In the closing chapter of Archinect In-Depth: Visualization, we return to one Renaissance painting referenced in an earlier article from the series. What does this painting, and our wider series, teach us about the relationship between technology and visualization? What do they tell us about the potential for visualization to open new worlds not beholden to the natural laws of space and time?
Over the past four months, we traversed the Archinect In-Depth: Visualization series through the vehicle of evocative imagery. We explored the atmospheric recreation of the original Habitat 67 by Safdie Architects, Epic Games, and Neoscape, which used the latest visualization software to resurrect Moshe Safdie’s original vision for what remains one of the most recognizable architectural works of the twentieth century. Elsewhere, there was Mecanoo’s consistent competency in delivering architectural schemes whose aesthetics and aura fulfilled the promise of the architectural renders that preceded them. Meanwhile, Squint/Opera and Journey straddled the physical and digital, as well as fact and fiction, with their multi-dimensional recreation of King Kong smashing through the windows of the Empire State Building.
The three case studies we examined in the series showcase the technological capabilities of contemporary architectural visualization; where advances from gaming engines to augmented reality enable us to create digital images and environments increasingly indistinguishable from real life. Amid these impressive products of twenty-first-century computation, however, my mind continues to be drawn back to a painting from the 1460s.
The painting in question, pictured above, is the Flagellation of Christ, created by the Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca between 1468 and 1470. The piece was referenced briefly in our feature article on the origins of perspective drawing in Renaissance Italy, offering an early example of perspective being used in architectural representation. As we noted, the painting shows how Renaissance artists began applying perspective principles to architecture before doing so to human figures. In the painting, people retain a flat, two-dimensional form given depth only by the use of shadow and overlaps, while the architectural elements are given a three-dimensional treatment using a one-point perspective and a single vanishing point.
The phrase ‘between two worlds’ is often used figuratively, but here we can use it literally. The painting, which emerged only five decades after Brunelleschi’s initial experiments in perspective drawing, is literally caught between a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional world.
Although the human figures on the left background and right foreground appear oblivious to each other, the painting is clearly one where different worlds of space and time collide.
The Flagellation of Christ is caught not only between two worlds of space but two worlds of time. For art and architectural historian Adriano Marinazzo, the three figures in the painting’s foreground represent the past, present, and future. While the identities of these three figures remain a subject of debate among historians, it is widely believed they hail from Renaissance Italy, placing them in a different time period to the flagellation scene in the background involving Christ and Pontius Pilate. The theory that the left and right halves of the painting take place in different time periods is compounded not only by the use of the perspective’s orthogonal lines to cut the painting in half but from the observation that the flagellation scene is illuminated from the right and the Renaissance-era scene is illuminated from the left.
Although the human figures on the left background and right foreground appear oblivious to each other, the painting is clearly one where different worlds of space and time collide. Piero della Francesca made this even more apparent in an inscription on the painting’s original frame, which has since been lost. “Convenerunt in Unum” the inscription read, which translates from Latin to English as “They come into one.”
As Archinect In-Depth: Visualization ends, there are two messages embedded within the Flagellation of Christ that speak to the findings and themes of the eight-part series.
Firstly, as we explored above, the painting demonstrates the ability of art and visualization to break established rules. While our built environment remains governed by three dimensions of space and one of time, visualized environments are not bound to such constraints. This observation was central to our previous profile of Squint/Opera and Journey, which today use media technology as a vehicle not to leave our spatial and temporal dimensions behind but to find a portal through them. Studios such as Journey are therefore searching for what our article dubbed a “blended reality,” where, to borrow Piero della Francesca’s phrase, several worlds ‘come into one.’
Visualization does not need to be a faithful reconstruction of history, an accurate depiction of today, or an intended prediction of what lies ahead.
This point was most explicitly expressed in our Journey profile, but it also served as an underlying theme throughout the series. Mecanoo subtly plays with time while creating images that imply a future world; images where the ‘feeling’ of the future is as important as its spatial dimensions. Meanwhile, Safdie Architects were required to transport themselves back to the 1960s to place the design and construction of Habitat 67 on an alternative timeline; imagining collaborations with landscape designers that never happened, ultimately creating a new present reality for Moshe Safdie’s acclaimed work in virtual space. From Étienne-Louis Boullée in 1785 to Archigram in 1965 to Alexis Christodoulou in 2025, the history of visualization is awash with works that use architectural visualization not as a commercial product but as a call to adventure.
In other words, our series demonstrates that visualization does not need to be a faithful reconstruction of history, an accurate depiction of today, or an intended prediction of what lies ahead. It can instead be a manifestation of what some historians believe is occurring among the three figures at the forefront of the Flagellation of Christ: a fluid conversation between the past, present, and future, not confined to one or the other.
The Flagellation of Christ also speaks to what was perhaps the dominant message of our series: the relationship between technology and visualization. Piero della Francesca was not only an artist but a mathematician and geometer. In around 1474, within a decade of painting the Flagellation of Christ, he authored De prospectiva pingendi (On the Perspective of Painting), the earliest and only pre-1500 Renaissance treatise devoted solely to the subject of perspective. Inspired by Alberti and Euclid, De prospectiva pingendi was an innovative work for its time, exploring solid geometries, faces, and the creation of perspectives using color. In the Flagellation of Christ, Piero della Francesca was taking the latest technological breakthroughs in spatial geometries and applying them to architectural visualization.
In the centuries since Piero della Francesca’s work, changes in architectural visualization have continued to be wedded to advances in technology. As Archinect In-Depth: Visualization explored, architectural representation in the Bauhaus was informed by the school’s embrace of the new age of industrialization, standardization, and modularity. In the past seven decades, meanwhile, the advent of computing technology has transformed the field of architectural visualization, from early CAD software to modern photorealistic 3D rendering, virtual reality, and generative AI tools.
Piero della Francesca was taking the latest technological breakthroughs in spatial geometries, and applying them to architectural visualization.
Elsewhere, the case studies profiled in our series demonstrate the potential for architects and designers to produce evocative visual work by embracing the latest technologies. Safdie’s Project Hillside was born out of Epic Games’ desire to push the technological limits of its latest gaming software, Unreal Engine, often breaking the engine in pursuit of the most immersive possible results. Meanwhile, Squint/Opera and Journey’s work is explicitly tech-enabled, asking how immersive technologies can construct new augmented reality experiences that connect the user’s real surroundings to fantasy environments.
“We are firm believers in asking how digital technology can change the physical spaces we are in,” Journey’s Matt Quinn told me for the article. “I feel that media architecture still hasn’t delivered on that promise.”
How, then, might we deliver on that promise? As a start, the twenty-first century has brought us a landscape of tools and technologies that a Renaissance painter such as Piero della Francesca could only dream of. Designers today can enter augmented realities through portals ranging from a VR headset to the Las Vegas Sphere. Unprecedented computing power allows us to run simulations that can predict, with ever-increasing accuracy and photorealism, the visual, acoustic, and tactile experience of a proposed space. Meanwhile, an ongoing AI revolution offers even those with basic software abilities the potential to generate static and moving imagery of, literally, whatever words or descriptions come to mind.
Technologies such as augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and computing processing power will only continue to grow in performance and capabilities as the years progress. In the meantime, perhaps the “failed promise” Quinn alludes to is not a failure of technology but of imagination.
A barely-traversed, theoretically endless multiverse awaits us if we revisit Cedric Price’s 1966 proposition: ‘Technology is the answer, but what was the question?’
As humans, it is only natural that we struggle to think beyond our three dimensions of space and one of time; such dimensions have governed our world and that of all living things around us since time immemorial. This is our reality. However, as our series has underscored, the visualized worlds of the ‘unreal’ are not tied to natural laws. In those worlds, the only parameters are that of the human imagination, and as impressive and imaginative as the work explored throughout our series is, I can’t help but feel we have barely pushed those parameters.
Returning to Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ, perhaps we are not too dissimilar from the humans in the painting. As with us, new spatial and temporal possibilities exist around those figures if only they could break out of their flat dimensions and break away from their inward-facing preoccupations. A barely-traversed, theoretically endless multiverse awaits us if we revisit Cedric Price’s 1966 proposition: ‘Technology is the answer, but what was the question?’
Niall Patrick Walsh is an architect and journalist, living in Belfast, Ireland. He writes feature articles for Archinect and leads the Archinect In-Depth series. He is also a licensed architect in the UK and Ireland, having previously worked at BDP, one of the largest design + ...
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Note: Piero Della Francesca's perspective is way out of whack or the three humanoid figures in the distance are three feet tall. What this painting teaches us is that most people who use some slant on linear perspective do not know the rules. This was also true of my Harvard GSD graphics professors. It also teaches us that it easy to fool the eye - perspective in image-creation is a super tool for eye-washers everywhere.
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