Here’s a plan of a home. Can you tell what the home looks like by looking at the plan? No? I can’t either.
How about the elevation below? Does it help? My answer would be, “a little, but I still don’t really get it.”
Part of my job is to help clients visualize the home I designed for them before it’s built to ensure they are satisfied with my work. Plans and elevations are not enough. These two dimensional representations simply cannot convey the feeling of three dimensional spaces or the impact of the architecture on the site. Virtually walking through the home via a 3d computer model provides a much greater understanding, but does not quite paint the whole picture, either.
But a rendering… now that can capture the essence of a design in an artistic way like nothing else can.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Here are four thousand:
Throw in a view or two from another perspective, and now you actually understand what you are building.
To this day, it amazes me that the vast majority of homes, even very expensive ones, are built with, at best, a few elevations and a plan. No physical model. No computer model. No renderings. I don’t know how they know what they are getting. Maybe they don’t care.