Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample catalogue the figures that populate architects’ drawings

Buildings.

The way in which architects populate drawings with human figures is often so individually distinctive that it acts as a signature. A new book by architects Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, and their practice, MOS, gathers more than 1000 examples of these images, drawn by 250 architects, which are abstracted from their original context and presented in alphabetical order by architect’s name.

Media ranges from the (artfully) artless scrawl to the carefully hand-shaded and cross-hatched, to portraits polished with all manner of Photoshop effects.

Ampetheatre
Ampetheatre
Ampetheatre

“Without their architectural surroundings, the scale figures present themselves as architecture’s refugees”, suggests publisher MIT Press. “They are the necessary but often overlooked reference points that give character to spaces imagined for but not yet occupied by humans. Here, they constitute a unique sourcebook and an architectural citizenry of their own”.

‘An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures without Architecture’
Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample and MOS
MIT Press, £66