Eye Magazine

The exhibition explores why and how models are made, and for whom. Material experimentation is one such avenue; Zaha Hadid Architects’ paper exoskeleton of the Morpheus Hotel, Macau (2019), with its mindbogglingly complex geometries, tests credulity. A study by Lina Ghotmeh Architects of The Stone Garden building façade, Beirut (2020), is made of laser-cut cardboard sheets, layered and glued to resemble stratigraphic layers of earth. Beirut is a city of archaeology. The building’s materiality replicates its model, appearing to emerge as a built form from the ground.

The need to communicate with impact in order to convince a demanding client is a familiar challenge. It is some comfort to learn this is not a new problem. One example model is a foldable paper cut-out, by Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1804), of an interiors concept requiring sign-off from his busy client Napoleon. Jørn Utzon’s wooden model (1961) of the Sydney Opera House was an attempt to convince Ove Arup that the concept would work and to please return to the job.

This free exhibition (which runs until 28 January 2022) is a collaboration between the Building Centre and the Victoria & Albert museum, with exhibition design by Roz Barr Architects and graphics by Studio Mathias Clottu. Clottu’s typographical choices (Antique) and minimal text descriptions (designated instead to a sixteen-page handout, which itself folds out like a model, see top image) creates an uncluttered, rationalised backdrop that supports the models’ intricacies and plays with their sense of ‘bricolage’.

New technologies are also in evidence. ‘Prajapati’s Painted Bodhi’ (2018), by Dalia Matsuura Frontini, was drawn using a VR headset output to a robotic arm and painted in 3D. A hybrid drawing / model (called a ‘drawdel’) was used by So & So Studio to illustrate, for a blind client, the wayfinding within their house. Tactile glyphs were devised to communicate the different spaces through touch. Sam Jacobs Studio’s ‘The most photographed barn in the world’ (2021) is a 3D-printed resin triptych of the TA Moulton Barn in Wyoming. Photogrammetry software was used to extrapolate information from photos amassed online, recreating the barn in three dimensions without referring to its real architectural form.

Not all architectural models are intended for a built future. Among these is Ellie Sampson’s intricate paper model ‘Wish List City’ (2020). It draws on Hayao Miyazaki’s animations and Teikoku Shounen’s illustrations to create an imagined urban scene that stands in for its maker’s Covid-curtailed backpacking holiday. Karen Britcliffe’s minka series ‘Looks like we made it’ (2019) (minka being Japanese houses inhabited by farmers, merchants, artisans and low-level Samurai) can be rotated and displayed either side up; curiously, therefore, one home, along with its trees and chickens, is always upside down. This was used as book cover artwork for Hiromi Kawakami’s offbeat People from my neighbourhood (2019). Such buildings are destined for the dreamscape, not the cityscape.

The above is just a small selection of a large and eclectic array of models on display. This captivating and understated exhibition offers a glimpse of a parallel architecture, where long-lost and imaginary buildings stand side by side with embryonic global icons. These are the miniature embodiments of monumental concepts.

There is an accompanying book, An Alphabet of Architectural Models, published by Merrell, eds. Olivia Horsefall Turner, Simona Valeriani, Matthew Wells, Teresa Fankhänel, £25.

Michèle Woodger, writer, London

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