I’ve never seen a rendering this detailed released with a “placeholder” parking deck screening.
I have. I even produce them, routinely! It’s pretty standard practice.
The rendering is not even that detailed… It’s a watercolor image. Architects do this intentionally to show that these are just an early suggestion of the character of the design, and are likely to change.
They’re literally showing blank 20’ x 30’ portions of the façade as a single panel. That is not even buildable. It is screaming that it hasn’t been designed, and is likely a placeholder for a panelized material that could potentially add detail, a pattern, or other forms of articulation. (Or they could choose to use metal perf. in a way that doesn’t emphasize panel joints, but the point is that the lack of detail in the rendering shows that this area hasn’t been thought through yet). I could be totally wrong about this, but I’m just speaking from gut reaction and experience.
What incentive would they have to release a rendering that looks worse than what they plan to build? It just doesn’t make sense.
It’s a reality of the development/approval process – there simply isn’t time. The design process for a project like this is months long, and renderings like this are often produced in a couple of weeks, at a stage of design where the articulation of many areas has not yet been studied. Lower priority things don’t always get addressed. I posted an example of this yesterday on one of my own projects… the renderings we used for city council approval/public meetings were a best guess at an early stage of the character of the design, but really only reflected our proposed massing and a couple of the materials. After we studied the facade, the design improved, drastically, over time.