1 Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 2 Jones, Wes. ‘Architecture Games’. Log No. 19 (Spring/Summer 2010), Anyone Corporation, pp. 25-39. 3 Wang, Yiou. ‘Form Follows Fiction – Narrative Drawings of Pictorial Profusion’, in Danilo Di Mascio of (ed.) EAEA15: Envisioning Architectural Narrative , University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK. 2021.
non-architecture fillers
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Figures are the loneliest part of an architectural proposition, as they violate many conventions of architecture and landscape practice. In sections, translucent figures disregard the natural rules of physicality. When architectural models and drawings are expected to be interventions, scale figures are expected to be accessory. In most cases, they are the only readymade portion of an architectural drawing or model, their nature should not compromise the perceived originality of the proposal. When a model is discarded, or when a new drawing file is opened in a software, the old figures get reused without any alteration, when such blatant copying is not tolerated in any other part of an architectural proposition. Scale figures can be obtained effortlessly in an age when the Internet is abundant with CAD freebies, but their very nature as a signifier of human beings evokes an uncanny second thought. Scale figures can be traded digitally from the Internet or physically from art supply stores. Now, as more varieties of scale figures are readily available for those architects to add scale to a drawing, the creators of the figures are mostly forgotten. Recognition of artistic intellect, from da Vinci to Le Corbusier, is now just a mechanical process of production. Often added as a readymade in the last software along the workflow, and having no place in critiques and discussions, figures are assumed to be characterless. The discipline’s collective attitude toward scale figures reflects an architectural attitude toward non- architecture, an analogy of the self-sufficiency of the architectural discipline and its desire to only query its own medium in response to every question. The scale figure itself, not architectural in its properties or method, is brushed aside as one of the least serious portions of a presentation. A serious look at the scale figure punctuates and punctures the self-referential discourse of architecture.
As technology provides more varieties of architectural mediums, the utility of figures lies no longer in scale indication or measure, a simple ‘less is more’ proposition, 2 but in their ornamental potential and narrative aspect. It is a convention in both commercial architecture and architecture schools to populate drawings, renderings and models with figures to augment visual appeal. If figures on physical models are still called scale figures by tradition, those that populate 2-d drawings and renderings could be regarded as style figures. Style figures speciated quickly with software development and thrive in the contemporary digital culture of architecture. Architectural and graphic designers make different kinds of style figures – realistic, silhouette, low-poly, vintage, pastel, funky, gender-fluid, punk, rigged – to satisfy diverse needs and fill market niches. These commercial repertoires of 2-d style figures as packs of 1:87 or 1:125 scale figures in plastic bags or hanging in plastic frames waiting to be popped out from the armature are mould- pressed, mass produced, standardised ornament. No matter how critics dismiss them as eye-pleasing sleight of hand that shifts the visual attention from the architectural space, style figures are effective in commercial practice and student work and will continue to be a strategy in representation. The stylisation and proliferation of miniature figures accompanies the postmodern transition of architectural models and drawings from representation to narrative, from prescriptive to imaginative. A postmodern interest in representation increasingly dissolves the causal relationship between ‘representation’ and a priori design, to the extent that representation gains autonomy. Style figures increase their own participation in a design narrative because such micro-narratives align with a postmodernist resistance to any meta-narrative. Architects and artists who design their own figures believe that their narrative can be told in no standard poses or standard appearances. Drawing Architecture Studio, Eric Wong and Chris Ware integrate figures into their spatial stories with spatial and temporal multiplicities: different stories and stories happening at different times appear simultaneously on the 2-d canvas, using an interplay of space and figures to convey asynchrony. 3 To the viewer, apart from visual pleasure typical of ornament, these drawings convey an engaging quality of intrigue, typical of fiction.
http://www.ericwong.co.uk
courtesy Chris Ware
courtesy of Fondation Le Corbusier
on site review 39: tools
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