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Have you noticed the little people in the architectural drawings? Often, in a developer’s building plans, they will present their vision for how the building will be used. The characters sit drinking coffee, chatting with friends, or working. With their modern clothes and accessories—a laptop here, an electric bike there—you’d be forgiven for thinking these additions to the graphics were a modern phenomenon.
However, as the new exhibition Fantastic Figures at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London reveals, these small figures or animals, known as “staffs”, were used by architects as early as the 1600s. Before they entered architectural painting, they were a feature of landscape paintings: gondoliers in Canaletto paintings; drunken peasants in sketches of Dutch villages; pious people against the backdrop of religious scenes. The Flemish writer and painter Karel van Mander charmingly called the staff “storykens” (“little stories”).
Fantastic Characters begins with a drawing by Leonard Knyff in 1695. The Dutch painter was commissioned by architect Christopher Wren to draw the floor plan of Greenwich Hospital. Realizing that his design did not match what the commissioners wanted, he asked Kneff to produce a drawing that was decadent enough to convince them that the new Royal Infirmary Greenwich would be a stylish place; a place of fashion, wealth and fun The place. In the foreground, Kneff added boats in the river, happy young couples rowing boats, and dozens of promenading figures in long dresses and wigs.
Their plan may not have worked (the hospital was built according to another of Wren’s plans), but the construction crew was born. As the exhibition’s curator, Frances Sands, told me, Kniff was very familiar with the use of staff in landscape painting and “brought it into the realm of architectural drawing.” “From that period onwards, the use of people in architectural drawings became increasingly common.”
The actual purpose of the employees is clear: to turn the imagined space into reality. But its purpose is also more technical – to give an idea of scale. Take for example a painting from the late 18th century, produced in the offices of George Dance the Younger (Dance was responsible for much of London’s reconstruction work, much of which has sadly now been demolished). This is a front view of the side of a country house: a blank wall, a porch supported by four Doric columns, and a pink carriage drawn by a black horse behind it.
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