Exquisite Profiles

Architectural renderings are made to seem commercially desirable and socially aspirational through the use of contextual elements such as people, objects, animals and plants. An analysis of architectural software libraries revealed a limited variety of elements, indicating that these utopian scenarios perpetuate current societal limitations. Addressing the racial, sexual, gender and ableist biases, a new plugin library was developed by hacking details and tags from existing human figures together. The figures are presented in a life-size installation that invites an embodied engagement with the software’s distortions. If the results seem dystopian, it asks: Is the real dystopia a world designed for an impossibly idealised human race?