From Weeks to Hours: MCAU Brings Urban Visions to Life with Gendo and AI-Powered Rendering

About MCAU

MCAU is an urban design and architecture practice with studios in Manchester, Liverpool, and London. Their work spans masterplans, residential neighbourhoods, infill housing, and large-scale regeneration projects.

With a strong focus on placemaking, MCAU operates across early RIBA stages, helping communities and stakeholders envision how underused or undefined spaces can transform into vibrant, liveable neighbourhoods.

Meet Liam Cox

Liam is an Urban Design Engineer at MCAU, specialising in front-end design, place visioning, and residential-led masterplanning. His work ranges from neighbourhood-scale frameworks to detailed infill housing strategies that aim to create more defined and legible streetscapes.

Eager to find tools that help communicate ideas quickly and clearly, Liam has led MCAU’s exploration of AI for design visualisation.

At the urban design level, visuals can sometimes be quite diagrammatic. Gendo helps us bridge that gap, showing clients and communities a vision they can immediately relate to.

Visualisation Before Gendo

Traditionally, MCAU relied on SketchUp for massing and white-card models, occasionally turning to external renderers for higher-quality visuals. While this approach delivered results, it also introduced significant bottlenecks. Street-level images could take a week or more to come back from visualisation teams, slowing the design process. Early-stage visuals often felt too abstract, making it difficult for clients and stakeholders to fully grasp the vision. On top of this, the costs of outsourcing limited the number of iterations MCAU could realistically test and present.

Discovering Gendo

Liam first introduced Gendo on small infill housing projects designed to revitalise overlooked spaces within existing estates. Starting from SketchUp massing, the team used Gendo’s Render, Material Selection, and Enhance tools to quickly build realistic imagery.

✅ Instead of commissioning weeks-long render packages, Liam was able to:
✅ Apply prompts for red brick, metal cladding, greenery, and atmospheric lighting.
✅ Iterate through dozens of versions in minutes.
✅ Drop in people and trees via reference images, bringing life and scale to the streets.

Each iteration takes 20–30 seconds. In just a couple of hours, we can develop images that used to take weeks and cost significantly more.

Impact on Workflow

With Gendo, MCAU has transformed its early-stage workflow:

✅ Faster decision-making – Images that once took weeks now take a single afternoon.
✅ Client-ready visuals – Stakeholders see believable streetscapes, not just diagrams.
✅ Iterative exploration – Quick material and lighting changes enable side-by-side options.
✅ Reduced external costs – Many renders can now be generated in-house.

Liam describes the process as flexible rather than strictly linear: jumping between prompting, material changes, and enhancing depending on the image. This adaptability allows MCAU to refine visuals organically as design conversations evolve.

Before

After

MCAU began with a simple white card model in SketchUp, applying basic prompts for materials, lighting, and atmosphere. Iterations introduced material experiments, reference images, and photorealistic style prompts, gradually refining details such as brickwork, greenery, and windows.

By Stage 3, the team produced a lively mews street scene: red brick facades, herringbone paving, lush planting, and people interacting. Using Gendo’s Enhance and Cinematic tools, they quickly achieved photorealistic results with crisp textures, realistic shadows, and an engaging atmosphere.

Client & Team Response

Stakeholders respond positively to the realism and clarity of Gendo-enhanced images. Instead of abstract diagrams, they can immediately imagine life in proposed streets and homes.

Internally, MCAU’s architects and designers have embraced the tool’s speed and flexibility. While clients rarely request small tweaks, team members find it easier to iterate and polish concepts rapidly.

It’s not about replacing traditional renders completely. But for visionary, front-end images, Gendo has been incredibly beneficial.

Clients frequently commented that the Gendo-enhanced images “felt real” or “looked like a photo,” making it easier for them to imagine themselves in the finished spaces. This earlier emotional buy-in often translated directly into faster sign-offs and more decisive feedback.

Looking Ahead

MCAU is continuing to experiment with AI visualisation, including hand-sketched inputs and larger masterplan-scale imagery. As Gendo evolves, the team sees opportunities to integrate it further into community engagement, allowing more people to connect with urban design ideas early in the process.

Closing Thoughts

We’re still in the early stages, but already Gendo has changed how we work. For street-level visions, it’s helping us sell ideas quicker, more clearly, and at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional methods.

Watch the Gendo Live with Liam as special guest: https://youtu.be/akANadxeBDs?si=L5UeP_PUmdko8Den

Start for free with Gendo.