Model Agency: Object Lessons and Theories

This seminar examines the relationship between architecture and scale tracing the history of the model and its function within the discipline.

As digital applications replace handcrafted architectural models, questions emerge about the specificity and status of such objects. A series of famous twentieth-century models will be introduced opening up links with precedents ranging from religious artefacts to cinematic special effects props. Fundamentally, the seminar aims to question the mystique of studio and the creative process. While the course does provide new information, it also seeks to revisit what students already know from their own academic experiences.

Modernism’s particular favoritism of the model paralleled its ascendancy in architecture education and its recurrent feature in popular culture, yet the critical study of this has been largely ignored. Why did the Ecole des Beaux-Arts ban the model? How did the dissolution of the Bauhaus help bring it back? How much did Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright owe to Kindergarten lessons? Toys will be considered as catalysts for design projects. Narrative constructs based on the miniature, including films, should broaden conventional notions of size and signification. Questions regarding digital fabrication will organize future debate.

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