In his writing Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Emile Durkheim posits that the sacred is society (Masuzawa, p. 28). Society is comprised of human beings that exist under the umbrella of a common cosmology, which enunciates the order of things in the universe. Architecture is a vehicle for humans to articulate this cosmology through a poetic assemblage of tectonic elements. The resulting construction is a cosmogony that cleaves the sacred and profane worlds; this cleft becomes meaningful when a human being experiences a building.

Architects envisage tectonic arrangements of building elements by making images. As far back as the time of Vitruvius, who recognized the human body as a geometrical ideal, the body has been a metaphor guiding the generation of architectural form (Ostwald, p. 24). The modern design procedure has brought forth new ways of incorporating the human body as a generator of meaningful architectural form through the depiction of metonymic figures who walk through the imagined building and give it shape (Frascari, p. 124). However, these bodies are more than mere form givers or indicators of scale; in fact, they are emblems of the human condition. Thus, the depiction of the human body by architects cannot be casual; the image of the body is a key to arriving at a design that benefits society.

The architects Le Corbusier and Walter Pichler depicted bodies through drawing, sculpting, and painting. In their architectural drawings, the body images function as anthropomorphic tropes, signifiers that consecrate the sacred, through the way they are drawn, their body language, facial expression, identities, and activities. The architect