Architects are sometimes criticized for taking creative liberties with their artwork, setting unlikely green scenes or populating their rendered scenes with an improbable array of happy figures. While these “literal renderings” (per Mike Rosenberg) may in some sense be figurative, using signage one would not likely see on an actual structure, they also are refreshingly blunt about the contents of the structures represented.

Surely, no one will actually call their store “Retail” or building “Signage” or mixed-use community “Mixed-Use Apartments,” but at least the viewer gets an actual sense of what they should expect to find inside.

In some cases, these are generic elements are simply temporary markers for mid-stage designs without a name — in others, they can be used to pitch developers, communities and local approval boards.

A kind of architectural equivalent to plain-packaging, minimalist companies (like Brandless), these exist at the other end of realism spectrum, countered by more playful and surrealist approaches like the one below.

The art of architectural representation has changed a lot over time, including the scale figures used to set stages, but at least these kinds of experiments show there is further room to adapt and grow.

Bringing a critical gap between 3D scanning technology and functional outputs for architects, designers and homeowners, Canvas can scan a room in minutes then generate useful CAD software files.

Raw scans of spaces can be helpful in terms of generating rough measurements and usable as a baseline for a more rigorous three-dimensional model, but it takes time and energy to translate between the two. So while they are great for point-to-point measurements and as-built drawings, such scans are limited in terms of letting someone rework or envision changes to a structure.

Occipital, the startup behind Structure Sensor, wants to make that transition smooth, painless and effectively automatic. After a users scans a room (or a whole house) with their iPad, they can send away for CAD files that will be returned in two business days. They can then plug those files into software of choice, like Sketchup, and begin remodeling their space.

The company calls their vision “augmented home” and pictures their software and hardware getting increasingly refined over time to the point where on-the-spot shots can be immediately transformed into precise and full-color 3D files.

“I think we’ll probably look back at today as a time, just like the 1830s, when we just started to have photographs,” says Adam Rodnitzky, the company’s VP of marketing. “We’re now entering the era when we’re going to start having a 3D record of the world around us.”

Used by architects and engineers, Autocad and other computer-aided design (CAD) programs have a long history as boring and blunt instruments of drafting, but this architectural illustrator has breathed new life into these drawing and rendering tools.

Fabiola Morcillo Núñez is a young Chilean architect who builds imaginary landscapes inspired by exotic architecture and pop art, a sort of modern-day Escher intent on blurring the improbable with impossible.

Many of her scenes play on elements believable at first look, like a deconstructed isometric or axonometric drawing of a house … but on fire, or flooded or featuring an impossible room or staircase.

“Architecture as a discursive tool has helped me a lot in constructing my own form of representation,” she says of her work. She is interested in deconstruction, spatial limitations, layers and multiplicity.

Her pieces borrow from various sources of inspiration in the media and world around her: “I like to take several references, be alert to life itself, be very observant and have a broad sense of understanding of beauty and the tools of creation that are presented throughout the day, for example; the internet, books, movies, the street, travel, personal stories, aesthetic preferences, dreams, philosophy etc.”

Beyond her artistic explorations, Fabiola’s work is an implicit statement about how the tools we use, even the ones with less-rich histories of creative expression, can be turned to new and inspiring purposes.

As they evolved, illustrated figures in architecture (sometimes called ‘scalies‘) have grown to have more personality, color and life, serving as more than a means to measure relative distances, heights and widths in renderings.

Historically, architectural drawings rarely featured people and, when they did, these were simplified constructs, often just outlines or silhouettes, designed simply to give the viewer a sense of scale.

Over time, start to see figures sitting in furniture, holding books (or recently: mobile devices), groups interacting and other strategies to bring these two-dimensional people to life, and the architectural scenes they inhabit along with them.

Their evolution is not accidental: scalies are often used with very explicit aims, from trying to give people a sense of the use that will take place in a finished building or space to conveying a broader vision of its popularity. Developers, for instance, may want to sell investors on how well their project will do financially, and thus pack drawings with figures to create that impression.

On the flip side, architectural students may take things to opposite extremes, setting lewd, crude or generally absurd scenes for shock value and collegial entertainment.

While some architects simply photo-edit their own scalies out of various images, there are professional makers as well, who take pictures against green screens and sell them in bundles, like “100 Business People” or “100 Casual People.” With the rise of 3D modeling, some companies are starting to capture and sell three-dimensional figures as well.

Increasingly, other ‘support’ objects have coming into play, from cars to carried accessories. Some designers go out of their way to make scalies stand out, using scantily-clad models, impossible characters (like dinosaurs) or famous figures (like a sad Keanu).

Taking the larger view, scalies show us a great deal about times, places and cultural norms; in the mid-1900s, you find men golfing and women in kitchens, dressed (of course) in period attire. Today is no different, but we notice the cultural cues less since these are now our times and places (Images via Gizmodo, Curbed, The New York Times and DesignObserver).

Many contemporary architects cut and paste scale figures into their renderings to show depth and dimension, but in cases where they draw their own, aspects of their style and personality become apparent in the radical differences between their approaches.

Frank Gehry’s figure, perhaps predictably, is a mess of forms and shapes. Walter Gropius’ betrays a Bauhaus bent, all angles and boxes. Steven Holl, of course, is a lovely little watercolor, expressive and reflective of his well-known habit for creating daily water-colored sketches.

New York architectural designer Noor Makkiya has collected twenty-one such examples for a series dubbed simply Figures, isolating them on neutral backgrounds to allow for easy side-by-side comparisons.

The variations are dramatic, between highly-stylized forms to simplified human figures or completely abstract sets of shapes forming nearly-illegible avatars, all showing something about the architect behind them and how they choose to represent their work.

From the collector: “Human figures are typically used in an architecture rendering to provide a clear scale for the common eye. Thanks to new technologies like Photoshop we have lost our “ontological dimension”, and the copy paste method we use makes it easier for us to fill architecture renderings with a desultory crowd of figures.”

“True architects since the early centuries used human figures not only to describe the quantity and the quality of the environment but also for deeper purposes of study and expression. Some used it as means of architecture inspiration, demonstrating the divine power of the human order. Other architects use human figures to emphasize on the activity within the space, sometimes it is important to depict the spatial properties of a design. Architects project themselves into the human figure. So if we compare drawings from different architects, we frequently find differences in body shape and body activity, for practicing architects often represent their own ideologies as a reference for understanding the human physical condition.”