magnifyi n g lilliput i a n s yiou wang Then God said ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth.’ – Genesis 1:26-28
Scale figures, tools made in our own image, are widely used in architectural models and drawings. Our miniature facsimiles populate the scenes we create, filling in architectural spaces, landscape, places and their blank margins. Different from Divine Creation that endows people with agency, designers deprive scale figures of both agency and the human psyche. Scale figures are standardised, commodified tools in human shape. People, bodies that occupy the space, are the subject of architecture, they make demands upon space, they manipulate space, they enact space and they navigate space. Conversely, in architectural practice, minuscule versions of people are objects of architecture. Space demands them, manipulates them, and enacts them, and they just passively sit still in perpetual poses whose only existence depends on a designer’s representational needs. Although things that manipulate people’s emotions and actions can have agency, as Gell postulates with dolls, the resemblance of a scale figure to a social agent is only superficially visual.1 Despite the progression of technology and digital culture, photorealistic resemblance of miniature facsimiles to people is incrementally simplified to abstract symbols of humans, reducing their personness layer by layer. The scale figure cannot exercise agency when the decision of whether to add it and where to add it involves nothing but straightforward utility. But it is not trivial — a passive recipient of agency from the human architect, the scale figure registers intention and subconscious projection.
from left to right: Toy Soldier, circa 1920 Wooden mannequin vs Nendoroid Le Corbusier, Early sketch of Modular Man Chris Ware, comic character Woody Brown, from Rusty Brown, 2019 Tamiya 12622 1/350 Crew Set Eric Wong, detail from Cohesion
24 on site review 39: Tools
utility ‘Man as measure’, an historic thought underlying art and architecture since the Renaissance, has persisted as an aesthetic to fix the proportions of architecture to those of the human body. From Vitruvian Man, to plaster cast figures, to wooden mannequins, the importance of man as measure presented the human body as a regulator of architectural form, a function which has a connection with, but is different from, the industrial indication of the scale of a space – the height of the ceiling, the width of the prospect space, the depth of the room. Originally man as measure meant replicating the proportions of the human body onto buildings, since the human body was believed to be perfect. However ‘man as measure’ has been used for decades as the comparison of the building scale to the size of an average 6-foot inhabitant. The scale figure gives the viewer a direct and perceptual understanding of spatial scale.
