neutrality
From mannequins to mass-produced scale figures, this tool in human form has undergone reductive transformations and digitisation over decades becoming abstracted, laconic, commodified and impersonal. Because of their de-personalised features, they slip into objects of art, toys and sometimes fetishised collectibles. Littered across an architectural model or drawing, they can signify a political stance that overrides the content of the work. As serious tools, scale figures are a narrative constant that add a fictive aspect for architectural representation and preserve a good amount of imagination space for both the architect and the audience . q
Rather than the cautious hand-picking of what we think as ideal for an architecture scenario, what would be a truly neutral, but meaningful, personable scale figure? The use of racialised, gendered and/or wheel-chaired figures easily falls into a naïve projection of the politics of inclusivity onto the space, a crutch Jones calls it, a mimicry for non-effective architectural propositions that need a lavish political entourage to cover their spatial shortcomings. We can look at other examples: SANAA’s elongated, abstract silhouettes give little information of individual character and group representation. Bernard Tschumi’s scale figure is abstracted to a line and an arrow, providing minimal inference as to what kind of people they are, yet emphasising the direction of movement or attention. In a populated model or drawing, the importance of scale figures is in their vocalisation of interaction between people, and the relationship between person and space. Scale figures differ from chess pieces whose identities are fixed; scale figures are pieces whose meaning exists not in their characters but in the relationships between element and element, between pieces and the environment.
Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample / MOS
https://toffu.co/products/cad-sanaa
on site review 39: tools
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