Abstract
Over 30 years ago the New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) organized the exhibition Idea as Model. It is one of the few examples in recent history to recognize the potential provocative power contained in a model. In the catalogue of this exhibition, New York architect Christian Hubert, in an essay entitled ‘The Ruins of Representation’, defended the relative autonomy of the model as object. The power of the model is not its referential character, but indeed its character as an object. The essay and the exhibition showed how this relative autonomy of the architectural model was in fact discovered through the arts. Hubert’s essay is reprinted in this OASE, accompanied by the author’s reflection on the exhibition and an updating of the essay’s original perspective.