Last spring, several months into the pandemic, a series of images appeared on Instagram, depicting a luxury home nestled into the cliffs of the Scala dei Turchi, on the coast of Italy. The building appeared to be sculpted from cream-colored adobe, and its rounded, uncovered windows and doors looked out over a peaceful aquamarine sea. Furniture by Gerd Lange for Bofinger and Le Corbusier sat invitingly by an ocean-fed pool; inside, Picasso ceramics were arranged artfully around a minimalist seating area, and bathed in early-afternoon light. The residence, Villa Saraceni, was the work of designers Riccardo Fornoni and Charlotte Taylor. It also didn’t exist in real life: the house was built with rendering software, and its design was entirely speculative. In reality, the Scala dei Turchi is a tourist destination that has seen erosion and damage from overuse. In 2007, the surrounding municipality applied to designate the area a UNESCO World Heritage site, and last year it was seized by Italian authorities concerned with its preservation. Still, some admirers of Villa Saraceni were transfixed to the point of sending booking inquiries. “Gorgeous,” one Instagram user commented. “Do they rent?”
Instagram is full of such images: living rooms, patios, bedrooms, and estates that do not and will never exist. The pictures are strangely soothing, with their fanciful palettes, evocative silhouettes, and enticing water features. Sunken living rooms are full of pillows, or clouds; spiral staircases are wrapped in cyan glass. Against the backdrop of something resembling the Mediterranean, a striking, ergonomically nonviable chaise lounge is flanked by two human-size vases and a climatically confused cactus. A high-ceilinged, white-tiled, cerulean spa offers arched, curtained relaxation nooks painted in a soft pink. Atop a brass-plated console table, in front of a geometric, color-blocked backsplash, a floral arrangement seems to be suffering, in a dash of realism, from dehydration. The spaces project order and calm, and rely on a visual vocabulary of affluence, indulgence, and restraint. They are uncluttered and private; welcoming but undamaged by human use. They are also slightly sterile. Although some incorporate hints of activity—a rumpled bedspread, an open magazine placed poolside—the spaces are uninhabited. An important part of the fantasy, it seems, is the absence of other people.
Though C.G.I. models are nothing new, the technology has improved over the years, and the images have become increasingly realistic, as well as cheaper and faster to produce. (Since 2014, the bulk of images in the IKEA catalogue have been computer-generated.) Today, digital artists have a menu of software tools to choose from, including 3-D-modelling programs like SketchUp and Rhinoceros 3D, and rendering engines such as OctaneRender and Enscape. There is a large international talent pool of render artists: Fiverr, a marketplace for freelancers, has profiles for hundreds of artists in Nigeria, Ukraine, Vietnam, and Turkey, who offer rendering and 3-D-modelling services. YouTube tutorials abound—“10 Tips for a REALISTIC Interior Rendering”—and many have been viewed millions of times. To the trained eye, some of these images look less convincing than others. But, for the casual observer, they may scramble a sense of reality.
Certain elements—plastics, curves, and soft, indoor light—are more straightforward to create with 3-D-modelling software, and relatively fast for render engines to process. These features tend to dominate the genre of computer-generated fantasy architecture. (Curves also tend to be legible to the human eye, while sharp, precise edges register as unrealistic.) This has cohered into something like an aesthetic: colorful, spacious, textured, bold. The lighting is flattering, the edges are rounded, and the pools of water ripple just so. “We’re always trying to evoke a mood within the spaces,” Taylor, one of the artists behind Villa Saraceni, told me over the phone. “We always have the same low lighting, and it’s really this calming atmosphere, between fiction and reality.” Taylor is a co-founder of Dello Studio, a London agency specializing in set design, and also oversees Maison de Sable, a 3-D and moving-image studio that collaborates with render artists to produce digital dioramas featuring dreamlike and futuristic elements, such as sliding terrazzo walls and fantastical rock formations. Taylor often has five to ten fictional interiors in progress at once, and said that she preferred to sketch by hand before passing her designs to render artists—a process that could take anywhere from a week to several months.
Taylor tends to meet her collaborators on Instagram, where she is part of a loose community of like-minded designers. Some highlights from the world of C.G.I. interiors were showcased in “Dreamscapes & Artificial Architecture,” a collection of high-design render art released by the German publisher Gestalten, in 2020. “We have never before had such capacity to render the world as we would like it to be, which means 3D modeling software has the potential to be immensely liberating,” Rosie Flanagan wrote, in the book’s preface. If, she went on, “it can free architecture and design from the constraints of reality, then surely it can do the same for other aspects of our life.”
Like all high-end interior design, the computer-generated interiors that circulate on Instagram seem engineered for aspiration and projection. In an era concerned with “Instagrammability,” the images are considered but not intricate; like statement wallpaper in a restaurant bathroom, or the exaggerated set pieces at the Museum of Ice Cream, they scale nicely to a smartphone screen. Although some spaces tip explicitly into the dreamlike or surreal, others are strangely plausible: with enough time and money, a person could live in a home with a bathroom that contains both a VitrA soaking tub and a giant bonsai tree. Though the renderings are of a piece with other life-style content found across the Internet, and often reflect real-world design trends, monetization is slightly more complicated. One cannot use product tags, or collect affiliate revenue, for antiques that are out of production, or objects that do not exist.
Some of the lush digital interiors on Instagram are marketing and advertisement commissions, created by illustrators and design studios to showcase real home furnishings. Six N. Five, a studio based in Barcelona, regularly designs 3-D-rendered interiors in partnership with high-end brands; in 2018, as part of a campaign for a home-goods line, one of the firm’s members, Andrés Reisinger, created a video animation in which a gigantic black marble rolls through a landscape of pink tiles, pink sand, arched doorways, and undulating high-pile area rugs. In 2019, Dello Studio created Villa Ortizet, a model of a house in the South of France. (“Imagined in the South of France,” Taylor clarified, over the phone.) Initially, Taylor and her collaborator on the project, the architect Anthony Authié, of Zyva Studio, had considered seeding the villa with items by favored designers, with the thought that the house could later be monetized as a platform for paid product placement. Lately, Taylor has been more interested in incorporating objects from her own home, and from younger artists and furniture-makers, for a more personal touch. For most designers and architects trading in fictional interiors, however, the product is immaterial; what’s being advertised are the creator’s artistic services.
Among architects, the phrase “paper architecture” is used to describe conceptual designs, nonviable models, and artistic—or technological—provocations. Though the term is often applied pejoratively, it was briefly reclaimed in the nineteen-eighties by a group of young Soviet architects, who saw fantasy architecture as a mode of resistance against the practical, unadorned, bureaucratic homogeneity of Communist buildings. Their designs, by contrast, incorporated domes and columns of natural light, and were often populated by gleefully chaotic masses; this was architecture for collective life. “Paper architecture has often had a real utopian or critical underlying agenda to it,” Lindsay Caplan, an assistant professor of art history at Brown University, told me. Fictional architecture was often explicitly anti-capitalist, and emphasized the possibilities of a post-revolutionary society. Today’s C.G.I. interiors, on the other hand, offer a fantasy of individual consumption and relaxation, but suggest a certain amount of political indifference. “This seems like there’s no plan, no societal vision, no critique,” Caplan said. “Taking a historical view, to have anything appropriating fictional utopian architecture with no utopian vision is a bit depressing.”
The earlier part of the twenty-tens saw an explosion of “cabin porn” on Tumblr: a nostalgic, earthy aesthetic of Obama-era hipster Americana—all wool blankets and gas lanterns and flannel jackets—which, in hindsight, may have channelled a growing uneasiness about accelerating digitization. By contrast, the aspirational, hyperrealistic interior-design imagery on Instagram—some call it “renderporn”—isn’t wary of digital life. It is reminiscent of a screen saver, or a video game. It is out of time, immune to climate change and seasonal darkness. “There might be a way in which C.G.I. architecture is appealing because it completely disavows the reality of scarcity—monetary, planetary,” Caplan said. “There’s this fantasy of freedom, where the real pinnacle of freedom is doing whatever you want without any material constraints.” This particular understanding of freedom, Caplan said, had come to be associated with the Internet; with C.G.I. interiors, it was being concretized through architecture. “Of course, these technologies themselves are extractive and hugely resource-draining,” she added. “But there’s a way in which that whole fantasy of freedom from constraints is a kind of denial of other people, and a denial of these very constraints.” The fantasy is also one of financial escapism: nothing is unaffordable in a C.G.I. dreamscape, and rent is never due.
