Architectural presentations to clients typically include renders, diagrams, and drawings. Interpreting these and envisioning the final product requires imagination and architectural insight to fill in the gaps and visualize a final product. BIG and Squint/Opera, a partnership between an architectural powerhouse and a creative digital studio, explore innovative methods to convey spatial and architectural design beyond traditional means. They reimagine architectural storytelling beyond static 2D visuals through cutting-edge video production and immersive technology, enabling clients and the general public to fully experience their futuristic visions of city planning and architectural design. Their notable collaborations include the video production for the Toyota Woven City Project and the creation of the VR collaborative design tool HyperForm.
In a conversation with ArchDaily, Daniel Sundlin, partner at BIG, and Matt Quinn, Commercial Director at Squint/Opera, discuss their insights on the future of architectural digital storytelling.
AD: How did this collaboration start? What sparked the idea of partnering and using digital storytelling to convey architectural ideas?
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BIG Designs Toyota Woven City, the World’s First Urban IncubatorMQ: BIG and Squint/Opera started collaborating around 2012. I believe the first public project was Miami Beach Square. We were both early pioneers in using narrative-driven digital storytelling to communicate architecture, and it seemed quite natural to start working in collaboration, and we've been doing that regularly ever since.
DS: At BIG, we always aim to make our design process and projects collaborative and inspiring. The projects are born from a dialogue between people, the environment, and technology. Squint/Opera is a firm that understands the potential of using digital storytelling to highlight that dialogue and process. Their approach is very much about explaining ideas and connections rather than just showing off a finished design.
Miami Beach Square from Squint/Opera on Vimeo.
AD: Architecture firms have used architectural walkthrough video animations as a presentation tool. How do you see architectural storytelling evolving beyond that?
DS: Architectural storytelling will evolve with the introduction of more sophisticated AI, Integrated BIM Modelling, and truly portable immersive screen technologies like VR/AR. Shortly, I see a much more seamless process where you not only walk through your models but interact with them through avatars and use simulation data to test design ideas in real-time, being able to discuss the pros and cons of these tests.
MQ: We started playing around with this concept back in 2015 with Bjarke walking around lower Manhattan and sketching over buildings to explain the concept of 2 World Trade Center. A couple of years later, we went further into what this might look like as a real-time design tool, creating a concept film in collaboration with BIG and UNStudio for a visionary software platform called Spaceform. The huge advances we've seen in real-time gaming engines like Unreal, combined with cloud computing and premium hardware such as Apple Vision Pro, are allowing us to get closer and closer to this reality in 2024.
SpaceForm // SpaceForm from Squint/Opera on Vimeo.
AD: What types of technology have you implemented in your presentations, and how did these enhance your ability to describe your design?
DS: We still do plenty of renders and diagrams, but more and more, we're exploring hybrids - for example, inserting moving objects on top of a still render and adding sounds, rendering 360 images to insert in a VR headset, or generating AI images and mixing them with several design options. In many ways, we aim to help people connect with our project in the design phase through different senses, essentially painting a more complete picture of the experience. But what I find most intriguing about these new technologies is that they have the potential to completely change our design process, including the skills needed for the design process.
MQ: This is another aspect of why our studios work so well together - we share a culture that embraces technology wholeheartedly. We take inspiration from the fact that the digital toolbox for design is becoming more expansive, sophisticated, and accessible. Let's face it: there's been a seismic shift in the design process caused by the introduction of GPTs and Image generators, allowing for seemingly endless opportunities for exploration. We need to embrace the fact that the creative industry is now heavily powered by AI, and there's simply no going back.
AD: In what setting and with what type of projects or clients do you see this type of storytelling being most successful? What are its limitations?
DS: The Architectural design process has historically been quite a niche activity, consisting of producing abstractions like models, drawings, and sketches. I love the fact that new technologies invite people to this process in a very interactive and vivid way. With AR and VR, people understand immediately without needing to explain the design – because of this, it becomes less of a subjective interpretation and more of an immersive experience. I think this is very important when you interact with people who are not working with architects or designers regularly. We experience architecture through our senses, and the only limitations, as I see with screen technologies, are the understanding of smells and touch - textures and materials. Hopefully, we see these kinds of technologies emerge shortly. Sometimes a specific smell and a breeze are more powerful than the height of your ceiling!
The Architectural design process has historically been quite a niche activity, consisting of producing abstractions like models, drawings, and sketches. I love the fact that new technologies invite people to this process in a very interactive and vivid way. With AR and VR, people understand immediately without needing to explain the design – because of this, it becomes less of a subjective interpretation and more of an immersive experience.
MQ: Both BIG and Squint/Opera have assembled an incredibly unique client base within the built environment and beyond that shares an ethos of creating something extraordinary for the world. These personalities tend to be risk-takers and quite often radical thinkers who use narrative as a function of their business life, I.e., raising capital, launching new industries, or transforming legacy ones. The art of storytelling as a function of the design process, especially when it comes to the communication of ideas, is often a natural fit.
AD: What role will digital storytelling play in the architectural production/design process in the future? In your projects, how has it changed the architecture, nature of the projects, and outcome? Is there a growing trend among architecture firms to incorporate similar tools into their design processes?
DS: I hope there will be more social and mobile ways to share a digital immersive experience. Today, it's still very much an individual experience tied to a heavy and bulky interface. We have a lot to learn from the gaming industry, and I do see more and more cross-collaborations between the digital and physical professions. On the one hand, these technologies help us make decisions earlier in the design process, eliminating surprises later on or in the finished project. This is helpful because most designers take pride in knowing exactly what to expect from their designs. Essentially, what you visualize is what you get.
However, I'm a strong believer in the element of surprise - the moments that are less prescribed, intentionally ambiguous, and left to the user to define, inhabit, and transform. For example, we built a pavilion for the Serpentine Galleries that was intended as a shelf and seating structure. It was fully constructed out of extruded hollow elements. Kids and adults loved to slide through these tubes, moving from the inside to the outside – which was completely unexpected and acted as a source of social surprise and play.
MQ: A major innovation in computer gaming has been the development of open-world experiences that use narrative and visual cues to help guide the user on a journey that feels truly expansive. In many ways, this mimics how we interact with the physically built environment. We've been experimenting with creating easily navigable open worlds in which the primary goal is the communication of architectural and urban concepts - this very much feels like the future of how we'll come to conceptualize, design, and develop our physical world. It is quite a departure from traditional communication within architecture, which tends to be very linear: start, finish, end.
AD: How did the Toyota Woven City Project collaboration work?
MQ: Toyota represents the culmination of many years of collaboration between our studios and allowed us to be quite ambitious in the storytelling techniques we were able to deploy during CES, going beyond the screen and into a series of immersive scenarios. I'm happy to say that we have some even more exciting collaborations within this space coming soon, so stay tuned.
Rethinking how architects communicate their work has the potential to revolutionize both architectural communication tools and the design process itself. By bringing more voices to the table through accessible design tools, we move beyond mere abstractions to understand our work through the actual experiences users may have within these spaces. BIG and Squint/Opera's efforts have proven successful in reaching the public through their user-experience-focused communication. Their partnership highlights the power of effective architectural storytelling in engaging users and its yet-to-be-fully-uncovered potential.
Bjarke Ingels presents Toyota Woven City at CES from Squint/Opera on Vimeo.
