Selling a big urban idea isn't easy. More than ever, architects rely on jaw-dropping images to convince their clients to spend millions on their projects. And to do it, they fill their fantastical renderings with people-people who have a story all their own.

These denizens of the designed future are the subject of Designing People, a show that's up through May 19 at the Environmental Design Archives at the University of California Berkeley. From refined watercolors of the early 1900s to today's fantastical landscapes, the architectural rendering has evolved from an elegant illustration to a high-tech marketing tool, and the people populating them have evolved as well.

Using people to sell buildings: Donald Reay (renderer), Ocean Park Towers and Terrace Apartments, Santa Monica, CA, 1961, Vernon DeMars Collection; courtesy Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley
Using people to sell buildings: Donald Reay (renderer), Ocean Park Towers and Terrace Apartments, Santa Monica, CA, 1961, Vernon DeMars Collection; courtesy Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley - After arriving at Berkeley's archives 17 years ago, co-curator Waverly Lowell found herself tucking away intriguing architectural drawings as she stumbled upon them, especially ones which incorporated an usual aesthetic. With her fellow curator Christina Marino, she quickly realized there wasn't much available in books about the history of the people who populated these drawings-not even an agreed-upon term, although Lowell prefers "scalie," since the human forms were originally inserted into renderings simply to show scale. 
Back when architectural drawings were art: Unidentified Project, n.d. Tallie Maule Collection; courtesy Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley
Back when architectural drawings were art: Unidentified Project, n.d. Tallie Maule Collection; courtesy Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley - At one point in architectural history, renderings were as beautiful as the buildings they would become. Architects hired illustrators to take their blueprints and romanticize them. Frank Lloyd Wright's drawings, for example, were legendary for their lush, Japanese aesthetic (which were almost all created by one woman, Marion Mahony Griffin). Slowly, these watercolors and pencil drawings began to include people, but even then, it was often in these unnaturally posed, highly stylized ways. People were added as abstract forms with the same look and feel as the building itself. Modernist project drawings, for example, might include geometric silhouettes....
One reason you'll see kayakers in renderings: BIG's proposal for a St. Petersburg, Florida pier includes balloons, although no one really knows why
One reason you'll see kayakers in renderings: BIG's proposal for a St. Petersburg, Florida pier includes balloons, although no one really knows why - In the last few years, architectural renderings have undergone a strange revolution, becoming almost over-the-top parodies of themselves. Architizer has a funny series where they look at the odd choices architects make in their renderings. The Architect's Newspaper also ran an excellent piece looking at emerging trends in renderings, from kayaks to fireworks to butterflies. Recently, San Francisco Chroniclearchitecture critic John King brilliantly annotated renderings for the city, pointing out their stereotypical details.There's a reason for these bizarre, nonsensical additions-ooooh, balloons!-to these future landscapes. Architecture is becoming less about a single walled-off phallus on the horizon, and more about parks and public spaces ... © BIG
The rise of the "hipster scalie":
The rise of the "hipster scalie": -   At a site like Architecture People, $5 gets you cut-out image files of 52 people.  So where do these people come from now? For architects, the process of collecting their "entourage" used to begin in architecture school. Scanned JPGs of people, cut out from magazines or newspapers like so many paper dolls, might be handed down from teachers to students. But the internet has changed all that. Now you can entrust a stock photography company to hire models posing as on-the-nose characters. Bundles of "Single Casual People" can be had for $50 or more. But these oh-so-perfect people are also why this kind of stock photography won't cut it for many projects. Most of it looks too staged, its scalies far too plastic to seem like real, relatable citizens out on the streets. Architects are increasingly on the hunt for ambiguous, diverse, but ultimately believable people.