Marc Hess Architekten

Lindenbaum: three houses of pre-greyed wood on Wehntalerstrasse in Oberweningen, with steep gable roofs, dormers and wine-red windows. Marc Hess Architekten planned the development, and Orbit showed…

• Client: Marc Hess Architekten GmbH
• Built by: Orbit (Jan)
• Period: 2024

Lindenbaum: three houses of pre-greyed wood on Wehntalerstrasse in Oberweningen, with steep gable roofs, dormers and wine-red windows. Marc Hess Architekten planned the development, and Orbit showed it before the first beam was up. In autumn 2024 it was the very first commission, before the company had even been founded.

Anyone who buys or rents a flat that does not yet exist is buying an image. So Marc Hess wanted images that sell the project, exterior and interior, and that still show exactly what will be built. The basis was the office's ArchiCAD model, first in the building application version; halfway through the commission came the construction approval version. Added to this was the colour and material concept from September 2024: which wood, which red for the windows, which blinds, which roof. The images were to show what this concept specifies, not whatever a material library happens to offer.

• ArchiCAD model as the basis • Building application and construction approval • Colour and material concept put into practice • Blinds, frames and roof rebuilt • Road, terrain and gardens • A furnished flat • Lighting in Unreal Engine • A scene that remains

A planning model is not an image

The planning software produces a model built for plans: correct dimensions, correct storeys, grey surfaces, an endless lawn. That is how the office's own views looked in August 2024. They show the project correctly, but not yet what it feels like to live there. Everything else an image needs was only created during the commission: blinds, window frames and a roof that hold up in an image, plus terrain and roads, the neighbouring houses, trees, cars and people.

Three tools, one image

Orbit prepared the model in Maya, component by component: new slatted blinds, new window frames in the facade, a roof with tiles, dormers, roof windows and solar panels. Twinmotion added terrain, road, trees and furniture, and lighting, cameras and images were created in Unreal Engine. Rendering happens there in real time, so a camera can be moved around until the houses sit exactly as they will be seen from the road.

A long road

Lindenbaum was a journey. At first the houses were to be composited into photos of the plot, taken from the roadside, with the construction fence and the gravel area. The photos were cleaned up for this and upscaled to four times their size with two AI tools, but the montage still did not work: too little resolution, too much left to chance in the lighting. So the entire surroundings were built in the model, with its own terrain, its own road and its own sky. At the end of November 2024 the project moved into Unreal Engine, and the automatic backups tell of nights until five in the morning. On 3 December came the switch to Unreal Engine 5.4, with three exports from Twinmotion, and on 5 December the ten images were produced in four minutes. Four minutes that took three months.

The concept, component by component

The colour and material concept specifies material, colour and number for every component, and the images stick to it. The facade is of pre-greyed wood with vertical cladding, Swiss Silver Protect, on a base of stainless steel sheet. The window frames are wine red on the outside, RAL 3005, and the same wine red recurs on the entrance doors, the letterboxes and the balcony railings. The slatted blinds are black and matt, the dormers of titanium zinc, the entrance canopy telegrey, the balcony soffits of lightly glazed fair-faced concrete. And on the gable roof, dark flat tiles lie next to a solar installation.

Inside: a flat

For the interior views Orbit furnished a flat: open kitchen with island, dining area, living room and the patio in front of the glazed facade. Furniture, lamps and objects give the rooms their scale, so you can judge the size of each room, and the patio and garden remain visible through the windows.

All the way to the bathroom

A flat does not end at the dining table. That is why there is also the bedroom, with parquet flooring, a double bed and the view through the open door back into the living room, and the bathroom with a walk-in shower, a wooden vanity and a window with the black blinds half lowered. These are the rooms people ask about first at a viewing.

Stills, and a scene that remains

The deliverables were stills, exterior and interior, with no animation and no walkthrough. The scene itself has been kept, though, with terrain, surroundings and the furnished flat. Another view is therefore simply a new camera in the existing model, not a new project. Lindenbaum was the very first commission, a lesson in patience, and it taught something that still applies today: a good image does not begin with the camera but with the architect's concept.