Rendering Redux is a weekly examination of architectural rendering practices. While many architects evaluate these images based on sheer effect, we take a more humorous approach, documenting the inconsistencies and incongruous scale figures that populate the architectural imagination. Each week, we take a look at a different project, decoding its renderings so you don’t have to.

This week, we are taking a look at Baku White City, a proposed master plan for the capital of Azerbaijan. Baku White City gets its name from an aspired-to reversal of destiny; the development is slated to replace a district formerly known as the “Black City” due to its industrial buildings.

Baku White City includes multiple neighborhood districts, some with high-rise office complexes and others with single-family homes. The master plan as a whole demonstrates an extremely urban intention, though at times this is thwarted by the sheer glitziness of its glass towers and tree-lined boulevards.

While at first glance the proposed buildings look adventurous, a lot of its forms come directly out of the new-hyper-capitalist-development playbook. Baku White City has some pretty hefty firms as partners, including Atkins, Foster + Partners, and F+A Architects, which certainly helps add some seriousness to the proposal. Nonetheless, renderings found on BWC’s website betray a bit more shakiness. Does Baku, a truly great world city, deserve more? Let’s find out …

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Machu Picchu, Peru

Anyone who’s traveled to popular touristic sites knows the feeling of being caught in the crossfire of countless camera lenses—the annoyed (and annoying) jockeying to capture the perfect shot … which in most cases looks exactly like everyone else’s. Striving to take that “perfect shot” reinforces the established, proper view of a monument, fully imprisoned in the image frame. When we stumbled across Richard Silver’s photographs of iconic monuments, we were shocked—caught in the same tourist hustle, Silver manages to give us a new perspective on famous landmarks we didn’t think possible.

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At the epicenter of the world’s largest urban area, Tokyo is synonymous with density—an overflux of people, spaces, and ideas. Upending the general take of Tokyo as an urban over-stimulant, photographer Gabriel de la Chapelle has captured a novel, arresting view of the city as desolate landscape in his series, Tokyo End. His images are achingly captivating, showing empty stretches of urban infrastructure. Upon closer inspection, the empty “highways” are in fact canals with road striping superimposed. With not a soul in view, these impossibly beautiful images offer an intimate (if inaccessible) window onto the city. Click through to see them all.

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We never thought anyone would top the soaring heights achieved and documented by the death-defying Russian teens, but these amazing aerial shots taken from kites are in serious contention! Shooting crazy images via kite-drone may be safer than “skywalking” without a harness, but it provides electrifying new perspectives on life on the ground.

Photographer Pierre Lesage captures his fantastic shots by suspending cameras from an enormous kite equipped with a remote shutter release (we assume the launching process is more graceful than the deadfall sprints back and fourth desperately hoping for the wind to pick up). In the Instagram age, where everyone is a photographer, Lesage’s amazing aerial images offer a unique and rarefied window onto the world. Scroll through the images after the jump!

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By now, thanks to the Internet, you’ve likely seen a few photographs taken by fearless, typically Eastern European youth dangling from the tops of skyscrapers to snap sweaty-palm-inducing aerial views of the street. These thrilling images capture what might be the 21st-century iteration of the sublime, a visual that makes one simultaneously recoil in fear and pine for more. Part of their appeal stems from the fact that only a rare few have experienced looking down at the world from such death-defying heights; the photographs thus document a highly unusual relationship with the city and its architecture. Photographer Romain Jacquet-Lagreze has remarkably managed to capture a similar sense of awe in his photographs of Hong Kong by manipulating a perspective that we are all familiar with: looking up from the ground. Click to see more.

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The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has released new photos taken from the summit of 1 WTC, what will be the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. The tower’s glazing has been nearly completed, as can be seen in the photo below, and the 42.2-ton spire, which will help the structure reach its symbolic 1,776 feet, is being prepared for installation. The shot above was taken from some 100 floors up, just over the future public observation deck where visitors will be able to take in uninterrupted views of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and New Jersey. (Oh, and Staten Island, too.) Looking at onto Manhattan, you’ll find the Woolworth Building and other nearby landmark structures that once stood proudly as the technological achievements of their day.

All photos: The Port Authority

[via WTC Progress]

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Behold “Pisces,” an enormous worm-like sculpture made of 10,000+ balloons! The piece, created by the New York-based artist Jason Hackenwerth, was unveiled at the National Museum of Scotland during the recent Edinburgh International Science Festival. According to the site Colossal, the artwork was inspired by the Zodiac sign Pisces, which itself was inspired by the story of Aphrodite and Eros escaping “the fearsome monster Typhon by transforming into a tightly woven spiral of two fish.” It reportedly took a small team six days to blow up the balloons for Hackenwerth’s installation. Click through to see more images!

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What happens when you drop a bunch of glow sticks down a waterfall? Um, mind-blowing awesomeness, it turns out! For their photographic series Neon Luminance, which we first spotted on Colossal, multimedia artists Sean Lenz and Kristoffer Abildgaard, of From the Lenz, use different-colored high-powered Cyalume glow sticks and long-exposure times to create these seriously rad, psychedelic images of neon-rainbow waterfalls. (Never fear: the photographers don’t open the sticks and collect them at the end of each exposure, keeping the water toxic-free.) Click through to see some more of these amazing photos, and check out the duo’s other work here.

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If you’ve ever visited Hong Kong, you know that space is limited. More than 7 million people pack into the harbor city, with the majority of the population living in the high-rise, high-density residential towers that dot the skyline. (Note to city officials: “high density” should never mean this.) These tightly clustered structures are the focus of German artist/photographer Michael Wolf‘s “The Architecture of Density,” a wonderful photo essay that casts these rather generic and often neglected towers in an artful new light. Click for more! 

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Project: Two Hulls House

Architect: MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects

Location: Nova Scotia, Canada

Floating above the coastal shoreline of Nova Scotia, the two pavilions of MacKay-Lyon’s Sweetapple’s sleek wood-clad home hover above a rocky beach like two ships’ hulls up on cradles for the winter. This is a full-time home for a family of four, consisting of a “day pavilion” and a “night pavilion,” which form protected outdoor places both between and under them. Like a captain’s pair of binoculars, the home acts as an instrument for focusing views of the serene seascape.

Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Photos: MLS Architects

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