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. 

In the editorial, the editors of this OASE address the specific qualities of the model, separate from the often empirical way it is used in the professional domain of architecture. They emphasize that the objective of this OASE is in fact to examine the dividing line between architecture and art, as well as the role the model plays as an autonomous object in both domains. The focus is on the model, based on the question of what exactly the model object can be and can signify when something other than its representative character is emphasized. The editorial places the various contributions in the issue against the background of this question.

Models play a crucial role in the work of OMA. All of Koolhaas’s buildings, however diverse, share one common characteristic: they also exist as models, and something happened with these models: this model was discussed; it was put on display, or it was pulled at or pushed in. It changed and it was taken in hand – and above all, the model was presented to the observer, the spectator or the viewer. Architecture no longer reduces its audience; it does not make it small and humble and swallow it up. It turns it into gods who can step over rocks and mountains like giants. 

What makes a model a model? Milica Topalovic investigates the characteristic qualities of the model. The difference between models and buildings seems obvious. A model is made on the scale necessary to get something (an idea) across, while a building is by definition the 1:1 reality of the architectural idea. There are, however, spaces that escape this distinction and for which the scale is not the distinguishing factor, such as the 1:1 installations of artists Gregor Schneider, Hans Schabus and Guillaume Bijl: ‘they seem to linger on the edge of reality: they might look too simple or too perfect or even too familiar’.

The work of the German artist Thomas Demand consists of large photographs he takes of temporary, life-sized paper structures he assembles in front of his camera. Once the photo is taken, the paper work is destroyed. The photos show exactly what their titles say: a sink, a camping table, a parking garage. The titles refer to the ‘architecture’ of the scene. Places we know from our collective memory without knowing the place itself. We had the opportunity to conduct a correspondence with Demand about his work and in relation to the theme of this issue: models. A conversation about their materials and their reality, about representation and idea.

Geers reflects on the position of the model within the development of an architectural project. By elaborating on the issue of convertibility between content and form, the article parallelizes, on an abstract level, the cinematographic novel Donogoo Tonka of the French writer Jules Romains, the architecture of John Hejduk and the installations of the artist Matt Mullican. All of which form parables about the sequential relation between a plan and a model, which is related to the issue of process and result, reality and imagination in the architecture of Hejduk. This article describes Hejduk’s aim to create a parallel reality using models in order to distance oneself from the real world. 

Georges Bataille, in his text ‘Le labyrinthe et la pyramide’ (1935), shows how the discipline of architecture spans the gamut from a reflective activity (the conceptualization of a space) to pure phenomenology (the experience of a space). This same dichotomy is also found in the architectural model. A model provides an overview of a project to be built, while also simulating the experience of the ‘real’ edifice. Because a model, in architectural practice, is always fettered ‘by the conundrums of representation haunting it’, Vervoort’s essay investigates the modus operandi of the model-based work of such contemporary artists as Rita McBride, Thomas Schütte and Julian Opie. The model, Vervoort argues, provides a dialogue between idea and materialization, offers the viewer an immanent experience and enables the artist to communicate through an opaque form.

Bas Princen’s contribution consists of images found and collected by the photographer that serve as inspirations for his photographs. They are images that attempt to render ideas about space visually. These include simulations, references, interpretations, never-executed buildings, existing but forgotten objects and landscapes, and places that only exist for us in drawings, spaces in which the idea predominates or in which the space exists solely to make an idea legible.

This text by American artist Mike Kelley is largely based on his work The Educational Complex. It describes his motives and the formation process for this work of art, which consists of one large model. The model is a configuration of several building fragments: an intuitive reconstruction by memory of all the childhood schools Kelley attended. Translating these into one model is caused by Kelly’s fascination for the Repressed Memory Syndrome, a controversial method in mental health care for treating traumatic disorders. Kelley relates this to an architectural space, and from there, he elaborates on the broader context of his work.

After the death of artist Georges Vantongerloo, the famed architect (and polymath) Max Bill took over part of his archive, including scores of models. Bill’s son, Jacob Bill, is now the trustee of this collection, and in this essay he describes the character of the models. Vantongerloo was a member of De Stijl. In his work, by embracing imagination and making use of the specific design perspective and formal idiom advocated and prescribed by De Stijl, Vantongerloo displays the interchangeable relationship between sculpture, furniture, house and airport, for example. Because the model is in a certain sense without scale, it makes it possible to interpret objects in different ways – specific indications in the models, however, identify them as furniture, house or airport.  

When collecting and exhibiting architectural models several questions arise. What happens exactly when the model enters the museum? Which role does it need to assume when exposed and made public? How can we consider its exhibition when taking into account the shift from working instrument to autonomous object? And what about the model’s significance and its role both in demystifying the architect’s work and mystifying his importance? Véronique Patteeuw opens up some of these questions in an informal talk with Howard Shubert, curator of the drawings collection at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. A CCA staff member for 25 years, Shubert is a privileged observer of the institute’s developing acquisition policies and curatorial programmes. Discussing the CCA’s acquisition policies, and the difficult role of the model once exposed, Shubert and Patteeuw ended up talking about Eisenman’s working models, Hejduk’s drawings for models, and on how to expose these models without losing their significance. 

This interview with Adam Caruso, principal of Caruso St John Architects in London, deals with the use of models in their practice and more in general with the problem of the representation of architecture. The practice of Caruso St John deals with models in a strong pictorial way, as only images of the model will be presented instead of the object itself. The model itself is treated in a transient way: like the drawing, the model forms one of the tools for constant architectural research. The article elaborates on the role of architectural models as a grateful tool to investigate the present-day neglected interest in the architecture of the interior, of key importance in the practice of Caruso St John.

Krijn de Koning’s pictorial essay consists of photographs he has taken of found objects, constructions, stacks, etcetera, which in their form have the potential and visual qualities to be seen as architectural and/or urban design models.