Rendered Futures: Drawing Architecture

INTERVIEW | ISSUE EIGHT | SCREENS

Micheal McCabe in conversation with Skye Lunson-Storey (they/them) | @uku_rangi |

Arts, Culture, & Te Ao Māori Editor

Rendered Futures: Drawing Architecture was an exhibition curated by Micheal McCabe and Kim Paton. Held in 2025 at Objectspace in both Tāmaki & Ōtautahi, it charts five decades of architectural drawing in response to today's stylised digital render.

Skye: Rendered Futures as an exhibition, quote, "brings together drawings from more than fifty Aotearoa architects, spanning recent graduates and practising architects across multiple generations, tracing the shift from hand drawing to digital rendering." Do you see screens as simply another drawing tool, or have they fundamentally changed the way architects think?

Micheal: I think of Rendered Futures as a counter argument to the idea that the digital is the dominant and singular way that we can represent architecture in the field of architecture. The multiple generations demonstrate that a variety of drawing practices have actually been opened up through the digital. Often it is the older generation who are the people on the iPad doing the drawings. It’s important that people like Pete Bossley are so adamant about using it as a tool. Almost like a page or a book, but is allowed to be shared, annotated, and worked over by other people. Conversely, younger generations are really thinking about the analogue as a critical site investigation. Thinking about expanded practices like printmaking as ways to extend and enrich their drawing practice. In that, I consequence their appreciation and understanding of architecture. Not just as a representation of a final building or a thing made to be solved and communicated to a client; but instead something with a motive force and enriched through an engagement of material, craft, and more importantly, time. The mediacy of the digital allows you to be efficient and generate ideas in different ways but I think always has to be measured and worked with the analogue. That is what the show articulates across time and the many generations. It’s about an expansion of practice, less so a contraction of one.

Skye: The exhibition suggests that digital tools can standardise architectural representation. Do you think we've lost something in moving from paper to screen, or have we gained new forms of creativity that wouldn't exist otherwise?

Micheal: Similar to my previous answer, I think the digital has become much easier to commodify. Because it does make processes more efficient, it aligns us through building information, management, and CAD programs, which are about pulling in not just the architect but also structural engineers, electrical engineers, and plumbing. We’re able to build these incredibly complex models that by every nature has to be standardised and professionalised to be of relevance and of use to people. Practices now have people like BIM managers, whose specific job is to manage these highly complex files. I feel these often do take away the creative act that may have been present. For older practitioners who are embracing the digital, they also understand the benefit of not having to stand over a drawing board, to not spend hours upon hours making a drawing that may be rejected or not relevant for the client. While we move towards these standardised practices, it's remiss to also romanticise the difficulty of labour when things were only analogue. In terms of expanding practice, we should always use tools that are relevant and appropriate to where we are in the design process, and to the processes we are trying to enact; relevant to the different communities we are trying to engage and communicate to. Maybe this is a bit techno-optimist, but I think that allows us to be more discerning in our practice and make sure we're balancing the challenges of time, labour, and money. Also, audience, community, and creativity that sit alongside all those things.

Skye: Architectural renders are often designed to feel polished and persuasive. How do you think the aesthetics of the ‘screen’ influence what we expect architecture to look like, even before it's built? In certain designs are you still able to communicate a sense of mauri in the site and place?

Micheal: I think rendering in some ways has flattened the expression or understanding of architecture by people not familiar with the discipline. It’s very rare that you get to see architectural drawings by architects that aren't on the back of a billboard or the side of a bus. By those very natures they are specifically geared towards commerce through capital; the idea of selling architecture and by consequence selling land with the many colonial implications of that. To me though, the render is a complicated drawing that I don't particularly like to talk about when working with students. I like to think about how you can enrich it in other ways like drawing or drawing into. The work of Icao Tiseli, thinks about Pacific cartographies as ways to orient people in space. She uses digital softwares like Rhino to extract initial wireframes that are then drawn upon, then printed out, then gilded and painted on. That is a kind of way that you can start to imbue the digital with mauri, with lifeforce, that pulls it out of this flattening space. But it’s something I’m interested in interrogating further as we become increasingly tethered to the digital. It’s a question we have to ask in Aotearoa, in particular with projects that are in partnership with Mana Whenua and iwi; how do we represent their values, their pūrākau, their landscapes, in a way that uplifts and honours the mana of those places.

Skye: One of the exhibition's themes is that architectural drawing can be a form of advocacy and experimentation, not just technical communication. In an age where so much design is consumed through Instagram, websites, and digital portfolios, what kinds of architectural work become more visible, and what risks are being overlooked?

Micheal: There are a variety of drawings by advocacy within Rendered Futures. Particularly, one of the first drawings you entered on was the work of Hatch which is Hannah Broatch and Mason Rattray. They were working with Palestinian communities through WhatsApp. They worked with them to create an instructional manual on how to make a composting toilet. This is an example of working within the constraints of the digital, i.e., literally being able to message on a phone, trying to lower the fidelity of the drawing so it’s able to be transmitted with low kilobytes. It’s an interesting way to think about the constraint of a messaging service, the production of a digital drawing, and how those things have direct consequence with communities at risk or at need. In a different vein, the work of Groupwork/Tessa Forde really thinks about the drawing as a place of communal advocacy, bringing together a multitude of voices and understandings of architecture. Not a plan, not a section or an axonometric, but as a diagram that allows us to map into our values, the practices we align with, and the landscapes we are connected to. That is where architectural drawing can begin to push beyond the purely representative or figurative intention, but actually think about it as a tool of site and inquiry. 

Skye: With AI image generation, real-time rendering, and virtual environments becoming more common, what do you think the next major shift in architectural drawing might be? One of the architecture tauira at AUT, mentioned the possibility of designing in VR. What are your thoughts on that? 

Micheal: Our tauira are kinda on the money with this, and I say that because of the work of Mitra Homolja and Ellie Tuckey that came out of Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. They worked with rangatahi in Ōtautahi, working in this sort of VR space to allow rangatahi to design their own spaces. Not thinking about drawing for architects by architects, but thinking about how we can translate tools to engage communities so they have a sense of agency over things that are made for them. That is an interesting way we can think about the application, the purpose, and opportunity created by real-time rendering. Otherwise it becomes another vehicle for letting boomers go through luxury apartments in real-time. To me, that's where the real opportunities are for architecture as an alliance to our communities, understanding the urgency of our time, and using these tools to extend and enrich our practices. To be less inwardly facing and consider the implications of practice or how can we expand to include others? In terms of AI but also really advanced digital drawing, the work of arc/sec Lab: Uwe Rieger and Yinan Liu, that were included in Rendered Futures, really look optimistically at these technologies. In one of their talks they spoke about the character of AI, reflecting on their own practices and how to begin to consider not just the tool itself but the way in which we wish to engage it and what attributes we begin to imbue into that technology. I think that is an optimistic way to approach the criticism of digital tools and drawing. That we’re not just refusing them, but actively looking for opportunities within them, and understanding how we can work alongside various intelligences. 

Skye: Your work spans architecture, galleries, curation, theatre, public art, and education. How has working across these disciplines changed the way you think about designing experiences for people, rather than just designing objects or spaces?

Micheal: I think a lot about how I came into architecture, which was actually through theatre design. In high school I designed my first set. As part of theatre you're always thinking about how to translate story and experience into an environment that other people can watch and then engage with. This had been quite fundamental to my own practice. I am always thinking about how an architecture – whether or not it's the architecture of an exhibition, a public artwork, or the theatre – how these things begin to shape, alter, and support the ways people interact with physical objects or things that exist within a space. I always ask my students to consider what tools are available for architects. Maybe more traditionally those are floors, walls, windows, and doors. They are about an approach to a building. They are about how those elements form a facade, a room, or space. We have to critically inquire how those things are deployed and what kind of experiences they support. In terms of Rendered Futures it is quite purposely confusing as a layout. It’s actually designed as a spiral. It's about trying to pull you into the space, a type of simulation of an archive, where across time you begin to sift through, revealing more drawings upon drawings, and those things layer on top of each other. Their associations begin to emerge by patterns, approaches, mediums, and ways of seeing site, or in this case even drawing types. The placement of those works were never about trying to create this perfect survey or thematic grouping but instead understanding a network or spiral of connection across time, across practice, and across generations.