MJ Wells examines a new history of the architectural model

Buildings.

Words
MJ Wells

‘The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse’
Matthew Mindrup
MIT Press, 352pp, £38

Modelling is a primary mechanism through which we make sense of our material lives and society at large. As a demonstration or proposition, architectural models have the ability to record and remake. Recently a variety of scholarly communities – including economics and the history of science – have been increasingly interested in how a model holds both the ability to embody existing knowledge and the potential to generate new experience. In this sense, architects not only model physically in card, paper, timber, at various scales, but also in different ‘media’. Every member of the profession works with models in one way or another from the economic models of fee calculation and risk assessment to space standards and building regulations. Whether physical, conceptual, or digital, models stand somewhere between theoretical concepts and our experience, reflective of both settings, thereby allowing us to use them as instruments in our understanding of both situations.

Recent research by younger scholars has brought new ideas to the fore, addressing topics as diverse as the post-war boom in model-making in the US (Teresa Fankhänel), the translation of drawings to models in sixteenth-century Italy (Giovanni Santucci); the effect of art practice on architectural models (Martin Hartung and Stefaan Vervoort), the emergence of the digital model in construction practices over the past 30 years (Émilien Cristia) and the expansion of nineteenth-century London in light of the emergence of the British architectural profession – my own field.

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Academic Matthew Mindrup’s new book does not offer a new line of enquiry or subjects to study, but aims to contextualise the model in (mostly) Western architectural practice over the past 2000 years, considering how the discipline has used models “as tools to test, refine, and illustrate their ideas about architecture in three dimensions”. Across six chapters, Mindrup provides a collection of histories of different uses of the architectural model from antiquity to the present day.

Focusing on models of existing buildings and landscapes, the first chapter combines ideas around the copy, the simulation, and the archive, moving from Sir John Soane’s Museum to thirteenth-century religious tombs in France, from Gottfried Semper at the Great Exhibition to the wunderkammers of princes. From there we move on to the discussion of models as a “medium for architectural reverie”, and then to the model’s role in the transfer of ideas from an architect to broader audiences – a recurring role that Mindrup charts from ancient Egypt to twentieth-century America.

Within these thematic discussions the book addresses the theoretical and practical concerns raised by architects about the choice of scale, materials, and how the models themselves should be viewed by ‘users’. Materials come to the foreground in the fifth chapter, where Mindrup examines the change in model-making techniques between the supposed inauguration of the medium as a design tool by Alberti and the emergence of the ‘concept model’ at the start of the twentieth century.

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The final chapter focuses on these concept models, separating them into “allegorical, analogical, and anagogical forms of interpretation”, each imparting a particular identity or purpose to a particular model. All of this is well narrated by Mindrup, who guides the reader from example to example with ease.

The strengths of the book lie in both the quality of the writing and the vast range of examples and periods. Equally generous illustrations and good graphic design are also welcome. The scope of the book is also a weakness, however: it offers us only a generalised account of the architectural model. We jump from place to place, century to century, scale to scale, without a full understanding of the objects studied. And focussing on the model as a ‘cultural object’, from within the canonical boundaries of architecture means staring at the discipline’s reflection in its own mirror, rather than thinking about the model more broadly in its connection between public and architect, society and its norms, theory and world.