From the editors
I FEEL OUT OF PLACE Words and Images Tuyen Le
We are currently living, working, eating, sleeping, yawning, crying in an enclosed space. Every single built space we have is operated or inhabited by humans. Heck, you are probably reading this comfortably inside a well-lit building. Thinking further into this, before the brick and mortar phase of this very space you’re sitting in, through the expertise of architects and engineers, we can rely on computer renderings and the scale figures plotted in the scene to be convinced that “yes, this space looks comfortable and meaningful to future users.” This article is here to contribute some awareness to the underlying bias we have for the polished world of architecture rendering. It is impossible to represent architecture without representing the human, yet, in present day, adding people into an architecture render is the last thing on an architect’s task list.
Like a lacklustre cherry on top, architectural designers tend to put little effort into choosing the appropriate scale figures to represent their design. Whilst these figures uphold the best version of us, designers never consider their existence further than a measuring tool. Thus, the issue of diversity dawns upon them only post-rendering, resulting in situations where there is zero people of colour in a scene. The lack of diversity in scale figures has come up as a contemporary issue, some partial explanations for this matter are: people just don’t care, or seeing white-abled human figures equals to a safe/approachable area. Through this short ridicule, I hope you can reinvestigate your own decision in plotting human figures for your next project, as well as thinking critically at the renderings you would see later on. The turning point of today’s architectural representation stemmed from the modernist perception of the human-building relationship. The post-war era greatly influenced the modernist thinkers to opt for capable human figures, ones that can handle new technology, can adapt to the
revamped metropolitan, and ultimately, are not locking the building. The result of this brought us to an idealised form of scale figure that is masculine and faceless. These features reinforce the gendered functionality of most built spaces during modernism: robust, productive, and capable. We don’t know who this person is, nor their ethnicity, their life story, their comfort level, their feelings, and whether or not they wish to be there. But all is none of our concern, it is their anonymity that make them versatile for all kinds of scenarios that the architects then have set up. The beginning of scale figures in architecture established the model citizen for many other renderings during this era, faceless and anonymous.1
Gropius & Meyer, The Chicago Tribune (1922)
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