David Auerbach

Architectural figures are charged with the task of bringing an architectural drawing, rendering, or model to life. They speak to us in ways that other elements of a drawing cannot, or rarely ever do. This is their charge, their vitality, their animacy, which can turn without moment’s notice, from the opening of a projective narrative in the tune of an invitation to live, to the swallowing of this extradimensionality by the overdeterminations of scale, proportion, order. I don’t want to assume that architectural figures serve a completely transparent, banal, self-evident role in architectural representation — the trope of human-as-scale. Instead, I would like to try to read architectural figures as sites of an ineliminable expression, perhaps deliberate and perhaps unconscious, within a given project. Watching out for figures, listening for how they might already be speaking, requires that we take a moment to reflect on the life of the figure — on its various appearances and disappearances.