magnifying lilliputians

by Yiou Wang, MArch candidate GSD, Harvard

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. 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. . . .

Read the full article by Yiou Wang in On Site review 39: tools