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

About MCAU

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.

Meet Liam Cox

Liam is an Urban Designer at MCAU, with a background in Architecture. He works on early stage work within the practice; from strategic visions to detailed planning submissions (RIBA 1-3).

Eager to find the tools to help communicate ideas quickly, Liam is part of an AI research lab at MCAU, currently exploring how varying AI tools can bring efficiencies into there workflow.

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 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 picked up, slowing down the design process.

Discovering Gendo

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.

• Apply prompts for red brick, metal cladding, hard and soft street landscaping and atmospheric lighting
• Experiment with varying iterations in minutes
• Drop in people and trees via reference images, bringing life and a sense of scale

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

Liam is championing the use of Gendo within the early stage work flow process at MCAU:

• Fast decision making - images that previously took weeks can be done in a fraction of the time
• Client ready visuals - stakeholders can make the link between urban design principles and transformative effects
• Reduced costs - the potential to generate higher quality renders in house

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.

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

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.

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.

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