The practice of Neutral is far from neutral. It could be subtle. Its subtlety could be cunningly hidden. It’s neither one thing nor the other. It’s not film and it’s not architecture. It’s credible, but it’s not real. It’s not virtual either, but mixed reality. If not neutral, whose side is it on? Neutral is the office which shelters the collaboration of its foun-ders: the space between the two of them where something could happen — something other than struggle.

Tapio and Christian both graduated as architects with an excess of curiosity about imagined and built environments and (apparently) a deficit of the will-to-build which would have driven a career in design and overcome the rigours of ar-chitectural practice. Instead, with Neutral, Tapio and Christian carved out a niche in which they have displayed a distinctive ap-proach to one of architecture’s service industries, and from which they have obtained a good view of the scene.

Since 1998, Neutral has formed relationships with several prominent architectural practices, helping them to produce competitive — indeed, winning — proposals with moving images of new architecture. The self-initiated work they have shown in exhibitions and video-screenings, however, discloses their own reflections on urban experience and its representation, on the experience of the city immersed in its own reflections.

Who cares about “frozen music”? Everything must move, and there must be music to propel it. The encounter with architecture in a con-temporary urban setting is the experience of the passenger, the pas-ser-by, on the move. That experience is (always already) mediated by movies and by television, in other words, it is both “sutured” and distanced, while the city (re)plays itself in situ in closed cir-cuits. It is accompanied by a soundtrack in personal stereo, an af-fect-laden sound-space intersecting, tuning the noise of the street. Urban experience is recognised by its rhythms, pulses and flows: bpm, mph, frames-, cycles-, revolutions per second.

Urban space is meas-ured in footfall and eyeballs, and translated into the price per square metre. Video games are the venues for real experiences of simulated cities. By the same token, urban experience is not authentic. It is played against a backdrop of thin architectural façades, augmented by imag-ined scenarios and a compulsive score. Neutral’s “visual analysis” (a term they prefer to “visualisation”) could be described as es-tablishing shots for the movie of the game, or perhaps as trailers for reality.

Neutral’s movies lend compelling narratives to the morphology of ar-chitecture, while at the same time demonstrating the “logic” of form as mere semblance. The animations anchor the designs with visual metaphors, proposing the architectural forms as if they were the “natural” results of genetic mutation and multiplication, of cool-ing liquids, rising bubbles, flowing streams or soft-landing alien spaceships. The movies are persuasive because they are wish-images that can be shared — passenger flights of fantasy.

Neutral’s installations, like the city and its phantasmagoria, con-tain moving images, projections, reflections, pulses and rhythms. Whose side they are on is hard to say when the inside spills over into the outside; when the display becomes part of the fabric of the city and the experience of the passer-by; when interiors drink in ex-teriors and spew them out again through prisms and filters onto semi-transparent screens; when inside and outside alike are walled-in by images; when no screen is passive; when windows are shallow vitrines and illuminated membranes; when walls are permeable and only mirrors impenetrable; when the city and our phantasmagoria share the same space in our skulls, interiors and urban passages.

Anthony Auerbach London, August 2007

Here you see an assortment of works from the animations company "studio neutral" from London, which already realized animations for well-known archtitecture offices like Zaha Hadid, Herzog De Meuron oder David Adjaye Animationen.