Human Figure as a Cultural Mediator in Architectural Drawings

Abstract

In architectural drawings, human figures generally express the scale of design space. Their presence is supposed to be a sign of a particular sensibility toward human scale and needs and over the centuries, figures were capable of playing a number of different cultural roles. From the anthropomorphic attitudes of Renaissance architects to the Functionalists' diagrams, human figures have illustrated and mediated the cultural development of human environment. Even if architects maliciously used them to convey layered meanings into their architectural renderings, they are an implicit index of different ideas about men and women and express architects' ideological positions toward society often beyond their intents. This paper analyzes the use of human figures in architectural designs with a particular attention to the twentieth century, to the passage from the mechanical to the digital age, in which the diffusion of cut-and-paste procedure is changing and enhancing their use in the globalized architecture.

Investigating the Influence of Virtual Human Entourage Elements on Distance Judgments in Virtual Architectural Interiors

“…Architects have a long history of including small human figures in their drawings to indicate scale and to show how the space might look while in use (Anderson, 2002 ; Colonnese, 2017 ). Our research is inspired by the possibility that adding such figures to building models in VR might similarly facilitate more accurate spatial understanding in those environments.…”

"Characters in Search of an Author". Human figures and storytelling in architectural design communication

“…The figures of Bramante, Baldassarre Peruzzi, Raphael, Vignola or Michelangelo are not only measuring the space and reminding the designer, but also legitimizing the rectifications Letarouilly made on the effective building surveys to restore their original form, at least according to his own idea. Quite on the same wake, a century later, the American architect Richard Meier cut-and-pasted Karl Friedrich Schinkel's trees and copied Otto Wagner's old-fashioned figures to provide an historical environment to his museum designs [9]. While these apparent contradictions can be easily accepted in an architectural survey, they look bizarre in the rendering of an architectural design, which is expected to show an anticipation of an upcoming transformation.…”

“…[13]. [14]. At the same time, the photographic images of artworks can be directly reproduced in the renderings, even when they are made with manual techniques, as can be seen in Steven Holl's watercolour views for the Swiss Embassy Gallery in Washington, DC.…”