Prologue

Let’s admit it: architecture did not invent modelling. Human life has known it since its inception, either as children playing with smaller versions of what adults do or adults learning on the basis of other adults’ previous experiences. The advantage of a model is that it provides a bird’s eye view on a situation; it allows one to understand its potential and to alter it without actually intervening in reality. The question this hereby poses concerns the various dimensions of architectural modelling in architectural culture. Two sub-questions need to be addressed: first, are architectural models just tools that transfer basic data (structural, spatial, social and economic) about the building to come? Second, do architectural models entail a potential that affects the broader working of a culture? Stated otherwise, things that merely resemble other things, like a representation of a house as a box, pose no problems. They just display a basic likeness and communicate this similarity. But when these models (drawn, carved or modelled) are used to represent all kinds of human relations, like a doll’s house, then they bring about meaning in their own way. They also have a meaning that extends beyond the mere likeness between a copy and a model. How then do these models work within architectural culture?

Modelling architecture

Let us open with a preliminary note about architectural education. Architectural models facilitate a kind of learning that foster a spatial type of thinking. Arguing that architectural models are expensive and time-consuming and that modest studios invest less in them does not mean that they should not remain a fundamental exercise of architectural education. Should the cumbersome architectural practice be the main criterion of an architectural education? A positive answer would reduce the broader scope of a qualitative architectural education that includes technical, humanist and artistic aspects. Recall how from Vitruvius to Durand, from antiquity to modernity, the architect was expected to understand music as the path between harmonics and mathematics. ¹It was once a truism that intellectual profile of an architect unfolded between humanities, fine arts and exact sciences. Alternatively, architects become proficient engineers with a modest ability to make space as profitable as possible. Furthermore, other than the flat digital screen, an architectural model has its own density and presupposes the active interaction between a “thick” object and a living and moving body, the Leib that German speakers sagaciously distinguish from the mere physical Körper. In this sense, the situation captures an essential phenomenological dimension, namely the ability to conceive space as actual bodily movement around a thing. Screens notoriously fail at that because all dimension of depth is inherently short-circuited by their flatness. The body does not move around a projected model, not even in virtual reality; the eyes need to imagine the movement around the objects appearing on the screen. This physical movement, however, is the indisputable fundament of architecture. And the architectural model, because of its density, facilitates this culture of careful movement and bodily relation to space...