Scale Figure Database

Title: Scalefigur.es (opens in new tab)
Date: Fall, 2020
Role: UX/UI
With: Akana Jayewardene

Scale figures typically have human or animal qualities, and serve, among other functions, to give the viewer of an architectural drawing a sense of the scale therein. This project diplays a sampling of scale figures from across time and modes of architectural drawings. Users of the website can sort the scale figures three ways: by architect’s name, by date drawn, and by “anthropomorphic qualities.”
Clicking on an individual image brings up an “ID card” displaying detailed information about the figure.

Project Text Below:

Who inhabits buildings and who is depicted inhabiting architecture? 

As we grapple with issues of equity and social justice in our built environment, we wonder about the representation of the human figure in architectural drawings. This project is an exploration into the types of scale figures used by architects and designers.* We seek to think critically about trends and differences in how the human figure is depicted over time, across project location and architect’s nationality. We seek to assess, while acknowledging our subjectivity, if a figure looks human and/or feels human.** We seek to evaluate the role dynamism and motion play in rendering a figure more or less human. We hope to draw into question decisions to abstract the human body or to articulate it as we populate our own architectural work with imagined inhabitants. This exploration studies and problematizes the ways in which we represent a person in an imagined scenario.

This project was generously funded in part by The Urban Humanities Initiative at UCLA CityLAB, via a grant from the Mellon Foundation. 

*The figures used in this project are a sampling of images from MOS Architect’s An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures without Architecture. It is by no means an extensive archive, and, accordingly, we intend not to draw conclusions through our categorizations, but to pique interests and ask questions. Like the Unfinished Encyclopedia, we see this project as “in progress”, with room for additions, edits and recategorizations. 

**Assessments made about the scale figures in this project are subject to our personal biases. We hope that one might evaluate our criteria through one’s own lens and reassess accordingly