Mirae Venture Building: new photos from Seoul

Yesterday we received new, quality photos of the Mirae Venture Building (aka "Live Cube"), an office building we designed in Pangyo, on the outskirts of Seoul. The building was just completed, although lobby furniture is not yet installed. I have not yet visited it, so my only experience is through these pictures. I've shown them to a few people, whose first reaction is usually, "Are those renderings?"

This has been a growing "problem" over the last ten years or so. Most obviously, rendering quality has begun to match the resolution of reality. Conversely, reality has also improved, becoming more seamless and cleaner, so photographs often appear fake. 

This building in particular is susceptible because the front facade is conceived as a sheer plane, inflected in response to the sloped garden opposite. The digital sensibility of this plane helps the photos to read as renderings.

Generally I have found that a built project tends to resemble the rendering more than you might expect. The rendering is truer than the old physical scale model we used to make, for example. A model is tactile -- it is an alluring object. But the flat rendered images give a much better sense of what being there will feel like.

And now - some A/B comparisons between renderings and photographs... (as always, click the image to view larger)