There has been a distinct shift in the priorities for communicating tall buildings over the last decade.

10 years ago, the emphasis was on square footage, office space, and the speed of elevators getting you to the 60th floor. Now we are seeing a much greater focus on green buildings, well-being, the responsibility to ‘touch the ground lightly’ and contribute to the public realm at street level, and a shift from predominantly commercial to more residential and mixed-use towers. These conversations are taking place not just in London and the UK but globally, in cities like New York, Toronto, Seattle and Miami, and are leading to more creative and innovative collaborations with our clients.

In 2014 the biggest requirement was for contextual views from a distance which would accurately represent the potentialimpact that a building would make on a city skyline. In London, tall buildings are still being designed to fit into city clusters in line with the London Plan and designated protected views, whereas in New York for example, there is a greater degree of freedom allowing for buildings which are designed to stand out rather than fit in, with bolder, more sculptural designs.

But aesthetics is only part of the picture. An ever-increasing amount of our current work focuses on the ground-level, human experience and how to invite people into a building, highlighting amenities and public realm that will make them feel welcome. More often now, our visualisations are about communicating the potential of a building to a much wider group of stakeholders, beyond just the building users.

That conversation will often start long before planning, helping to inform design decisions, and may require a much more varied range of images, styles and perspectives than before. Using visualisation to open up the dialogue earlier and to a wider group of people means doing things differently and exploring the potential of technology to drive engagement.

To date, the industry has still largely been constrained to the same rigid verified methodology for planning applications, but new technology is giving us the ability to offer an on-street experience of proposed new buildings. At Hayes Davidson,we’ve been developing new tools and apps including HDScope, launched last year, which offers a much greater degree of flexibility and allows us to view proposed tall buildings from anywhere in the city. We're looking at more dynamic ways tovisualise future buildings, using 360 video which better illustrates the whole experience rather than just offering a fixed still image. 

Storytelling is a crucial part of engaging new and diverse audiences in discussions around the built environment, and showing the potential experiences that a building might offer requires an approach which is more artistic than technical. While tall buildings are now offering more amenities at ground level to invite people in and make them feel welcome, the process of visualising those schemes is also reflecting that deeper level of engagement.

We are currently working on a tall building project in London which will include new public spaces, and have collaboratedwith our client to create assets for planning which also represent and engage the existing local community. We held a filming day with locals, including them in the conversation about a building which will have a big impact on their day-to-day lives. We are also working on several retrofit projects where we have created AR tools that allow potential tenants to visit the site and see on a 1:1 scale what the refurbished floor plate will look and feel like.

Visualisation has always sat at a fascinating nexus between science and art, with technology now playing a growing role in the democratisation of the built environment and our ability to better communicate with people. We are excited to see what the next 10 years will bring.