Alan Davidson
Pioneer of computer-generated ‘visualisations’ of planned buildings for the architectural industry
ALAN DAVIDSON, who has died of motor neurone disease aged 58, revolutionised architectural visualisation by swapping paint, matchsticks and plaster for pixels, pioneering the use of computers to create realistic digital images of buildings; he described himself as a “digital perspective artist”.
In 1989 he founded a studio from a front room in Chiswick, west London. He called it Hayes Davidson, though Hayes never existed; Davidson merely included his own middle name in the interests of corporate gravitas.
Hayes Davidson became the first to specialise in producing computergenerated imagery (CGI) for the architecture industry and Davidson went on to develop a technique known as “verified imagery” – the rendition of accurate digital representations of proposed structures set in real photographs – that has become an important way for architects to present their plans to planners and the public.
Not everyone welcomed the move from traditional pen and paper, Philip Crowe, president of the Society of Architectural and Industrial Illustrators, claiming in 1996 that CGI techniques could not replicate the “human element” of the direct contact between artist and paper. Advocates, however, claimed Davidson’s work represented the most important development in architectural visualisation since perspective was “discovered” in the 15th century.
Alan Hayes Davidson was born on July 9 1960 and trained as an architect at Edinburgh University. His first brush with computers came during a year out from university working in Fiji for an architect who had six early Apple Macintosh machines. Back home he bought a Mac and early 3D modelling software and began to develop new techniques of computergenerated architectural visualisation.
Moving to London in 1986, he worked with the Richard Rogers Partnership “putting flesh on the bones” of his design sketches. After founding Hayes Davidson, the bulk of his work continued to be for Rogers, visualising projects including the Millennium Dome.
He was quickly in demand and commissioned by many other leading architects including Zaha Hadid, Nicholas Grimshaw, Chris Wilkinson, Norman Foster, Terry Farrell, David Marks, Will Alsop, Julia Barfield and Future Systems. Key London projects that were visualised by Hayes Davidson include the Shard by Renzo Piano, 30 St Mary Axe – better known as the Gherkin – by Foster & Partners, Tate Modern by Herzog & de Meuron and the London Eye by Marks Barfield.
Outside London he visualised the Lowry Centre in Salford, created a striking animated sequence for the Manchester Olympic bid, and did visualisations of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and the Saitama Stadium in Japan. Hayes Davidson won the coveted Cica/building Design Award for three years running, from 1994 to 1996.
Davidson was enormously sensitive to charges of being simply a computer technician and indeed his digital images often had something of the hand-painted quality of watercolours.
“I’m really a tortured artist who lives in a garret, living on bread and water,” he told an interviewer in 1996, and he claimed to take enormous pains to “add soul” to his work: “We take something very precise, very mathematical and very objective, then mess it up often by digitally painting with Photoshop. We add emotion and, we hope, something from the heart.”
“When we interview staff,” he went on, “the key question is, ‘Why do you want to be an illustrator?’ Not a computer graphics person but an illustrator … My heroes are not operations like Pixar, but 1920s commercial artists such as Hugh Ferris.”
In 2017 Hayes-davidson became an employee-owned practice.
Diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2012, in the last years of his life Davidson raised funds for the Motor Neurone Disease Association through his charity Alan Davidson Foundation.