Is this built? The labile limit between architectural photography and rendering, a new aesthetic

Nowadays, as a result of a global process, architecture is being communicated mostly by images in a global trend that even for architectural competitions ask to the architects for images in order to evaluate the project more than for drawings or traditional models. Architectural photography and its relationship with architecture itself has been long and deep studied, but the academy is still reticent to admit that there is a different kind of architectural images, those that are produced in a synthetic way, so called rendering, that are strongly influencing the aesthetics of architectural photography, and so, of our aesthetical concept of architecture. We have studied the generation and composition of architectural renders since its origins, focusing in how the evolution of different softwares has led to produce both more realistic renders and to manipulate digital photography beyond limits we didn’t expect. Nowadays, it’s hard for us to distinguish an architectural render from photography. At the basis of this confusion there is no only an improvement of the realistic possibilities of the 3d rendering engines that tend to reproduce reality, but also the postproduction and the framing of the architectural photographs, which are coming together into a new aesthetic, hybrid between natural and synthetic effects of the light. In our research we analyse the publications of several architectural magazines and competitions both from an artistic and composition perspective but also from a technical point of view of its creation and we confront it with the work of the most outstanding architectural photographers of our time. We also make a deep study of the most recent artistic practices which put at the centre of its research and message the actual panorama of architecture. It seems very clear that there is a sort of contamination between disciplines, rendering, photography, and architecture and that this mix has a characteristic aesthetic that plays in an undefined ground between the imagination and the reality, between photography and rendering