From Weeks to Hours: MCAU Brings Urban Visions to Life with Gendo
Accelerating Urban Design Workflows with AI-Powered Rendering
Weeks → Hours
Workflow speed
20-30s
Per iteration
Reduced
Costs
MCAU
Team Size
50+ people
Location
United Kingdom
Focus
Urban Design, Masterplanning
Approach
AI-enhanced workflows
MCAU is a team of designers, planners, architects, researchers and strategists united by a shared purpose: to create extraordinary, sustainable places that inspire and elevate communities.
We work across a variety of services and sectors offering: Design & Delivery, Placemaking, Masterplanning, Residential, Estate Renewal, Town Centre Mixed Use, Heritage Repurposing and Commercial.
Visit MCAU"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."
— Liam Cox
Meet Liam Cox
Urban Designer
"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."
Time-Intensive Visualisation Bottlenecks
Traditionally Liam has relied on Sketchup for white-card models and developed renders in house or through external consultants. While this approach has delivered quality results, it also introduces significant bottlenecks to the workflow process.
Street level images can take a week or more to come back from visualisations team, and often require additional time for comments to be picked up, slowing down the design process.
Liam was looking for a way to introduce aspirational and realistic vision images in his and MCAU's early workflows to allow stakeholders to make the leap between how urban level schematic drawing and principles could translate into a real world vision.
Discovering Gendo's Potential
Liam first started using Gendo to explore its potential on a small infill site project. Starting from SketchUp massing, he used Gendo's Render, Material Selection and Enhance tool to quickly build up a realistic image of what the site could potentially offer.
"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."
Instead of commissioning high cost and time hungry render packages, Liam was able to apply prompts for red brick, metal cladding, hard and soft street landscaping and atmospheric lighting, and experiment with varying iterations in minutes.
Before & After
Drag to compare the transformation
The Impact: Transforming Urban Design Workflows
Liam is championing the use of Gendo within the early stage workflow process at MCAU. It has helped him with fast decision making, client-ready visuals, and reduced costs.
Key Outcomes
Images that previously took weeks can be done in a fraction of the time
Stakeholders can make the link between urban design principles and transformative effects through aspirational vision imagery
The potential to generate higher quality renders in house
"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."
Liam Cox
Urban Designer, MCAU
