Abstract
In a presentation drawing, human figures have a natural attitude to work as an optical reference to measure the design space and to provide a sort of instructions to use it, but over the centuries, their agency has been multifaceted. The practice of photo-collages, which was fed by photography and cinema development, has recently spread thank to the digital techniques and human figures in architecture renderings seem to have become as fundamental as a top-modes for a fashion magazine cover. Besides providing a recognizable mark to the design entry, selecting peculiar figures can visually connect a design to a specific place and time, working as a cultural, situationist and sensorial agent. This seems to be true particularly for the cultural typologies. In renderings of museums, theatres or libraries, often ordinary people are integrated by figures of artworks and celebrities, like in Alberto Campo Baeza and Raphael Gabrion’s design for a Louvre new building in Lievin, France, whose figures are placed in the renderings not only to explain the functions but also to remind the ambiguous threshold between representation and reality.
Highlights
In the context of the digital production by “CAD monkeys, rendering farms, and outsourcers”, hyper-rendered seductive scenes look often detached from real people and places [1]
The people inhabiting the picture, whose agency seems to have become more and more central in any architectural communication, exploit much of the potential narrative of an architectural “scene”. This seems to be important for the culture-addressed typologies such as museums, theatres or libraries
Human figures are conventionally used in architectural drawings as an optical reference to visually express the scale and size of design space, [5] like “scalies”, as suggested by Waverly Lowell [6]
Summary
In the context of the digital production by “CAD monkeys, rendering farms, and outsourcers”, hyper-rendered seductive scenes look often detached from real people and places [1]. An architectural “scene” is commonly intended as a mere picture of an imagined place for commercial goals, while it can take into account the social context and agenda to depict a theatrical “scene”, in which “action is carried on, business is being done, or events are happening” [2]. This specific attitude is currently practiced by those architectural visualizers who use to portray designed buildings immersed in peculiar environments, at night, under the rain falling or half-hidden in the mist. The analysis of the digital renderings by disassembling the visual components and individuating the source of some of the human figures and artworks shown, compared with the specific quality of the proposed building, reveals the central role of figures in denoting it as a Louvrerelated museum and the activities planned inside it, and a critical approach toward the museum as institution, the relationship between true and fake, and the fragile boundary between virtual and real
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