The Strange World of Architectural Renderings

John King takes a look at the future promised to us by architectural renderings.  He doesn't like what he sees:

In tomorrow’s San Francisco, every adult who matters looks as if he or she arrived on a Google bus. The men are stylishly scruffy. The women are lissome and poised. These are people who drink single-origin coffee and listen to vinyl at home.

I base my prediction not on the apocalyptic warnings of gentrification critics, but the cumulative evidence of every architectural rendering that has come my way in recent years. The city imagined by designers and developers is a monoculture of the wired and young.

An air of unreality is expected, to be sure: Renderings released for public consumption have always set out to seduce us. The idea is to conjure up a mood so that the viewer sees change as something to embrace or at least accept, not oppose. Panhandlers are never in the background. Graffiti does not scar the walls. The difference now is the narrowness of the vision conveyed. For all the debate over gentrification and saving the “soul” of San Francisco (whatever that means), the future will arrive with a backpack slung over its shoulder.