaginaries are produced and how they are used in architectural competitions. Second, this paper sets forth the idea that the type of architectural rendering used to showcase competition proposals can be considered a kind of landscape. This analysis is based on compositional and semiotic approaches, which are outlined in the third section of the paper. The fourth section presents an analysis and discussion of architectural renderings before the final conclusion.

Architectural rendering

Architectural renderings refer to the type of CGI that is commonly used to show how new buildings are supposed to look. Evans (1989) calls them presentational drawings, and their function is ‘to propagate a completely defined idea’. Nastasi (2016) argues that photorealism is the mode of representation that dominates renderings, that is, that they imitate photos rather than reality. Photorealistic renderings are easily read by non-professionalsbecause they look like movies, television, and photography, and are modelled representations most people are familiar with.

In the context of architectural competitions, representations of architecture and renderings are less about accuracy and more about presenting a persuasive imaginary. Sauge (2010) emphasizes that these images are part of the rhetoric of the competition proposals and are designed to excite and move the jury. Tostrup (2010) comments that the rhetoric of competitions has come to rely on concepts such as landmarks, edifices, or flagships that are used as though they are self-explanatoryvehicles of unambiguous goodness. The persuasive but superficial ideas promoted by the visual rhetoric of competitions act as a pretence for relentless profit maximization.

Degen, Melhuish, and Rose (2016) showed how CGIs, similar to the type of images analysed here, have been used as advertising aimed at investors and home buyers. These have also found their way into the city by way of billboards and posters on building sites that promote construction projects. Degen, Melhuish, and Rose (2016) connected this to an understanding of contemporary capitalism as increasingly relying on the aesthetics of its commodities and considered visualizations of development projects as ‘one way in whichevery day urban spaces are becoming “aesthetically charged”’ (105).

In more practical terms, Melhuish, Degen, and Rose (2016) found that for the people who make these renderings, the atmosphere is related to the lighting of the buildings, the type of sky used, the activities, and how people are included in the renderings. This means that the context in which the building is presented is central to establishing the overall message of the image, in addition to presenting the proposed new building in the best possible way.

Reserved or even negative views on architectural renderings are not limited to theoretical critiques. In the interviews conducted in this study, the architects expressed a great deal of scepticism about renderings. According to a senior architect in a mid-sizedarchitectural practice, ‘it is so easy to lie or to misrepresent’. A partner-levelarchitect from a small firm from one of the parallel assignments stated that ‘renderings present the building from the best possible angle, even if that particular view is impossible in reality’. Going even further, a senior architect from a big firm exclaimed that ‘they are a degeneration; they have nothing to do with architecture’. Renderings alone are not considered enough to judge architectural quality; more information and visual materials are needed. Nastasi (2016, 4) reported a similar finding: ‘Many architects claim to detest such renderings as a way of representing architecture, as they consider them too prosaic and close to the imagery of advertising and entertainment …‘. Despite such criticism, architects are also aware of how central these images are to architectural practice and communication. Debates over the use of photorealistic renderings occur in architectural writings every now and then. For instance, on the pages of Archdaily.com, an architectural blog with almost14 million monthly visits, Rotterdam-basedarchitectural firm MVRDV defended their renderings and practices in 2016 after receiving criticism from Mark Minkjan (2016) for creating renderings that reduce architecture to cosmetics and presenting a visualization that does not include any feature that can be used to actually evaluate the building. They also fell under fire in an article by Tim De Chant (2013), who explained why renderings showing skyscrapers adorned with trees and vibrant greenery are highly suspect. Knikker and Davidson (2016), writing on behalf of MVRDV, argued that visualization is a necessary form of communication, a translation from technical drawings to something clients and users can comprehend. There is a wide range of views on the practice of renderings (Cutieru 2020), and some architects, like Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao, have banned the use of renderings in their practice, relying instead on models, sketches, and collages (Frearson 2019).

Renderings as landscapes

On the basis of clear similarities and an interesting common history, understanding these renderings as landscapes is useful. During the Renaissance, the development of perspective drawing as a method of realist representation was fundamental to the development of landscape as an idea (Cosgrove 1985). Perspective drawing techniques were adopted to create presentational images of buildings (Ackerman 2002), and it was in this period that architectural competitions became part of architectural practice (de Haan et al. 1988). Having developed from geometry, perspective drawing was considered objective and based on science, and formed the basis for both architectural and landscape representations of the time. According to Cosgrove (1985), landscapes emerged as a way of seeing the external world that is closely bound to the practical appropriation of spaces.

Cairns and Jacobs (2017) argued that the development of architectural drawing in the Renaissance gave architects the ability to experiment with their ideas and solutions. Through drawing, architecture became part of the art of design and separated from construction. Architects did not adopt the strict rules of the central point perspective; instead, opting to place the observer in whatever position they felt gave the best impression of the building (Ackerman 2002). This might be why some architects, such as Evans (1989), call these drawings projections. Projections usually refer to the transfer of three-dimensionalforms onto two-dimensionalmedia, but as Evans (1989) also noted, architecture essentially does the opposite.

The first landscapes drawn with linear perspectives are of the idealized city, formal, monumental, and organized according to precise geometry (Cosgrove 1985). As it is based on the science of geometry, the linear perspective was regarded as a method for discovering the inherent properties of spaces (Veseley 2004) and an objective tool to control absolute space and transform it into the property of the individual or the state through the development of survey mapping (Cosgrove 1985).

The outcomes are a way of seeing where form and positions in space are relative, with the eye as the centre of the visual world (i.e., the point from which perspective originates), and, finally, a realist mode of pictorial representation of space (Cosgrove 1985). This is how landscapes come to be understood as ideological, just as in any other representational media (Hall 1997). For instance, landscape paintings during the Norwegian romantic period were central to the building and strengthening of national identity by supplying common aspirations and narratives of what the nation is and what being Norwegian means (Arnesen 1998; Hamran et al. 1981). Peet (1998) contends that geographers regard landscape images as important because they frame the social imaginary, which means that over time, landscapes come to define how people think about a place and their relation to it (Wylie 2007). Landscapes also hide the labour that goes into creating them. Landscapes are the results of a certain set of relations of production, social processes, and sometimes even struggles. However, landscapes hide these elements in their appearance, which seems given and natural (Mitchell 2000).

Landscape representations have been produced for a long time to promote commercial developments and private speculations (Daniels 2004). As such, Zukin (2000) indicated that landscapes are a compromise between place and market. This seems particularly relevant when architectural renderings blend their proposed future elements into a context that represents the present. The place is already there, but the architecture must market itself. Architectural renderings and landscapes share a similar privileged view of the city: ‘The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the utopia that yesterday was only painted’ (de Certeau 1988, 92). This quote from de Certeau (1988) pinpoints the similarity in perspective between architectural imaginaries and landscapes, while at the same time defining one major difference: architectural rendering is an imaginary that is about the future. The ideological function of landscape paintings is chronocentric to their present because it is the contemporary relations of power, economy, culture, and the social aspect that the paintings separate from their history and naturalize. The main subject of architectural renderings is the future. While parts of the rendering might show elements of existing urban landscapes, their subjects, the new projects, and the proposed changes are promises of a reality that can no way be experienced outside the image.

Nastasi (2016) argues that photorealism is the mode of representation that dominates renderings, which means that they imitate photos rather than reality. Photorealistic renderings are easily read by non-professionalsbecause they look like movies, television, and photography, and are modelled representations most people are familiar with. Photorealism in architectural illustrations is a relatively new phenomenon and is only possible because of CGI technology; therefore, it has only been part of everyday architectural practice for the last 15 to 20 years. Both Stagni (2019) and Freeman (2013) argued that this also has effects on architectural photography, which is the mode of representation Evans argues to be the most common way of spreading architecture information. Photorealistic CGI rendering is the first major change to architectural representations since the invention of perspectival drawing. The architects quoted above have issues particular to this mode of representation. One senior architect volunteered that because he did not like renderings, they still worked much more with models internally. Also concerned over the use of digital representations, Freeman (2013) wrote that ‘in the digital age the graphic representation of architecture has moved beyond an exercise in persuasion; it has become an exercise in deception’. The deception works in two ways. First, by mimicking photographs, they use a visual language that used to be considered a true representation of something existing. Second, as with landscapes, the mode of production and the fact that these are produced are hidden, and the ideology of the image is naturalized.

Analytical approach

The analysis presented in this paper is a combination of what Rose (2016, 35) calls ‘compositional interpretation’ and a more traditional semiotic reading based on the concept of myth outlined by Barthes (1987, 2013). Semiotics provides a useful tool for a close reading of the content of an image, but it is less sensitive to the elements in representations that are used to create atmospheres and affective reactions. This is what compositional interpretation supplies. Here, elements such as eye level and perspective, colouration and lighting, and contrast and balance can be considered part of how denotive signs come together and form myths. Since renderings in architectural competitions create imaginaries of the future, time becomes an additional component of interpretation.

The basic element of semiotic analysis is the sign. A sign is a carrier of meaning and consists of the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the word or image, while the signified is the mental concept invoked; together, they form a sign. Myth is based on the same logic, but it is a second-ordersystem, which means that signs themselves become signifiers or forms that evoke a signified or a concept, which, together, create a new meaning, a myth.

Myth is the level at which social meaning can be discerned. It represents history as nature while hiding all the relations of power and production that shape it (Barthes 2013). The relationship between the signifier and the signified is both arbitrary and unstable; that is, they may change atthis second-ordersemiotic level, and when they do change, so can the myth they form. The point here is not that knowledge or analysis is impossible but that a lexicon of signs and meanings cannot be established. Hence, a reflective mode of analysis is required.

Rose (2016) utilized Barthes’ myth concept to connect signs to a wider system of meaning. The broader theoretical framework presented here outlines this context of meaning. In the following sections, the context of these renderings is further explored, beginning with their empirical context as products of architectural competitions under a waterfront redevelopment programme. They are then examined as a mode of representation, as urban imaginaries, and as art, creating a broad context of reference for interpretations.

Fjord city in Oslo: cases and data

The Fjord City plan is Oslo’s version of a waterfront development that has become common in cities worldwide, where former industrial and harbour areas are designated for redevelopment (Breen and Rigby 1996; Brownill 2010; Hein 2011; Marshall 2007; Smith and Garcia Ferrari 2012). It is the context for the cases studied here but is also interpreted as containing other aspects. The cases in Fjord City and those that are studied here include four architectural competitions and two parallel assignments. Parallel assignments differ from competitions in that they include only a handful of invited participants who are paid according to pre-negotiatedhours and fees. They are included here because while they are not supposed to have a winning firm, as in regular competitions, parallel assignments still often lead to one firm receiving a contract to realize their project.

The locations of the selected cases and the Fjord City planning area are shown in Figure 1. B6A/B6B and B9 (lot names in the Bjørvika plan) were the assignments, and the selected competitions were those for a new main library, new museum for Edvard Munch, new national museum, and Sørenga (the South Field). The four competitions were all international and either open or invitational, but with some open prequalifying slots. They all asked for buildings with clear identities and of the highest architectural quality. B6A/B6B was concerned with housing on 2 or 3 adjacent lots, whereas B9 is designated for housing on one lot. The Sørenga project covered a larger area and proposed an overall plan for housing developments with some mixed uses, whereas the other three competitions focused on single important buildings.

Figure 1. Map of Oslo’s Fjord City planning area and select cases.

(Data sources: Geovekst/Oslo Municipality)

The winners and runners-upwere identified for the selected competitions using jury reports and project evaluations. Images were then collected from multiple sources but mostly from jury or press reports on the competition results. The renderings are, in many cases, also presented on the architectural firms’ webpages and featured in architecture magazines (print or online). In total, 92 images were analysed. This paper also drew upon a series of 23 semi-structuredinterviews with architects and planners (both from the private and public sectors), as well as politicians and property developers. The interviews were invaluable in developing an understanding of these images and their functions. Owing to the high-profileand public nature of these cases and the quite limited population of potential informants, it was necessary to offer them anonymity. The consequence here is that quotes must appear unattributed, and descriptions of informants lack details.

The Fjord City development plan is executed and implemented through different municipal and state-ownedfirms (operating as independent entities) and public-privatepartnerships. HAV Eiendom is a firm fully owned by Oslo Harbour KF and is an independent organization of Oslo municipality that serves as the primary property developer for a large subsection of the Fjord City planning area, Bjørvika. As such, it has also served as a host to the architectural competitions for the new main library, new Munch Museum, and Sørenga and its parallel assignment B6A/B6B. After the competition and the following regulatory process, Sørenga was sold to a private joint venture, and B6A/B6B was sold to Oslo S Utvikling AS, which also received the B9 parallel assignment. Oslo S Utvikling is another major property developer in Fjord City and is owned by Entra ASA (a nationally leading property developer that was once state owned but is now completely privatized and publicly traded), Linstow AS (a private property developer), and Bana NOR Properties (a property developer fully owned by the Norwegian state, tasked with maintaining and developing all railway properties in Norway). A press release dated June 2021 announced Bane NOR’s plans to sell their share of Oslo S Utvikling to Entra and Linstow for950 million NOK. Lastly, Statsbygg, the national government property developer, hosted the competition for the new national museum. It is a clear example of the rollout phase of neoliberal governance (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010; Peck 2010; Wacquant 2012), in which the municipality uses an entrepreneurial mode of planning with the goal of attaining growth (Harvey 1989).

The new main library and Munch Museum flank the already iconic Oslo Opera House, which was created by Sn’hetta Architects (Hofseth 2008). Together with the new National Museum and the recently built Astrup Fearnly Museum of Modern Art (drawn by Renzo Piano), they form what the municipal government is promoting as the ‘new cultural axis’ that runs through the Fjord City planning area. The Fjord City plan itself does not explicitly invoke the label ‘creative city’, as promoted and made famous by researchers such as Florida (2005) and Landry and Bianchini (1995), but Aspen (2013) observed that ‘it plays upon many of the same features and ingredients that one can find in the international discourse on creative cities and culture-ledregeneration’. Sklair (2017) sees developments like this as driven by the transnational capitalist class, promoted by local fractions, to enhance inter-urbancompetitiveness, create investment, and generate growth.

Fjord city imaginaries

The images included in this paper represent a small selection of the set that was analysed. The analysis examined the images as outputs from the competition process rather than the work of specific architects. The images included are intended to illustrate the general findings and do not single out any one architect, firm, or project.

In the analysis, the selection of images was approached in two ways. The first assessed the images through themes such as the use of colour, lighting, and other elements of atmosphere and technique.The second examined the contents of the images and what people, objects, and activities are included and excluded or minimized.

Semiotic jargon can be quite dense, and a danger when using this analytical approach is that one spends too much time applying labels to different elements. To keep the analysis focused, not all first-ordersigns are accounted for in all images; rather, illustrative examples are used, and what is presented is mostly restricted to the level of myth. Architectural images are rich representations, and listing all first-ordersigns for all images in the collection is simply not practical or informative.

Some differences should be noted between the competitions for significant single buildings (often aimed at creating iconic architectures such as the Munch Museum, main library, and National Museum), as the competitions are aimed at housing and mixed uses. While not iconic, these projects must be brandable. The distinctions made in this analysis should be understood as tendencies because the differences are not consistent enough to constitute mutually exclusive categories.

Aesthetics

The images created have mostly high contrast, with distinct and saturated colours. Bright-colourpalettes dominated, and sunlight hit the buildings so that they reflected beautifully in the water of the Oslo Fjord. They used only a few carefully selected angles and views, showing off the best sides and key features of the projects. The buildings became signs of beauty and attractiveness. A few of the renderings in each project were made from high, wide angles to show their integration into the cityscape (Figures 2 and 3), and a few renderings were from a human eye-levelperspective closer to the buildings, giving a more detailed look at their facades (Figures 4 and 5).

Figure 2. From B6A/B6B, by Pushak Architects/Mir.

Figure 3. From B6A/B6B, by Dyrvik Arkitekter/Luxigon.

Figure 4. From B9, by Spor Arkitekter.

Figure 5. From B9, by LINK arkitektur as/BRICK visual.

When showing iconic buildings, the intended meaning is that the buildings are special – something better than what existed in the same space before. Thus, despite the significant seasonal differences in the Norwegian climate, most images show the buildings during the summer, often bathed in the warm sunlight common to late summer evenings and a low-settingsun. Most projects also used daylight illustrations, and only a few night-timerenderings were found. The iconic architecture is subject to more dramatic renderings, with contrast and saturation pushed even further. The lighting effects become even more pronounced, with specular lights on reflective surfaces and warm sunlight or buildings that seem to illuminate their surroundings (Figures 6 and 7). Figures 6 and 8 are images for use in ways like what Tostrup (2010) described as self-explanatoryrepresentations of unambiguous goodness. The images are used as arguments themselves. Everyone can see how great this is, so no further debate is necessary. However, the long and heated debate over the Munch Museum and the lack of controversy over the new library indicate that this does not always work.

Figure 6. From the new main library, by Lund-Hagemand Atelier Oslo.

Figure 7. From the new Munch Museum, by Christ & Gantenbein and Lie Øyen arkitekter AS.

Figure 8. From the Munch Museum, by Herreros Arquitectos and Kulturbygg KF.

Contents

The second part examines the content of the images, people, things, and activities that fill out the renderings alongside the proposed architecture. Their function is to give the building proper context; sometimes, they are even rendered transparent, allowing us to see the building through them. There are people and activities depicted in almost all of them, both in the background and foreground.

What the renderings show are signs of a healthy, safe, clean, and enjoyable city. The people depicted are able-bodied;the pictures show neither canes nor wheelchairs. There are quite a few children and youths and many prams and strollers. This city is dominated by people in their thirties and forties, even when a rendering occasionally includes an older couple. It is difficult to make out all the details, and the scale often makes the humans small, but there are only two people of colour in this collection, although immigrants and Norwegian-borncitizens with immigrant parents make up a significant percentage of the city’s population, which is 33.1% in 2018 (Statistics Norway 2018). Most people travelling or resting in these spaces do so as part of a pair or group. The homeless, beggars, and drug users who can be found in most central parts of Oslo are not seen in these images. The images show a limited group of individuals, and the diversity envisioned by the Fjord City plan is not rendered here.

The seemingly public urban spaces and buildings in these images appear to be populated by people from the upper or educated classes. Thesmall day-cruisersand elegant, moderately sized sailboats that crop up in the renderings fit well with the myth of the non-ostentatious,Norwegian way of being wealthy. There are almost no cars, although when included, they are small, few, and sometimes blurred or simply represented as colourful light trails, as if photographed with a long shutter speed. A few people are walking with their bikes, but no one is running or travelling fast. Along with many different small boats, there is also a curious number of kayaks; amongst the renderings in this collection, most that included images of the water at the right scale included at least one kayak. A central element of the Fjord City plan that repeatedly appears in related documents is the activation of the connection between the city and the water to activate the waterfront. The boats and kayaks might be such an activation. Furthermore, there is an emphasis on healthy living, of which the kayaks are also a sign. A study of leisure activities by Statistics Norway shows that kayaking, along with canoeing and rowing, is quickly increasing in popularity but that it is limited to people in the upper-incomebrackets (Vaage 2015).The day cruisers, sailboats, and kayaks are signs of a certain lifestyle and socio-economicstatus of the people that these neighbourhoods are built for.

In competitions, where iconicity is part of the assignment, people in the renderings can become less important and sometimes appear only as silhouettes. These renderings show the existing urban context with greater accuracy, often creating collages with the new building rendered into a photograph taken of the future building site. People in these renderings seem to be more on the move, coming and going to the iconic building, making them signs of increased attractivity and activity.

Projects centred on housing, with services, shops, and public functions integrated on the ground floor, tend to show people engaged in different activities. Spaces between buildings are depicted as true public spaces (Figure 6), making these images a sign of a city that people can inhabit and make their own. People sit down and inhabit the places next to the buildings to a larger degree than iconic building projects. However, there are usually more people moving than sitting still. Other buildings and the surrounding urban context are often rendered as white blocks that fade out in the distance; much less effort is usually given to showing the project’s real context. The usual separation between the outside service areas, cafés, and restaurants that can be observed along typical waterfronts like this are never rendered.

Landscapes

Having first considered how renderings and their contents look in detail, it is now time to consider these renderings as landscape representations. The renderings show that urban spaces radically changed from their historical uses. The waterfront that used to be dominated by industry and shipping is transformed into clean and harmonious urban spaces. There are no traces left that hint at the historic function of these areas. Close to the new National Museum, located in Aker Brygge, gigantic H-3 semi-submersibleoil drilling riggs were constructed until 1982. Nyland Mechanical Yards built ships for 150 years in the areas where the Opera and the Munch Museum now reside. Where tankers, whalers, and passenger ships used to roll off the line, the waterfront now features small sailingyachts, day cruisers, and kayaks. The renderings show the fundamental transformation of these downtown areas. The changes have been gradual, but the renderings show the dramatic accumulation of changes over time and those yet to come. When the rest of the city is either hidden or abstracted into white boxes (see Figures 2, 3, and 7), history disappears entirely. Just as in other landscapes, these renderings erase the labour that makes them (Mitchell 2000). The renderings show how the waterfront spaces have moved from work to leisure, from the working class to the upper-middleclass, and from industrial to post-industrialurbanism. The closest that the renderings come to show any kind of work are the open facades on the ground floors and the café-styleseating along what one may assume are spaces for retail and services. While changes in landscapes often take the form of destroying ways of life (Mitchell 2003), in this case, they simply hide the elements that do not fit the desired image of the city. Norway is still largely an oil-basedeconomy, and many of these firms have headquarters in Oslo. One of the private investors in Oslo S Utvikling, Linstow AS, is based on the capital accumulated from shipping, cruise lines, and the oil service industry. Despite these changes, the landscape rendered here is largely produced by the same relations of production.

The rendering of the new main library in Figure 6 is a particularly interesting example. The city is relatively dark, and people are but silhouettes against the dimmed lights of the city in the background and the clean white snow in the foreground. The rendering has a building almost perfectly located according to the rule of thirds, indicating that this is the main sign in the image. The building also glows with a warm white tone bordering on a deep yellow that seems to emanate from the centre of the building and grants the primary source of light in the image. The image shows how this building gives off light and, therefore, life to the city. This image, with its faceless people in the foreground and a glowing building in the distance, seems to reference the landscape painting ‘Soria Moria Castle’ by Theodore Kittilsen from Norway’s national romantic period, using this well-knownsign of ‘Norwegian-ness’but transforming it from a rural to an urban image. This connects the city to a national culture that has been predominantly rural, if not anti-urban.Stagni (2019) makes a similar observation after analysing the renderings by MIR of the underwater restaurant ‘Under’ by Snøhetta. Here, the rendering draws on the dramatic effects of weather and light typical in romantic landscape paintings such as Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer’ or ‘Meeresufer im Mondschein’.

Renderings were created for the final round of the National Museum competition, in which the proposed buildings were superimposed onto photographs of the existing city (Figure 9). While there is little to see in terms of the area’s industrial history, these images force a bit more realism into the renderings or, at least, the normal elements of an actual urban area. Suddenly, construction cranes, ferries, trams, and traffic emerge. A few features snow, and since they are actual photos of Oslo in winter, much of the snow is dirty. These renderings offer a less idealized image of the city, and at first glance, they may seem more realistic in the context of this collection. However, first, they still function as landscapes showing and hiding in selective ways and not revealing any hint of their production. Second, the buildings are just as idealized as in other renderings. The main architectural feature of the new National Museum – its alabaster hall and main entrance – offers warm light promising shelter from a city that looks cold (Figure 9). These renderings may do less to promote post-industrialurbanism, but the power of these renderings is that they make the buildings look like they are already there.

Figure 9. From the National Museum, by MIR/Kleihues + Schuwerk/Statsbygg.

These landscapes are clearly made for commercial purposes, but still, as Zukin (2000) argues, a compromise remains, not between place and market but between architecture and commerce. These visualizations have become an expected means of communicating architectural ideas and visions of the future. Architects know that they represent the best possible outcomes, but that the subsequent development of the project often leads to compromises in facade materials and other elements.

Imaginaries and landscapes

As landscapes, the imaginaries analysed here differ from the regular form of landscape in that they show something about the future. They show how the city is about to become or will become if those who made the rendering get their way. The future of the images is often separated from the past by making the past – the existing city – fade into the background, an abstraction, or hidden altogether. These coming buildings are, of course, rendered in pristine condition. There is no sign or mark of use, as if the everyday urban scene playing out in the rendering has no effect on the buildings. The city is untouched by time and robust against both weather and use. Indeed, according to Cairns and Jacobs (2017), architecture has difficulty handling the decay of its objects. Managing dirt, grime, dross, and damage requires labour; someone has to maintain the city, but they are, of course, nowhere to be seen. The newness invites another reading of buildings as signs, which means that these projects are good because the buildings are new, innovative, and future-oriented.

Furthermore, newness also connects to the rationale of the competition, which to a certain degree dictates that the time that the building is new is the most important for the building. This is to say that it is when the building is new that people pay attention; this is when its status is achieved. The history of an architectural structure is written when it is new. The flow of investments, human capital, and tourists must quickly increase for any project to be regarded as successful.

The future orientation of architectural competitions is clear: the goal is to build something new or even renew the old. The images here show a city that might appear different, but the landscape imagined is based on the same relations of power that produced the previous one. The housing projects B6A/B6B, B9, and Sørenga are all aimed at the higher end of the property market, and their architectural renderings show this. The new library, Munch Museum, and National Museum are all presented as iconic urban flagships. These imaginaries are more about keeping the post-industrialcity going and maintaining the existing relations of power that govern the city’s production spaces.

What the compositional and content-orientedanalysis revealed here is the result of a set of choices about what and whom to include or exclude. The renderings followed certain patterns and relied heavily on the photorealistic mode of representation. The urban imaginaries analysed are photorealistic landscapes that represent future architectural projects in highly selective ways and in a mode of representation that effectively hides their nature as produced and the ideology on which they are based. Digital images are not the problem, as one can create representations that replicate the same pattern of inclusion and exclusion. However, photorealism is achieved only through the use of specialized software.

Compared with Figure 10, a hand drawing in the style of the Norwegian architecture Odd Brockman of the same Munch Museum shown in (Figure 8) would have been just as an effective, if not more truthful, mode of representation, given how the building eventually ended up looking (Figure 11). Truthful here does not mean more accurate and truer to the lived experience; rather, it means the obviously abstract nature of the image with which any viewers must engage their own imagination to understand the proposed building. Photorealism induces an intuitive, pre-reflexiveunderstanding by mimicking photographs, but the drawing clearly requires a different engagement to be understood. The hand-drawnimage is clearly an abstraction, but what all the ‘missing’ elements and other choices of exclusion and inclusion analysed here show is that the rendering is, in reality, just as abstract. It misleads by representing abstraction as complete reality.

Figure 10. The finished Munch Museum, drawing by Svein Foss.

Figure 11. Photograph of the Munch Museum under construction, with its facade finished. Photo by author.

Conclusion

The renderings studied here have a lot in common with the images analysed by Degen, Melhuish, and Rose (2016) and Nastasi (2016), particularly their aestheticization of urban spaces. Architectural competitions seem to invite a way of seeing urban spaces that adheres to the norms of these visualizations rather strictly. At the same time, they invite a narrow look at projects and may, in some cases, offer only a superficial understanding of the projects’ quality. Libraries can help develop social networks and build resilience in communities, although whether the architecture of the new main library has the potential to fulfil such functions cannot be read from its architectural rendering. This shows why some architects are uncomfortable with the current mode of architectural representation. The appearance of complete building projects is fundamentally misleading when it comes to competition architecture; at this stage, what is presented are ideas and proposals or perhaps even just potentials. According to a senior architect at a major firm, the idea that their end products would be compared with the renderings is completely laughable. However, recent debates in Norway over the mismatch of the Munch Museum as built and its rendering show that this is exactly what can happen.

Altogether, the imaginaries produced by the architectural competitions in Fjord City analysed here propagate the myths of the attractive city. The renderings show a beautiful, clean, and organized city occupied by the ideal kind of people: in good health, with friends or family, and with enough income to engage in rather selective forms of recreation. It is a myth of the city designed ‘for everybody’ but without anyone old, sick, or lonely. It presents a mythical urbanism that is without friction or conflict. The attractive city is presented for the consumption of a novel commodity of the experience economy, while architectural renderings hide any relations of labour or property. The power of such a myth has been demonstrated elsewhere. Harms (2012), for instance, showed how residents consistently ended up aligning themselves with ideals of beauty, even if it meant driving projects that led to their eviction. The promise of a more beautiful city can, as Harms (2012) further argued, be read as a classic legitimizing strategy and as a way ‘in which dominant interests assert their rule via claims to expertise’ (747).

It makes sense, then, to view architectural competitions as a process that operates within the moment of representations of space and spatial production that, according to Lefebvre (2009, 33), is the domain of architects, planners, politicians, and other experts. Architectural competitions can, at one level, be understood as competitions between different representations. Given the commonalities between the renderings across cases, it seems reasonable to assume that the architects know and understand what is asked of them by the developers, jury members, and politicians. In this way, the representations of space are coordinated with the consequence of limiting what spatial practices will be welcomed or resisted and, in turn, shape lived spaces. In other words, architectural competitions produce not only renderings of the city but also a particular way of seeing the city. Lefebvre (2009) writes, ‘We may be sure that representations of space have practical impact, that intervene in and modify spatial textures which are informed by effective knowledge and ideology’ (42). Architectural competitions and their way of seeing are expressed in the representations it produces. Their contents describe the myth of an attractive city, as described above. According to Lefebvre (2009, 45), the classic perspective as a mode of representation is a ‘perfect illustration’ of how representations of space have been combined with ideology and knowledge within a socio-spatialpractice. The knowledge and technology of computer rendering have been combined with the dominant ideologies within urban planning through architectural competitions and have produced a way of representing the city that is highly useful and productive for certain actors. It is a way of seeing urban spaces that utilizes de Certeau’s (1988) totalizing eye and the same drive to shape spaces through ideology that is contained in certain landscape representations.

Architecture in general and architectural competitions in particular are reliant on modes of visual communication and representations that function. While a hand drawing was used here to further a critique of photorealistic renderings, this does not mean that architecture must return to the pre-computerage. First, creating renderings that are generally more realistic and less idealized, both in terms of the building itself and its environment, is something that architects should strive for. The reason is simply ethics. Freeman (2013) asked an important question of how much digital ‘correction’ is permissible before the image becomes fraudulent.

Architects must look for modes of communication, visualization, and representation that engage diverse audiences in a more constructive way than the photorealistic illusion of completeness. The strength of architectural competitions is their ability to communicate ideas about cities and the urban future. Commenting on urban imaginaries, Dunn (2018) writes, ‘When working at their best, urban imaginaries act as conduits for ideas and are able to share and explore pluralistic possibilities to reconsider the world we live in’ (376). Dunn’s argument builds on a much broader set of imaginaries from many different media, including narrative media. However, there is a common element here in the centrality of imagination. Unfortunately, the images in the sample collected here might also point to architectural competitions creating what Dunn (2018) calls an imaginative lock-in.The Fjord City plan, with its entrepreneurial mode of governance and neoliberal understanding of the city, has likely contributed to such a lock-in.To function as described by Dunn (2018), architects must find ways of visualizing and representing that which actively engages the imagination of their audiences. Thus, representations must be more open to engagement and perhaps not appear so final and polished. As Sennett and Sendra (2020) argue, the key to good cities is open modes of design rather than closed designs. Unfortunately, this study shows that the current mode of photorealistic landscape representations fails to achieve this. While architecture is always useful, it is also a practice of design, creativity, and a form of art. This critique of the current mode of representation should be read just as much as an argument for architects to be creative and experiment with different and more open modes of communication. For those hosting or consulting on competitions, this could be accomplished by relaxing the specification and the specificity of briefs and competition rules, thus making competitions more about the ideas than the finished product and therefore closed projects. This could also mean less standardisation in the competition process; for instance, participants themselves could be allowed to choose how best to communicate and present their projects, even allowing miniature models for firms that prefer that way of working.

This project has some clear limitations. One is the lack of opportunity to discuss how these images are used in a different context, as the focus was on the images alone. An interesting next step could be to analyse in what media and context these images are used and how they are mobilized for different ends. Second, the sample size was too small. All the examples studied were from a development dominated by an entrepreneurial mode of urban governance and neoliberal ideologies of urban redevelopment. A comparative study with other samples from other redevelopments in different political and cultural contexts may reveal the effect of this context on the images generated by architectural competitions. A study using broader examples from sites of architectural communication other than those in the architectural competition would also be an interesting and important next step.

Acknowledgments

Prof. Per Gunnar Røe’s and Prof. Donald McNeill’s valuable and constructive suggestions on this research and their input on the earlier drafts of this paper are greatly appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).