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Entry to Supermodels.
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World Tower
Comparison, by Richard Braddish, Urban Design
and Heritage, Planning Department, City of Sydney.
The series of models was located along a window
edge of the exhibition space.
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Detail of Mt Stromlo Walkway by Amelia
Holliday.
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Detail of some of the East Darling
Harbour competition models.
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Detail of Wall
Panel by Simon Grimes, with Negative Space by
Jenny Hien and Form Generation by Gaurav
Malhotra seen in the background.
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Overview of
the exhibition with Timber Framing by Virginia
Wong See in the foreground.
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Marian Macken considers Supermodels: an exhibition of space and form in architectural models – a ‘tablescape’ of diverse architectural models curated by Sam Marshall.
In the Soane Museum, in London, hangs a
painting which shows all the architect John
Soane’s works, both built and unbuilt, as
models of different sizes and materials,
packed into a single huge room. Robert
Harbison has written that this brings out the
“miracle of models, which can put the
whole world in a small space”. The
exhibition Supermodels – curated by Sam
Marshall, with financial assistance from the
NSW Architects Registration Board’s Byera
Hadley Travelling Scholarship – takes a
similar approach, in displaying nearly 450
models made, predominantly, by Sydney
architects and architecture students.
The exhibition is in three spaces. The
first contains models made as part of
submissions for the recent East Darling
Harbour competition, and, along a window
edge, a personal overview of local and
international buildings and their
relationship to the world’s tallest building
badge, by Richard Braddish, City of Sydney
Council model maker. In the other two
rooms, Marshall has gathered together
models from the offices of practitioners.
According to Marshall, the impetus of the
exhibition was to create a medium between
architects and the public, via the showing of
architects’ wares, to form a “table-scape” of
models at chest height and eye level.
The models range in type, including
modelled vignettes of the development of
individual schemes; presentation models;
interior models; toy construction kits; detail
construction models; sectional urban
studies; models made after the fact, paring
back built complexity to post factum
conceptual simplicity; modelled
interpretations of well-known buildings;
and models not actually proposing a built
work, but exploring an abstract spatiality.
The models range in scale, from those
displaying an obvious 1:100-ness to those
needing a title to clarify interpretation.
For example, SJB Architects’ white card and
plastic model, titled Facade Study, could
just as believably have read “Joinery Unit
Study”. The catalogue allows this freedom
by omitting scale information. The models
are made of different materials, from
monolithic lead (Quarry, Dale Jones-Evans
Architecture) and plaster (House for a
Billionaire, Wes Grunsell) and the
mono-materiality of balsa (Backpacker
Hostel, Connie Zhang) and boxboard
(Negative Space, Jenny Hien) to assemblages
in wood, metal, resin, plastic, clay,
sandstone, bronze and folded paper.
The East Darling Harbour models, due to
their sharing of site and brief and scale,
invite initial comparisons of content and
scheme. But these models, seen within the
greater context of this particular exhibition,
and cut off from the symbiosis of their
drawings, invite examination based on
other criteria. They are seen here within the
realm of model making itself, and it is the
representation of the city, the portrayal of
the existing, that invites observation.
Interestingly, this forms a connection with
the rest of the exhibition: it is the site of the
making of those other models.
The act of model making, of making
miniature a proposed building, creates
fascination. Qualities associated with this
change of scale include intimacy and
interiority. However, as Susan Stewart has
written, the act of holding the miniature
within the hands creates qualities of the
giant in the viewer, leading to exclusion and
distance. Architects have acknowledged
this remoteness by creating models that
have taken on the role of presenting
architecture, not representing it; the model
as referent, with its own identity and
presence and, therefore, perhaps
self-consciousness. As Michael Graves has
said, “We’re not making real buildings;
we’re making models of ideas.”
The origins of this shift within model
making lie in the 1976 seminal exhibition
Idea as model, curated by Peter Eisenman,
in New York. Eisenman intended to display
the model as a conceptual rather than a
narrative tool, revealing the artistic
existence that models could have,
independent of the project they represented.
However, Christian Hubert, in his essay in
the catalogue of this exhibition, writes of
the extent of this objecthood: “The space of
the model lies on the border between
representation and actuality … neither pure
representation nor transcendent object.
It claims a certain autonomous objecthood,
yet this condition is always incomplete.
The model is always a model of. The desire
of the model is to act as a simulacrum of
another object, as a surrogate which allows
for imaginative occupation.”
The models in this exhibition are the
manifestation of the act of making. There is
a relationship between the model maker
and the model, and between the viewer and
the model. Therefore, the mark of the hand
of the maker transfers to the viewer,
something a photograph of the built work
can never do. In Supermodels, sometimes
the eye is drawn to the coarser models, the
ones with uneven edges pinned together,
such as Sam Crawford Architects’ Bathroom
Addition or the model by Bruce Eeles, made
when he himself was a student. There is an
honesty and immediacy to these types of
models, exposing the craft of the profession,
revealing a healthy shedding of the usual
editing of an office’s output before it reaches
the public gaze. This lack of pretension is
contributed to by the location of the
exhibition itself – not in a white-walled
gallery, but, instead, in an as-yet-unleased
commercial space, with bare concrete block
walls and fluorescent lights, the models
sitting on raw plywood. Unfortunately,
some sit within their own acrylic cases and,
due to this, are slightly removed from the
viewer and their modelled neighbours.
Often group shows fail due to their
generality. However, in this case, because
seemingly dissimilar architectures are
placed next to each other, connections and
similarities can be speculated on that would
not exist at a built scale, or across pages of
drawings. By providing a core sample of
three-dimensional representation, via a
driftnet approach of gathering, the
exhibition presents an overview of one
city’s architectural labours. Supermodels
provokes consideration of other exhibitions,
such as a similar survey of the spatial
representations of allied professions –
landscape architecture’s rendering of terrain
or stage design’s theatre sets.
Models are usually seen as exploratory
and preparatory to a building. The emphasis
is on their generative qualities, and their
revelatory capacities in getting to the
design. The models in this exhibition are
no longer “current” within their own design
processes, and hence are separated from
their earlier roles. They have become
records of a process, inviting reflection that
a space of time offers. The usual way of
documenting architecture is by
photographing the built work, which often
involves the ubiquitous stylist’s fitout.
In the case of Supermodels, architecture is
documented by dwelling on the artefacts
of architecture’s process, allowing them to
elucidate, narrate and comment. And as
the exhibition disregards architectural
classifications at a built level, it leads to
an inclusivity sometimes missing from
the profession.
MARIAN MACKEN IS A MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE
(THESIS) STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
TECHNOLOGY, SYDNEY, WRITING ON THE TOPIC
OF MODELS. SHE WAS ALSO AN EXHIBITOR IN
SUPERMODELS. SUPERMODELS SHOWED AT THE
ST MARGARET’S COMPLEX, SYDNEY, IN SEPTEMBER.
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