Rendered Futures charts five decades of architectural drawing, capturing the final years of architecture as an exclusively hand-drawn discipline to today’s digital culture dominated by the aesthetics of the stylised render.

The exhibition brings together drawings by architects from across Aotearoa, spanning recent graduates and practising architects across multiple generations; here, technical drawings, sketches and works of art all jockey for position. A breadth of mark-making is expressed, from creative exploration to the formative stages of the design and construction process, mapping the enduring modes of drawing that architects return to.

The diversity of work in Rendered Futures articulates architectural drawing as a shape-shifting and sometimes radical form. Not just a means of technical instruction and representation of the built realm, drawing can also be a site for advocacy, experimentation and cultural production, much of which isn’t visible beyond the discipline itself.

Taking a broad view across its timespan – a period of vast technological disruption to the tools of image-making – the exhibition considers how drawing is changing. The drawing process is increasingly codified through computer-aided design, standardising representations of architecture and impacting the way it is taught and communicated. Rendered Futures asks what this change could mean for drawing’s influence on the discipline; for its creative and critical potential in the futures to come.

The Ōtautahi showing of Rendered Futures includes new contributions from the Macmillan Brown Library at The University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha.

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Rendered Futures: Drawing architecture was originally exhibited at Objectspace in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland from 28 Jun–24 Aug 2025.

The exhibition is presented by Objectspace’s Strategic Partner ECC and supported by The Warren Trust.

Colour Partner: Resene
Product Partner: Laminex