The MIR Style Is Now a Recipe. Here's What Comes Next.

Open Instagram in incognito mode, search "archviz", and scroll for two minutes. You'll see the same image twenty times. Overcast sky. Single backlit figure walking away from the camera. Foreground branch creating depth. Muted palette with one warm interior light glowing through a window. The "MIR look."

Except MIR didn't make any of these. They just inspired all of them.

This matters more here than people admit. The MIR style is a Nordic answer to a Nordic question, and most of us aren't rendering Nordic projects. We're rendering sea-facing towers in Worli, mill conversions in Lower Parel, integrated townships in Thane, beach houses in Alibaug, commercial precincts in BKC. The light is different. The architecture is different. The story is different. Borrowing the look anyway has become a reflex worth examining.

We've been thinking about this a lot at the studio over the last year, partly because we've contributed to the flood ourselves. So this is half observation, half self-criticism. The work coming out of Bergen remains the most interesting in the field. The work imitating it isn't, and applying it to projects it wasn't made for makes things worse.

What the MIR style actually is

MIR didn't invent any of the techniques people associate with them. Painterly post-processing existed in concept art and matte painting decades before. Atmospheric overcast lighting is the bread and butter of Nordic photography. Restrained colour palettes have been a Scandinavian design instinct since long before anyone was rendering buildings.

What MIR did was assemble the elements into a coherent grammar. They made decisions about what to leave out as much as what to include. The result is work that reads as a place rather than a product. You look at a MIR image and you imagine being there, which is not a technical achievement. It's a curatorial one. They edit their own work the way a magazine art director edits a shoot.

That distinction matters because it's the part that doesn't copy.

Why it spread

MIR's images are highly screenshottable. They translate to small Instagram thumbnails better than almost any other archviz aesthetic. The visual signature is portable, and the underlying techniques are within reach of any competent V-Ray or Corona artist with three weeks to spare on Photoshop.

By 2024 there was a global flood of MIR-influenced images. By 2025 it had become the default look for award submissions in entire categories. Look at the last CGarchitect 3D Awards shortlist and count the overcast-lighting entries. It's the majority. Even projects that have no business being rendered quietly have been rendered quietly, because quiet wins prizes right now.

The recipe, made specific

The tells, once you see them, are everywhere.

Overcast or just-after-rain lighting. Specifically the diffuse top-light with a slight cool cast that comes from a Nordic sky on a moderate day. Easy to fake with a HDRI and a small amount of post.

A single human figure, backlit, mid-distance. Often walking away from the camera. The figure functions less as a person than as a scale device with vibe.

A foreground element creating depth. A branch. A railing. A piece of furniture. Anything to break the picture plane and give the eye somewhere to enter.

A muted palette with one warmer accent. The interior light visible through a window. The brake lights of a distant car. A single point of warmth in a cold image.

An asymmetric composition with significant negative space. Half the frame is sky or shadow. The architecture occupies maybe 40% of the image. The rest is breathing room.

Soft edges, no hard shadows. Heavy post-processing with subtle painterly textures applied as overlays.

Any one of these is a technique. All of them together, in the proportions MIR uses them, is the look.

What it's hiding

Here's the part that matters. The MIR style is deeply suited to a specific kind of architecture and a specific kind of light. Restrained, contemplative buildings in Nordic or temperate climates. The kind of work MIR has actually been commissioned to render. Snøhetta. Reiulf Ramstad. Other Bergen and Oslo practices building in landscapes that genuinely look like that.

Our context is the opposite of that in almost every dimension.

The light in Mumbai is warm even when it's grey. Pre-monsoon haze is golden and thick. Post-monsoon afternoons are clear and bright with long shadows that cut across the sea face. The monsoon greys themselves are heavy and warm, full of saturated greens and wet concrete, not the cool diffuse light of a Bergen overcast. Our atmosphere is dense with humidity and dust and the particular quality of light that comes off the Arabian Sea, and none of it behaves like the reference photography that built the MIR canon.

Our architecture is the same way. Louder. Taller. More ornamented. More vertical. More confident in its density. The buildings we render are not trying to disappear into a meadow. They're trying to hold their own against the sky, the sea, the neighbour, the city. They have a job to do in the brochure, on the hoarding at the site gate, in the sample apartment presentation, and quietness doesn't help them do it.

When you apply the MIR look to a project that wasn't made for it, you get tension. A sea-facing luxury tower in Worli doesn't want to be quiet. A retail concept in Lower Parel isn't contemplative. A high-end villa in Alibaug at dusk wants warmth and saturation, not the desaturated cool of a Telemark afternoon. A BKC commercial podium wants energy and clarity, not painterly atmosphere. A monsoon-saturated coastal home in Goa wants the rain to feel alive, not to feel like a Nordic memory of a Nordic place. Forcing the look creates work that doesn't trust its own subject.

We've done this. Everyone here has done this. You get a brief that doesn't quite know what it wants, you reach for the most-awarded aesthetic, you make a MIR-influenced image, and the developer looks at it and says "that doesn't feel right" without being able to say why. Because the building is loud and the rendering is quiet. The image is fighting itself.

That's the cost nobody talks about. The default style isn't free. It costs you the relationship between the architecture and its representation. In our market specifically, where developers are commissioning images that need to sell apartments in projects with real personality, it costs the building its own voice.

Three studios doing something else

There are at least three live alternatives doing genuinely interesting work right now. Worth studying if you've been stuck in the MIR groove.

Forbes Massie. Eye-level grain, vintage film references, a denser atmospheric quality that owes more to film photography than to painting. Their compositions are tighter. There's less sky. The work feels lived-in rather than observed. Pay particular attention to how they treat reflective surfaces, which the MIR style mostly avoids because reflections complicate the soft-edge aesthetic. Useful reference for any project with serious glazing, which describes most of what gets commissioned along the Mumbai coast.

Beauty and the Bit. Hybrid matte-painted imagery that's openly painterly. They lean into the construction of the image rather than hiding it. The pleasure of looking is partly the pleasure of seeing how it was made. Their lighting is often warm where the MIR canon is cool. Useful reference for projects that want to feel composed and intentional rather than caught.

Play-Time. Bold negative space, almost graphic compositions. Closer to architectural illustration than to photography. Single dominant colours. Clear edges. The opposite end of the spectrum from atmospheric softness, and a useful corrective if you've been making everything look like a wet morning for the last two years.

None of these are better than MIR. They're different answers to the same underlying question, which is: what is the rendering for? What does the image want the viewer to do or feel?

The MIR answer is "imagine being there, quietly." That's a strong answer for some buildings. It's the wrong answer for many of ours.

What we're trying

We've been deliberately not making MIR-style images for about six months now. Not as a rejection of MIR, who we admire enormously and learn from constantly. As a forcing function.

The question we ask at the start of every project now is: what does this building, in this city, in this light, want to look like? What does a Mumbai pre-monsoon golden hour actually feel like to a person standing on a 30th floor terrace looking west? What does the monsoon look like over a coastal villa when the architecture is meant to be in conversation with the rain, not retreating from it? What does a Lower Parel mill conversion look like when it's celebrating the texture of the original brickwork, not flattening it into atmosphere? What does a hill station retreat want when the air is genuinely cool and the light genuinely soft, and the MIR vocabulary actually applies?

Sometimes the honest answer is MIR style. A contemplative civic building in a temperate hill town, a coastal museum in late monsoon, a small temple at dawn in Goa, these can genuinely want to be rendered with restraint and atmosphere, and we will. Most projects are not those. Most projects want something they haven't seen yet, and finding it requires putting down the most-imitated style sheet for a minute and looking at the actual building, in the actual light it lives in, in the actual city it belongs to.

There's a risk in this. The next look will spread the same way the MIR look did. Someone will identify it, build a recipe, and we'll all be looking at slight variations of it on Instagram in 2027.

The point isn't to find the next look. It's to ask the question first. To choose, rather than to default. To make images that come from the building rather than from the algorithm.

If you're a studio reading this and you've been making MIR images by reflex, that's a sign worth taking seriously. Not because the work is bad. Because the work is no longer telling you anything about you, or your city, or the buildings you've been trusted to represent.

The recipe is finished. The cookbook closes. Something new starts.