This is not quite news anymore, but some plans and lousy renderings of the U.S. embassy in Iraq were placed online by the architecture firm in charge of the design, Berger Devine Yaeger. Needless to say, the Department of Justice wasn’t too thrilled about having them on the public domain so they pulled the images down, the website was shutdown, etc. The thing is, you can still find them all over the web.
The design, I’m not even going to comment on. Nor on what this 104-acre monster implies in terms of the ‘temporary’ occupation, but I have to say though, that the renderings just suck. No global illumination, no raytracing, not even shadows, nothing. It all just looks like it was rendered in software rendering or something like that. The entourage is also terrible, just 1 dude guarding the whole complex, no snipers on rooftops, no tanks, nothing, very unrealistic. If they really wanted to sell this thing to people, and be able to proudly show this project, they should have just gone all out for ultra-real rendering.
The original news was brought up to light by Tom Engelhardt, read yahoo news here. A Washington Post article here, the BBC here.
Tags: architecture, war, wtf