homo faberM O D E L L I N G I D E A S

EDITED BY ALISON FAIRLEY

ANDREA MINA

PETER DOWNTON

the focus is not on the working model, or its method of manufacturing, but rather on the role that models play in representing ideas.

homo faberM O D E L L I N G I D E A S

MODELLING IDEAS THROUGH MANUAL MEANS: AN ANALYSiS OF THE ‘MANUAL IDEAS’ STUDIO PETER DOWNTON & ANDREA MINA

MANUAL IDEAS: STUDIO MODELS

FROM IDEAS TO MODELS: AN INTROSPECTIVE REPORT PETER DOWNTON

GIVING FORM TO IDEAS ANDREA MINA

POISE: AN OVERVIEW MARK BURRY

POISE STUDIO MODELS

DEVELOPMENT OF THE LED STICK

M. HANK HAEUSLER

CONTEXT-SPECIFIC LIGHTWEIGHT STRUCTURES IN ARCHITECTURE

JEROME FRUMAR

SCREENRESOLUTION PAUL NICHOLAS & TIM SCHORK

DESIGN MODELS FOR BKK ARCHITECTS MUMA GALLERY COMPETITION 2006 RORY HYDE

HERTZIAN SPACE: MODELLING SPATIAL PRESENCE MARK TAYLOR

EXPLORING THE ROLE DIGITAL MODELS

SARAH BENTON

BEAUTY & BRAINS ABOUT MODELS JULIETTE PEERS

POISE DIARY: MOMENTS FROMS THE STUDIO JULIETTE PEERS

MAKING LANDSCAPE CRAIG DOUGLAS & ROSELEA MONACELLA

RE-MAKING: IDEAS AND MODELS CRAIG DOUGLAS & PETER DOWNTON

A HOUSE FOR HERMES: THE HOUSE OF MY FATHER CHARLES ANDERSON

DESIGNING OPTICAL GEOMETRY AND CREATING HOLOGRAPHIC IMAGES

MARTINA MRONGOVIUS

COMMUNICATING IDEAS - SHARING INFORMATION DOMINIK HOLZER

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In the second Homo Faber exhibition in 2007 the focus is not

on the working model, or its method of manufacturing,

but rather on the role that models play in representing ideas.

For a person who has not been educated in architecture or

design the very thought that models can exist, for some purpose

other than to prefigure a completed building, is potentially

anathema. Yet, every architect and architecture student learns

that models can express a range of themes, ideas and desires

none of which are necessarily constructable or even prefigure

a design solution. Few of these models are ever seen by the

general public and it is rare that an opportunity arises to gain

a more detailed level of understanding about their production,

application and meaning.

The idea model is one of the most powerful examples of pre-

architectural form that is available to the designer. In its more

metaphysical guise it can embody complex philosophical ideas,

it can evoke emotions or offer unique tactile or even aural

sensations and it in no way has to resemble a building. In the

form that architects more commonly call a “conceptual model”

it can encompass the essence of a vision for a building. In this

variation the model represents a halfway-house between the

building and some formative idea that will thematically define

the completed architecture. This freedom of expression is one

of the most important qualities of the idea model and it is seen

in many of the exhibited works that have been produced by

students, professionals and academics.

The Homo Faber project is led by a team of senior academics

from RMIT University and the University of Newcastle.

The members of the team are Professor Mark Burry,

Professor Michael Ostwald, Professor Peter Downton

and Associate Professor Andrea Mina. With the support

of a major national grant from the Australian Research

Council (ARC), the team is proud to present the second

in this important series.

MICHAEL OSTWALD

Like the architectural drawing, the architectural model is

one of the primary tools used by designers to shape the built

environment. While other design tools have been employed

at various times throughout history, only the model and the

drawing have retained their primacy today. However, in the last

decade the relationship between the model and the drawing

has begun to change. As computers blur the distinction

between drawings and virtual models, and as physical models

are increasingly manufactured by computer-controlled devices,

these architectural tools need to be critically reconsidered.

While architectural drawings have been featured in many

exhibitions, the architectural model has rarely been the subject

of the same level of scrutiny. This realisation was the catalyst

for Homo Faber: a series of exhibitions, symposia and books

reflecting on the changing role of the architectural model

both in contemporary practice and in academia.

Homo Faber is Latin for “man the maker” – a reference

to the manner in which humans use tools to shape, control

or understand the environment. In the first Homo Faber

exhibition held in 2006 at the Melbourne Museum,

the focus was on the way in which architectural models

serve as working tools to assist in the development of a design.

Major architectural practices from across the region presented

their working models and took part in a series of interviews to

find out how architects use rough models and why? A parallel

theme in the first exhibition was the exploration of different

modes of making and different scales of representation.

To elucidate the second theme, the four curators exhibited

models constructed using a variety of different techniques

and for a range of representational purposes. In one pair of

projects, exquisite hand-crafted, timber and brass models were

exhibited alongside bright, plastic, computer-generated and

rapid-prototyped models. In a second pair, large plaster models

of building details were juxtaposed with miniscule organic

models possibly depicting entire worlds.

PREFACE

Johnson is not actually holding the AT&T model up from his

body, as if celebrating an award, rather he is holding it out

from his chest, as if either offering the model to the city,

or perhaps receiving the model as gift.

There is a long history of the architectural model as symbolic

offering. In the mosaic above the main door of Hagia Sophia

in Istanbul the Emperor Justinian is pictured holding

a miniature of the church and reaching out with it towards

the Virgin and Child. In Gloucester Cathedral the Abbot Osric

is depicted holding a model of the church to his chest and

in Rheims there is a representation of the architect Hugh

Libergier presenting a model of Saint Nicaise as an offering.

These examples, which have much in common with the image

of Philip Johnson on the cover of Time magazine, use models

to represent the idea of architecture. The person holding the

model is symbolically invested with the power of creation

(either as designer or patron) and they offer up the object

of their exertions as a gift to god or to humanity. The models

in these examples are not used for developing a design,

or for assisting its construction, they simply stand for an

idea; architecture as offering. Yet, while working models

In January 1979 American architect Philip Johnson was

famously featured on the cover of Time magazine holding

aloft a model of his AT&T Tower. At first glance the model

is barely recognisable and to the uninitiated it more closely

resembles a trophy or award. This reading is not inappropriate

as any architectural commission for a high rise building could

be considered a major prize and perhaps Johnson is celebrating

his win. Furthermore, the sense that the model is a trophy

is exaggerated by the way in which Johnson is photographed

against a backdrop of New York towers. Johnson stands

amongst these towers as an equal in power, presence and

stature. His grey clothes mimic the colour of the nearby

towers, his head and shoulders are silhouetted against the

skyline. A close inspection of the base of the photograph

reveals that Johnson is actually standing on a constructed set.

He is both part of one model and supporting another; a feat

which simultaneously questions the significance of scale and

demonstrates the way in which models can be used to

suggest power or superiority. Yet, with all of this happening

in the image, it is easy to miss a minor detail that changes,

in subtle but important ways, the reading of the cover.

and finished models are important communication

tools, it is the idea models which potentially possess the

greatest symbolic power. While Johnson may appear to be

magnanimously offering a gift to the city, the act of giving

reinforces the extensive sphere of Johnson’s own influence.

As this example shows, when stripped of its traditional purpose

(of directly serving the design and construction of a building)

the additional representational capacity of the architectural

model is revealed.

The history of the architectural model is typically structured

around the presumption that models are first and foremost

representational objects and that their primary power is in the

communication of intent. Regardless of whether the model is

a working detail to solve a construction problem, or a finished

model for presentation to a client, it represents the desire to

complete a building. However, many models, like the historic

examples described above, have little or no connection to the

production of architecture.

A visit to any major architectural practice or school of

architecture soon reveals a collection of so-called “concept

MICHAEL OSTWALD

INTRODUCTION: MODELLING IDEAS AND THE POWER OF REPRESENTATION

models”. The common characteristic of these models is not

found in their materiality or in their making, rather it is one

of intent and distance. These models are demonstrations

of the proposed essence of a design but they retain a clear

separation from any suggestion that they represent an end-

state. Concept models suggest the stylised kernel of an idea

that may eventually find its place in a building, urban plan

or interior. These objects are a protean attempt by a designer

to embody or abstract, in three-dimensional form, an idea.

Despite the fact that conceptual models have materiality,

it should not be assumed that they are necessarily either

architectonic or architectural. Some concept models bear

a closer relationship to architecture than others. Those

produced by students tend to be more abstract while those

produced by practitioners often more closely resemble some

aspect of the completed building. However, the degree to

which the model resembles a building is far less important

than its capacity to evoke the spirit of an idea. Consider

the models featured in the present volume that have been

produced by Jarrod Manevski, Phil Smith, Camilla Zanzanaini

and Greg Teague. In terms of their intent, these are classic

conceptual models. They offer clear and evocative gestures

towards architectural expression while maximising the distance

between their actual form and the possible form of a finished

building. These models are passionate and compelling dreams

of future worlds and experiences. The models described by

Dominik Holzer in the present volume also fit into this first

category; they suggest architectural qualities without defining

a finished building. In contrast to the works of Manevski,

Smith, Zanzanaini and Teague the models of Simon Pearson

and Allison Claney are more recognisably architectural. Pearson

and Claney present concept models with screens and walls that

define enclosure, view-framing and qualities of light and shade.

Yet, despite coming closer to an architectural form, these

models still cannot be seen as an end product. In all of these

cases the model serves to translate an idea from the designer’s

mind into architectural form.

There is a second category of conceptual models which could,

more correctly, be described as miniatures. The theoretical

shift delineated in this category is away from the supposition

that small objects inevitably prefigure large objects. The

epistemological pavilions of Peter Downton and the interior

realms of Andrea Mina might be examples of this approach.

In the former case Downton’s objects are completed works.

They possess the signs of a refined architectural language

and they appear to be models, but there the similarities end.

Downton’s miniatures do not represent future forms at some

other scale. If they model anything at all, other than the

refinement of architectural form, it is an interrogation of the

relationship between thinking, designing and making. It could

be said that these miniatures exist to model concepts and that

any architectural by-product is simply evidence of the thought

process. Mina’s works are similarly finished objects that also

serve as catalysts for thought. They provoke questions about

scale and interiority and they are primarily, as Mina says,

“things unto themselves”. Each of Mina’s models has qualities

and characteristics that are simultaneously organic and

architectural. The miniatures are also undeniably mythopoeic;

some forms become wing-like or appear as caves or insect

hives, others look like lost utopian communities, trapped

in amber. The models of Downton and Mina each have their

own innate qualities and concerns that do not prefigure

an alternative scale construction.

Finally, there is a less common category of idea model where

the model serves as the architecturalisation of a concept.

In these rare examples an idea is modelled for the purpose

of explanation or analysis. The intent here is not to suggest

how some idea may be converted into a building, but

rather to use the techniques of architectural modelling

to interrogate a non-architectural subject. Artists, scientists

and mathematicians all use architectural analogies, and

often recognisable architectural models, for explaining non-

architectural ideas. These too are concept models but not

generally of the kind produced by architects.

If then, in the context of architectural practice, the working

models produced by architects qualify as examples of homo

faber—models in the service of work— then perhaps idea and

concept models might be considered under the banner homo

ludens; the man who plays? If we remove the more wilful

or frivolous connotations from the concept of play and consider

it in the terms described by the anthropologist Roger Caillois

then this may be possible. For Caillois, play is the ritualised

and repetitive tracing of cultural values and ideals in our

everyday practices. Play is not wanton or meaningless;

it is the often exultant or euphoric act of creativity that occurs

within the boundaries of a community. If the community is one

of architects and designers, then the conceptual model may be

the result of the type of loosely constrained, yet energetically

pursued, creativity that Caillois sees as a characteristic of play.

Regardless of the definition, conceptual models are as much

about what the viewer brings to them as what the designer

has put into them. In this sense, working models and

presentation models are about closing down the possibilities

of interpretation while concept models expand them.

The studio was named ‘Manual Ideas’ to express the

connection of the hands and processes of thought, and

centred on investigating the physical modelling of ideas.

Strictly, ideas can be modelled by other ideas – this is part

of metaphor. In the studio ideas were to be modelled by small

physical objects. The process still entails metaphor, but

a shift of medium is also required, and this was the process

of greatest interest, focus and difficulty.

The Interior Design students engaged in this design studio

were predominantly from second year with a couple from third

year. The projects set in the studio asked students to make

physical models to say something about some rather unphysical

ideas. As an initial project they were each asked to model

an idea they selected from a provided list that included terms

such as ‘comfort’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘isolation’; next they had

to select and address in modelled form, two of these ideas

juxtaposed in some way. For their third project students were

asked to think of three spaces each with a different function

and concentrate on modelling the relationships between the

spaces and also develop the narratives surrounding the spaces

and the ways in which they related. From this they progressed

PETER DOWNTON & ANDREA MINA

INTRODUCTION

Models in architecture, and most other design areas, serve as

representations of design intentions. Frequently, such models

are made after designing has been done by other means;

sometimes designing is done while making models. In either

case they serve a function in the overall process of designing

something such as a building and bringing it to completion.

In most cases the model serves as a communication device

which enables the transfer of intent and information from

one body to the next, be it from the designer to the detailer

or from designer to the client. The emphasis in these models

is on the thing – let’s assume a building – that will be

constructed. Clearly, there are a number of ideas or concepts

informing the design which are to be expressed in the design.

These are often discussed in a design process, but they are not

singled out for examination in their own right.

The discussion here grows from an effort examine the

modelling of ideas in a fairly pure form by running a design

studio where this somewhat artificial task could be conducted

as part of the overarching Homo Faber research project.

to identifying three activities – one for a single person, one for

five and a third for twenty people and modelling the relations

between the spaces housing the activities and between the

spaces and the site. The narrative in which the activity-housing

spaces and their inter-relationships were embedded was

also an enriching element. For their final project, students

reflected on the idea of ‘home’ and sought to model this for

themselves. While there was some universality in this, people

quickly realised that the concept varied greatly from person to

person and that they needed to focus on their own personal

concepts. From this base, they were more able to explore the

degree to which these were more widely shared and, by this

means, at least offer echoes of familiarity and trigger feelings

of recognition.

It was evident throughout that the models produced were

often the result of rich thought and complex ideas, but that

there are great difficulties involved in giving physical form

to a set of ideas not typically thought to have physical

components. Frequently the pieces produced were soaked

in metaphoric layers, but the intended readings could not be

accessed without the author’s guidance. Once some small

MODELLING IDEAS THROUGH MANUAL MEANS: AN ANALYSIS OF THE ‘MANUAL IDEAS’ STUDIO

1

insight into the approach was provided by the author, reading

of the model and an understanding of the author’s modes of

expression and exploration unfurled.

Throughout the fifteen sessions of the studio, conversations

around the ideas under consideration by each student were

often quite personal and inevitably strongly felt. Studio

sessions took the form of group conversations led by Andrea

Mina and Peter Downton. These conversations covered the

ideas themselves, their exploration and their subsequent

representation through a three-dimensional model, critiques

of the ideas and of the modelling, discussions of possible

further directions of discovery and the materials and

techniques for making. Actual making was done elsewhere.

Karen Hamilton (both an interior designer and jeweller)

conducted a workshop-based weekly session covering

making, materials and techniques and requiring students to

undertake some set making assignments. Andrea and Peter

could also address such issues, but the principle focus of the

studio sessions was about the ideas in each project and their

development and expression in the models.

Some of the issues introduced above warrant more detailed

reflection and exploration; their expansion and discussion

follows in subsequent sections.

MODELS AS FOCI OF CONVERSATION

Students’ models served as foci of the weekly conversations;

without the objects on the table the discussions would

neither have been as rich or as interesting to the participants.

Those sitting around the table showed their own work and

appreciated, supported and critiqued the work of their peers.

The fact of having invested personal concerns and effort

in a model makes the producer’s interest in it considerable.

If it has been undertaken with care and commitment,

the author has intellectual and emotional attachment to

the work, and an interest in promoting and defending it.

In nearly every case, students had an interest in hearing

thoughts from others about what might have been different

and what might be done in a future model. Almost regardless

of the topic and quality of a model, it served to facilitate

conversation and hence learning. This can be also said

of designs that are described through images and pinned

on the wall. However, in this instance, because the work

is small and positioned on a table, a normal conversational

situation is established. With drawings on the wall, the typical

crit group is arrayed in a shallow semi-circle with the studio

leaders and/or other critics nearest to the images while the

remainder of the studio group is at various distances; this may

indicate degrees of interest and involvement. It also means that

the conversation is at the front and tends to be a performance

watched by an audience. Circling models on a table, the studio

members and leaders are in a more equal arrangement. People

in this case often moved so as to get closer views – even if this

meant they crouched or stood rather than sat. There is much

to be said regarding the actual handling of an object in

contrast to the detached viewing of an image located on

the wall. This setting, and the attitude of the studio leaders,

encouraged everyone to offer opinions and share concepts,

techniques and experiences.

Whilst the conventions of architectural drawings demand

the author convert ideas and desires into a formal language,

which is in effect an abstraction of reality, the physical model

provides a more direct representation of intent which is more

easily understood by others. In this way the students’ intent

and subsequent outcomes as communicated by the models

became readily available to all which in turn induced an

atmosphere conducive to the free flow of conversation.

This role of models as facilitators of a conversation is easy

to overlook, but was shown to have considerable significance

in this studio. That they were mostly small models – often

around palm size – and therefore required fairly close

examination is important. It led to reasonable physical

closeness, concentration on the object and therefore the ideas

under discussion, and these behaviours helped produce the

observed richness of the conversations. Clearly the participants

have to be motivated, thoughtful, appropriately verbally adept,

and not overcome by nerves – as in any such seminar.

The contention here is that the models helped the students

to prepare and contributed in the ways discussed above.

They thus aid learning. As designed works they played several

roles in the learning of the studio participants. They focused

the thinking about the ideas; they were an integral part of the

translation of those ideas into physical forms; they were central

to learning about making; and, in addition, they were part

of the process of learning from others. Of principle concern

here is that through facilitation of conversations they

encouraged sharing of knowledge and triggered ideas

in different members of the group.

CONVERSATION’S ROLE IN EVALUATION

The role of the models as facilitators of conversation and

hence learning extends to their contribution to evaluation.

In design, and more widely in practice, models are constantly

assessed and evaluated against a wide array of criteria – some

clearly specified and well articulated others that are intrinsic,

unexamined and possibly unshared.1 Some evaluation is almost

instantaneously carried out by designers and results basically

in a yes or a no, a decision to continue with the directions

represented by the model or to veer in another direction

in the search space of design ideas. A similar and more

protracted process is conducted by groups of designers,

or groups involving others – maybe consultants or clients.

In these cases conversation is necessary to share values,

debate degrees of success and discuss alternative future paths.

Individual designers parallel these conversations by conducting

their own internally or even vocalise them and debate with

themselves as a means of evaluating their progress.

Again models have a role in conversations.

In the studio circumstance there was also a frequent evaluative

component to the conversations. This had at least two forms.

Mostly evaluation played a role in discussions about what could

be better. Obviously this entails values and positions about

what should be the case. The studio leaders attempted to

provide a democratic space of engagement and conversation

by trying to argue these positions rather than asserting them

as unchallengeable certainties. We also encouraged students

to reflect on, and openly report, the values they brought to

their evaluations of the work of themselves and others. In this

way conversations quickly spread to encompass ideas that were

not about a model although brought into being by a model.

Each model, and the process around it, had to be assessed

for the purpose of awarding a grade to each student.

Four of these periods of evaluation and grading were

conducted as part of the final presentations on each model.

In one session each student was required to submit a grade

for every model presented including their own; these results

were averaged and formed part of the overall grade of that

project. The final project assessment was a special event

with guest critics and reduced input from studio members.

In physical layout and relations of people to work, it mirrored

the crit panel outlined above. Utilising these processes, the

models again served as facilitators of conversations – between

students, students and staff, and between staff (including

guest critics) – they were conversations debating values

and degrees of success.

IN WHAT SENSE ARE THESE OUTCOMES MODELS?

It is simple to call the objects produced by the students

in the studio models because they are small, carefully made,

and can be understood as representing something. They look

like models. This is somewhat simplistic and it is revealing

to consider why.

Most of the literature on models is traditionally a science and

philosophy literature concerned with their role in discovery.

It concerns the relation between the model of something and

the original being modelled. Good exemplars are the use

of knowledge about the flow of water in pipes as an early

model of electricity in wires or the planetary system as a model

of the atom. In each case the model is a model of something

that is less well understood than the entity used as the model.

What are these things made in the studio models of? Nothing

at all – they do not represent something that is extant.

They are not models of works from the canon of architecture

or interiors for instance. Compare them with the types of

models seen in design practices and which take their place

as part of a design process intended to result in perhaps

a building or a product. These models may be made during the

designing process as thinking and designing tools, or they may

be made after at least initial designing, as representational and

communication tools – usually for showing others (probably

clients) the present state of the design. This class of models

is projective. Such models are intended to describe what will

come into existence in the final product or building; they serve

a function in making the final building exist. Effort is spent

to make the final outcome like the model. The model

represents an intention; the outcome can be understood

as representing the model.

None of this is true for the models made in this studio.

Some of the pieces could, with various degrees of structural

and detail effort, be scaled up one, two or even five hundred

times and made into a (small) habitable building. This was

never specified in the studio. In two of the projects there

was a specification that spaces for an activity or for a number

of people be designed, but the focus was on these and

their relations to other spaces, not on the production of

the remainder of the elements required to form an entire

building. So, the pieces were not models of extant buildings,

nor were they models for intended buildings – even if some

could potentially become so. One useful descriptor of a

model is that it can be used to answer questions of interest

to an interrogator that could be asked of the thing or system

modelled. It can be seen that a model of an existing building,

or a model representing an intended building, can both

be used in this manner. It is difficult to say whether-or-not

this is true in the case of the models of ideas in this studio.

The answer hinges on the degree to which the relations

between the ideas and the model can be understood as well

as the qualities of relations.

Two other uses of the word ‘model’ can be considered.

‘A model student’ is one displaying characteristics that are

desirable to see emulated by other students. ‘An old model

computer’ is a phrase that could be applied to an individual

example of a particular type of computer. Each computer

type probably had a production run of tens of thousands.

In this example ’model’ refers to the type and not strictly

to the instance of it; more correctly, this is a token. Neither

sense illuminates the nature of the models made in this studio

other than to define them as not conforming. However, one

sense of the word ’token’ is helpful, for a token is an emblem

of something abstract. We are used to emblems standing VAUGHAN HOWARD BRIEF #5

as a small shelter. Size and time (where plants are involved)

are major issues in landscape architecture courses with respect

to full-scale productions. In the case of industrial design

concerning products, size is infrequently such an issue –

here the problem is expense and complexities of materials

and manufacturing processes. Fashion is different; students

can deal with the full size and often the materials and means

of making of their designs. There is sense in which the studio

models are full-size; they are the size they were asked to be.

They are in their intended materials, not in a material chosen

to simply represent a future building material. If they are

regarded as being at a scale smaller than one to one and

at least tentatively considered as potential full-scale structures

then a range of adjustments in the way they are viewed is

necessary, as sizes, thicknesses and fixings all become items

requiring detailed consideration.

Armed with this cloud of ideas about the term ‘model’ and

even accepting doubts about whether it is the right term

to describe what the students made, we will continue to

use the term as it is the word most likely to be applied to

them by others. In some instances they could be small

sculptures or large pieces of jewellery.

MATERIALISATION

Regardless of what the ‘models’ are thought to be, their

makers confront the same issues. They had to establish

a way of understanding the idea or ideas that were the

givens of any one of the projects – whether these were pre-

specified or self-selected. They also needed to find a way

of dealing with their particular views in a physical form,

what materials to use and how to make their model.

Such things often do not evolve sequentially, and if they do,

the order in which they unfold may vary instance to instance.

It seems that most often these matters at least partially

co-evolve and mutually inform and shape one another.

Surrounding each student’s discoveries and decisions

is a narrative giving an account of their idea, the ways

they are been seen, what is significant and how the whole,

or a particular form or material, symbolises an idea. Confronted

with a mute object the viewer can conjure concepts concerning

the ideas embodied in the object. These are easily at odds

with the intentions of the maker. Minimally, the maker needs

to provide a small key to unlock their intended ideas pervading

the piece. Once there is this understanding, the relation

between the ideas being dealt with and the model presented

can be unravelled, enriched and explored by the viewer.

Once this narrative is shared, the viewer’s ability to understand

the piece entirely in their own terms is reduced, while the

maker’s intentions become available in varying degrees.

The reading is then potentially played out as a resolution

of the tensions between the two understandings. Additional

inputs from others, as in the studio, enhance the possibilities.

The processes of moving from idea to physical form entail

many possible choices, decisions and evaluations.

How arbitrary are choices of forms and shape to express

ideas? On what grounds, for example, does a designer

decide that something round (maybe a circle or a sphere)

symbolises or represents the universal, or completeness,

or calmness? Sometimes the choice involves selecting an

historic cultural archetype that has been valued in one

or more cultures for centuries; sometimes the choice rests

on an original argument. There are positions in between.

There are variations in the degree to which the representational

form can be shared. In the case of the argued representation,

new insight or understanding may be offered as an alternative

to the comfort and ‘rightness’ of the culturally entrenched

form. The choice process can be predominantly emotionally

driven or it might be essentially intellectual. There is a history

of claims about a form equalling an idea just as there are

similar, although disputed, claims concerning blue being

a cold colour whilst red is warm – these things are not

universally agreed. Particularly post-1980 there are well-

documented elaborate arguments often drawing on

philosophic or literary theory to pin architectural outcomes

to complex intellectual programs..

The process of deriving form from idea, or at least offering

a post-rationalisation of the form based on an a set of ideas,

can be characterised as a game in which the designer sets up

some rules and then continues to play out the consequences: if

round things are taken to represent universal calm,

for brands, organizations or countries. They are symbolic

representations of an abstract concept or idea. These models

are laden with symbolic representations, with visual metaphors

and metonyms for the abstract ideas they were intended

to model. The activity of forming these is central to this

discussion, but difficult to illuminate.

One last examination of the characteristics of these models

is necessary. That they are models of something existing

or something intended was ruled out above. As physical

things they do not represent other physical things; they are

themselves. There is thus no possible mapping of attributes

between physical things. These models are ends in themselves

and in this sense are not models at all, but final outcomes.

Such objects are common in design schools. They are easier

to produce in terms of time and resources than buildings

or products. They do not have to satisfy the dictates

of construction, costs, clients or regulatory requirements

that intended future objects are subject to; rather their

ends are educational. Full size objects occasionally get

constructed in architecture and interior courses, but they

are typically portions of a possible whole or something such

As physical things they do not represent other physical things; they are themselves.

BRIEF #1 (FROM LEFT TO RIGHT)

VAUGHAN HOWARD KATIE COLLINS

then various other attributes of the ideas or the brief follow

from this and an audience is asked to read and understand

the outcomes in light of the original generative rules.

Designers derive forms for their current task from their

personal catalogues of forms, re-using, re-interpreting

and evolving prior forms. This behaviour may support the

cultural archetype or the intellectual argument approach

or anything in between.) Part of the success of the mapping

of form onto idea results from the degree of literality

employed. Too much abstraction leads to unintelligibility;

too little results in cringe-worthy banality. The tasks for

the students in this studio entailed pitching their ideas and

physical mappings at an appropriate level of literalness.

Even when this was successful, consistency in following

through the consequences of the self-imposed rules,

or the full ramifications of the metaphors established,

led to stronger outcomes.

OUTCOMES

The richness of thought and content in the work produced

is best discussed by contrasting the different approaches

adopted by Vaughan Howard and Katie Collins. Vaughan’s

response to modelling the idea of complexity was to engage

with the idea of a complex ecological system composed

of a number of number of disparate elements which through

their inter-dependent relationships form a coherent and

harmonious whole. This was manifest through the making

of a sphere composed of many parts made from contrasting

materials. The junctions between these materials were

in themselves formed along highly complex edges further

adding to the articulation of complexity. Katie, set the task

of modelling the idea of isolation, used her model as a form

of machine which demanded the active participation of the

viewer to articulate her intentions. Through the use of pulleys

and thread, fourteen small components initially located

as a unified and interlocking whole at the centre of a sphere

made from five circles of wire, were able to be individually

moved apart to the edge of the sphere. Her machine enabled

the generation of space through distance with isolation

manifest as the gap in-between.

In response to brief #3 Vaughan modelled the activities

of reading, story-telling and watching. His composition

of spaces is held together by a series of curved ribs from

which varying sized circular platforms are suspended.

The watching space dominates the composition being

accessed via a spiral staircase. The story-telling space is

located below in a space illuminated by light filtering through

the open lattice structure. This space is privileged by its central

location and large scale as it serves as the forum for social

construction through the dissemination of the stories and

knowledge gained from the reading space which is located

at the foot of the composition. The reading space is conceived

of as a quiet and introspective space.

Katie addressed the idea of a dinner party narrative

through her machine. This involved the narration of a linear

timeline experienced by the host involving the spaces of

preparation, dining and cleaning. The artefact described

a linear movement from one space to the next working with

the ideas of one space coming into being on the pretext of

that which immediately preceded it, neither being able to be

simultaneously occupied. These spaces were described by the

space contained between two timber rings joined together

by flexible brass plates allowing for the expansion and

contraction of the central space. The preparation space

is manifest through this space in its enlarged configuration

followed by its contraction during the time of dining and

by its ultimate collapse at the conclusion of the event.

The inspiration for Vaughan’s response to brief #4 is from

a quote by Thoreau who had three chairs at his cabin

in Walden, “one for solitude, two for company, and three

for society”. He has modelled some of the elements which

make up a community. The large communal singing space for

twenty is made from aluminium shingles positioned to face

upwards in the evocation of the upliftment of music with the

suggestion of an aspiration towards a higher level of being.

His space for five is a dining space intended as a space of

interaction, ritual and enjoyment, made with the shingles

facing downwards in an effort to communicate a sense of

grounding. The space for one is manifest as spherical; unique

and individual yet made from the same shingle-like building VAUGHAN HOWARD BRIEF #3

blocks used to make up the other spaces. The composition

is held together within a metal cuboid shaped frame which

may be read as representing the universal nature of that

required to make up community. Of interest is the linear

nature of this outcome in contrast to his previous artefacts

which have a dominant curvaceous characteristic. This can

be attributed to the fact of his being encouraged to engage

with materials that are not as conducive to carving from

a solid as had been his previous practice; a demonstration

in the powerful influence materials have over outcomes.

Most of the projects were done over three or four weeks each.

In the first studio sessions for each project we discussed the

ideas to be focused upon and the conversations covered each

person’s initial views of what they might deal with. Inevitably

their approaches evolved – sometimes greatly; sometimes

there was refinement rather than a change of approach.

Hearing the initial intentions of others and discussing

the array of concepts circling the ideas led to an enriched

conversational field which gathered momentum as the sessions

continued. There became both a conversation concerning the

particular project and a larger enveloping one for the studio

as a whole. As inter-personal trust increased the character

of this conversation could become more open and personal.

Throughout, however, there was a sufficient level of trust that

most people could be fairly comfortable in putting their ideas

to the others for general discussion. We made clear the notion

that no one student held a patent over an idea but that ideas

were accessible to all and it is in the physical manifestation

of the idea through the use of particular materials and their

relationships that the authors could lay claim to the ideas.

Usually in the second session of a project there were sketchy

design ideas appearing – mostly on paper. By the third session

these were more detailed, sometimes ideas were presented

in the form of a modelled mock-up and sometimes there were

the beginnings of a partially-built final model. For the last

project a rough model in an easy to use material was specified

as a required step. The final session for each project involved

presenting each model to the group. Throughout, visual and

written documentation of the projects were also required.

These emphasised designing and making processes and later

ones also sought reflection upon, and curation of, prior work.

Through the conversations surrounding the development of the

model and its final presentation, students were very conversant

with one another’s approaches and work. The models were

thus enriched in complex ways. Layers of conversation

encapsulated each of them. Connections between the one

student’s five models could be clearly seen, but throughout

there were increasingly rich connections between the work

of many of the students in the studio. There was also a group

conversational memory able to be drawn upon for commentary

and comprehension.

Another albeit abstract form of materialisation was achieved

through the photographs taken by the students of the

spaces contained within the models as distinct from imaging

the models as objects located on a surface within space.

These photographs provided beguiling effects through their

dissolution of scale and their abstraction of the materiality

of the surfaces describing the spaces. Considering this was

a studio for interior design students we felt it important

KATIE COLLINS BRIEF #3

to direct the conversations towards the making of spaces

as distinct from the making of objects .

MATERIALS

Except for a mock-up or when used in an exciting or

entertaining manner, the common materials seen in studio

modelling were banned. Card, balsawood and paper, typically

asked to represent sheet and mass construction materials,

were forbidden; foam-core was frowned upon. Students were

challenged to investigate the expressive potential of any other

material. Timbers, metals, fabrics, plaster, and clay were used

in a range of ways however as the studio progressed the use

of plaster became something to avoid. Far more unusual

materials were explored – fish scales and bones, leather,

Vaseline, oven-baked modelling putty, toilet paper and wax.

Materials were mostly glued, but precise friction-fitting,

and riveting were employed. Materials were cut, bent,

carved, sanded, vacuum-formed, woven, knitted, crocheted,

moulded and machine routed.

The large materials palette aided expressive possibilities when

compared to those materials that were banned. A fabric

might be much more useful to convey the idea of ‘comfort’

for instance than is card. In the main, however, the relation

between the materials chosen and the idea dealt with was not

this direct. It is frequently the case that the kinds of materials

used result in a more seductive outcome than can be produced

by card or balsa. There is some danger in this – perhaps the

making and materials are seducing the viewer, but the ideas

embodied are ordinary. When, however, the ideas and the

object are working in unison, the deployment of a fascinating

and carefully chosen collection of materials supports and

enhances the modelling of ideas.

Asking students to engage with material palettes that were

in the main new to them, encouraged the production of

forms and spaces that managed to negate preconceived

solutions. Of more interest was the manner in which these

different materials were joined. The common use of glue was

in many instances unsuitable which in turn led the students

to develop jointing techniques which in themselves began

to influence the nature of the forms produced and their

contained spaces. For example a circular form made from

pieces of mirrored acrylic joined by metal rings produced

space defined by the irregular angles of the planes of acrylic

relative to each other. This in turn produced an interior space

composed of multiple reflected images.

CONCLUSION

As the production of work progressed through the studio

a sense of frustration in the studio leaders began to develop

due to the enormous potential for design development

contained within the models. In so far as the models were

effective tools for the exploration and communication of ideas

and consequently the production of meaningful conversations,

they also provided glimpses of future possibilities which were

intentionally not further developed. Perhaps this provides

the foundation for further research into the use of modelling

as part of the design process.

Several of the papers in the catalogue for Homo Faber:

modelling architecture addressed the roles of models in

architectural practice. Downton, “Temporality, Representation

and Machinic Behaviours: model dialogues with self,

collaborators, clients and others” (p.33), specifically addressed

the conversational role they play with respect to practice.

1 See Marvin Minsky, ‘Matter, mind and models’, in Marvin

Minsky (ed) Semantic Information Processing, Cambridge

Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1968, 426.VAUGHAN HOWARD BRIEF #4

MANUAL IDEAS

LECTURERS

Professor Peter Downton

Assoc. Professor Andrea Mina

PARTICIPANTS

Ahron Best

Katie Collins

Bethany Daniel

Lauren Goodman

Vaughan Howard

Takako Kajiya

Bradley Kilsby

Mary-Jane Jean

Catherine Jones

Rebecca Law

Melanie Muraca

Jonathan Ong

Myvanwy Purwo

Elizabeth Schofield

Anchalee Sroison

Eric Yang

Generally models are made to represent something that will be

constructed in the future.

The models displayed here originated in an Interior Design

studio named ‘Manual Ideas’ to express the connection

of the hands and processes of thought. It was centred on

investigating the physical modelling of ideas, rather than

designs or things. Students made physical models to say

something about some rather unphysical ideas.

As an initial project they were each asked to model an idea

they selected from a provided list that included terms such

as ‘comfort’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘isolation’; next they had

to select and address in modelled form, two of these ideas

juxtaposed in some way. For their third project students were

asked to think of three spaces each with a different function

and concentrate on modelling the relationships between the

spaces whilst developing the narratives surrounding the spaces

and the ways in which they related. From this they progressed

to identifying three activities – one for a single person, one for

five and a third for twenty people and modelling the relations

between the spaces housing the activities and between the

spaces and the site. The narrative in which the activity-housing

spaces and their inter-relationships were embedded was also

an enriching element. For their final project, students reflected

on the idea of ‘home’ and sought to model this for themselves

in such a way that more universal ideas of home could be

understood by others.

9

MANUAL IDEAS

BRIEF #1

Students were asked to produce a three dimensional piece

of work that modelled an idea they selected from a provided

list. This list included the terms – calm, care, connectivity,

comfort, complexity, flexibility, health, heaviness, history,

honesty, hope, isolation, lightness, pattern, peace, protection,

responsibility, richness, rigor, rigidity, sparse, speed, time,

truth and waste.

The piece was to be complete in itself, structurally stable

and no bigger than 200x200x200 mm. It had to possess

particular characteristics which would enable the articulation

of one, if not many stories about the selected term/idea

whilst also demonstrating an allegiance to the interior design

discipline in which it is located.

A demand was made for the highest standards

of craftsmanship.

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

MYVANWY PURWO ANCHALEE SROISON VAUGHAN HOWARD KATIE COLLINS

BRIEF #2

This brief asked students to construct a three dimensional piece

of work that modelled the juxtaposition of two words selected

from a provided list. This list included the terms – calm, care,

connectivity, comfort, complexity, flexibility, health, heaviness,

history, honesty, hope, isolation, lightness, pattern, peace,

protection, responsibility, richness, rigor, rigidity, sparse,

speed, time, truth and waste.

The piece was to be made from more than two materials

(balsawood and card were prohibited) and be no bigger than

200x200x200 mm. These objects had to have the ability

to project the narratives of the relationships between the

selected ideas and the choice and juxtaposition of materials.

The production and articulation of interior space was

of paramount concern.

A demand was made for the highest standards

of craftsmanship.

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

CATHERINE JONES LAUREN GOODMAN KATIE COLLINS VAUGHAN HOWARD

BRIEF #3

Students were asked to model a complex of three spaces by

concentrating on the ideas which dictated the characteristics

of each space and determined the relationships between the

spaces. The connections or transitions from one space to the

next were of critical importance together with the narratives

that could be articulated about the connections and the

complex as a whole. Unlike the previous exercises there was

a requirement to identify the function and performance

of the space prior to commencing modelling.

There was no limitation on height but a specific requirement

for the location of the object on a 200x200 mm base.

Another requirement was for the object to have the

appearance of a unified whole although comprised of more

than three spaces. Once again card and balsawood were

forbidden modelling materials.

A demand was made for the highest standards of

craftsmanship with the priority being on the communication

of spatial ideas in preference to privilege the appearance

of the model.

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

VAUGHAN HOWARD ELIZABETH SCHOFIELD BETHANY DANIEL KATIE COLLINS

ERIC YANG VAUGHAN HOWARD

TAKAKO KAJIYA

ELIZABETH SCHOFIELD

LAUREN GOODMAN

BRIEF #4

This brief dealt with ideas of scale. Students were asked to

identify three different activities and the spaces required

to accommodate these activities. The three spaces were to

respectively accommodate one, five and twenty people and

to house dissimilar activities to those worked with in brief

#3.. The requirement was to model the ideas of the relations

between the spaces housing the activities and between the

spaces and the site. The narrative in which the activity-housing

spaces and their inter-relationships were embedded was also

an enriching element.

The model was to be no larger than 200x200x300 mm and in

this case paper, card, balsawood and plaster were prohibited.

A demand was made for the highest standards of craftsman-

ship with the priority being on the communication of spatial

ideas in preference to privilege the appearance of the model.

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

KATIE COLLINS CATHERINE JONES JONATHAN ONG ANCHALEE SROISON

BRIEF #5

For this final brief students were required to model the idea

of home. This was to be achieved by contemplating what the

idea of home meant both to themselves and in a more generic

sense.

Students were asked to consider what minimum set of

elements was necessary for somewhere to feel like ‘home’ to

them; what were the things, relationships, characteristics or

attitudes they needed to establish or find in order to create

home for them? How universal were these and did they vary

with different cultures and age groups?

They were asked whether one could generalise the concept

‘home’ from personal experiences to a concept that would be

recognizable and of value to other people.

Considering the project was located in an Interior Design

program students were expected to deal with those aspects of

‘home’ that fell within the realm of Interior Design.

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

VAUGHAN HOWARD LAUREN GOODMAN MELANIE MURACA

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

KATIE COLLINS CATHERINE JONES ANCHALEE SROISON MYVANWY PURWO

an inquiry into researching through the designing-making

of a model. The voyage began by forming a Plasticine mould

for a papier-mâchè shell roughly in the shape of half of the

back of a cello – certainly enough for it to be recognisable

as a cello or violin. I had the idea of this being raised on

a frame and sheltering whatever grew beneath it. What

developed below the cello was a three-element bridge

sloping up to an elevated raked gravel garden held in what

might be a timber boat hull with the plan shape of concert

grand piano. This was made from wood found in a street skip.

This melding of hull, Japanese (or possibly Parisian) gravel and

piano hopefully calls for questioning on the part of a viewer

and a need to resolve the combination produced through

conflation. There is a fourth element: sound waves propagate

through the gravel – perhaps as a result of performance

on the piano.

The characteristics of the bridge are derived from the

remembrance of Scottish castle drawbridges with hints

of other bridges that raise or open as in Amsterdam and

of working cranes such as those used on container wharves.

The three timber bridge sections were also influenced

PETER DOWNTON

This is a tale of two models. Both are driven by ideas, but the

ways in which these ideas were given form and the relations

between form and ideas, differed instructively in the two

cases. The model making was set up intentionally to inquire

into the differing relations the two approaches would entail.

An account of the explorations and the findings is offered here.

The two models are part of a series of ‘Epistemological

Pavilions’ that I have made since 1996 to investigate aspects

of designing and making. Number 11 in the series, Music

Bridge: a chamber of iterative interpretations utilises forms

derived from items involved in the production of music, while

number 12, The Pilgrim Temple of Canonic Desires, investigates

re-use by employing elements of various works of architecture.

Aspects of the processes of translation and transformation

can be ascertained in both instances by following the paths

of ideas as they became physical form.

MUSIC BRIDGE: A CHAMBER OF ITERATIVE INTERPRETATIONS

The site for this model is a 270mm length of Stegbar cedar

window-sill. It takes a base for a window as the base of

by Mark Goulthorpe’s bronze hearth in the Haddad apartment,

Paris, 2001.1 The mechanisms for the bridge are predominantly

made from parts employed in hard disks – items inevitably

involved in the recording, reproduction and performance

of music. There are also plugs, pieces from within hard drives,

and brackets for memory on motherboards.

In an early mock-up, the cello form sat beside a skillion-roofed

shed. This idea persisted, but the initial shed was abandoned

as at odds with the more unusual things happening in the

model as it formed. Under the influence of images by Bernd

and Milla Bechers this part became most like an industrial

hopper as I worked on it in mock-up and final materials.

Its colouring and surface hopefully suggests a hint of signal

boxes by Herzog and de Meuron. This is one of the forms

with connections to architectural ideas, or ideas drawn from

the physical environment.

The elements of the piece were not selected or formed

in the order described above. I had various, partially-

made parts and assorted possibilities in mind and sought

commonalities, threads of integrative ideas that could

be characterised as tying them together. My explorations

FROM IDEAS TO MODELS: AN INTROSPECTIVE REPORT

17

PETER DOWNTON MUSIC BRIDGE: A CHAMBER OF ITERATIVE INTERPRETATIONS

led to music becoming the principle idea that linked them.

As this idea became more certain, the search for ways of

transforming music ideas into forms for this pavilion gained

focus. The discovery of new, music-related, ideas led to

physical expressions of a fairly literal kind; a model-making

idea sometimes began a connective chain to a musical idea by

filling in gaps in the music theme. Likewise, the music theme

made sense of some ill-formed modelling notions. Ideas about

music and modelling shaped one another. The process was

iterative. The forms are fairly direct translations from music to

architecture – even when the music form is used in unusual

ways or compounded by cross-pollinations as in the piano.

If a more abstract approach to music had been employed

the outcome would have been entirely different. For instance,

suppose I had attempted to map a physical form onto

a sonata form, I would have had to find physical analogues

for the musical ideas of development, recapitulation, keys

and thematic material – a much more difficult task than

the re-use of shapes and components. Where can such

analogues be sought? What are the grounds for arguing

that a physical form in some way equates with a musical

form? Against what criteria can the success of such

mappings be judged?

THE PILGRIM TEMPLE OF CANONIC DESIRES

The other 250mm of the remnant window-sill had to be used.

The first idea mocked-up was for a small pavilion sitting before

a sloping deformed oval platform with no obvious derivation

other than previous shapes I had used in other models. In its

second iteration a hole was cut in the platform for a tower

to rise through. Perhaps this tower idea was a precursor

of those that were later built. Pavilion 12 began to take on

the theme of re-use when I decided to replace the initial shape

with most of the roof plan of La Chapelle-Notre-Dame-du-

Haut at Ronchamp by Le Corbusier (1950-1955) used as a floor.

There was no theoretical rationale for this. The idea of using

the plan of an existing building led to a very short mental

search that resulted in trialing this choice and assessing it

as worth pursuing. My version of this plan displays both

bending and mild warping – an exaggerated version of the

sloped floor of the actual building. A level platform leading

to it is sheltered by a roof derived from any of a number

of houses by Frank Lloyd Wright – the only idea from the first

mock-up to survive to completion. (Wright’s houses that utilise

this roof form and pitch include the Ward Willits House (1901),

the Frederick Robie House (1906), the Avery Coonley House

(1907), Taliesin (1911) and the Harry Adams House (1913).)

The intentional referencing of these made only minute

difference to the form originally formed in card.

With these two forms in place, the search for other

useful building blocks began. The pavilion is predominantly

a compilation. I explored the idea of using a plan of Francesco

Borromini’s San Carlo Alle Quattro Fontane (1638) chapel

by adding it above the sloping floor, but concluded that

a greater sense of interiority could be attained by letting

it into the Ronchamp-based platform and having its sixteen

pilasters rise from there. These pilasters transformed into

columns made of clear Perspex reminiscent of the glass

columns of the Paradiso Hall of Terragni’s Danteum project

of three hundred years later. This was a translation of a

translation as the Danteum is a rich re-working of the poetry

of Dante into an architectural project.2 Entirely by coincidence,

as far as I know, sixteen columns also support the roof at

Ronchamp; there are twice the number in the Paradiso room,

plus one in its entry. My pavilion scheme had acquired

a magic number. A reversed, bent and beaten metal version

of the Ronchamp roof plan, punctured by a selection of the

windows from that building’s south wall, hangs above the

Perspex columns, as they intentionally fail (by various amounts)

to touch the roof. Positioned where the towers at Ronchamp

occur, there are two brass-framed towers, one of which

is structurally irrational. Proportionally, the height of the

larger one is appropriate for the size of the plan; otherwise

they are probably beyond what could be reasonably considered

a transformation, as they are frame rather than mass

construction and their forms are dissimilar to the originals.

The final major element is a re-working of the original scheme

(rather than using the simpler built-version) of a folly at Osaka

by Morphosis.3 On the towers and on extensions of the folly,

there are cranes – again made from hard drive components.

The two roofs hang from the cranes.

PETER DOWNTON MUSIC BRIDGE: A CHAMBER OF ITERACTIVE INTERPRETATIONS

PETER DOWNTON MUSIC BRIDGE: A CHAMBER OF ITERATIVE INTERPRETATIONS

PETER DOWNTON THE PILGRIM TEMPLE OF CANONIC DESIRES

The common threads among these diverse architectural

elements are membership of the canon of architecture

for at least some of them and their selection here by me.

The chosen works share little in the way of stylistic, formal

or theoretical concerns. These were not their grounds for

choice – rather they were selected from my repertoire of

known works on the basis of their formal usefulness. They

have been coerced into contributing to a new work – a viewer

may judge how successfully the collection, or sampling, forms

a whole. For me this whole came to be about producing

a piece concerning the idea of canonic works as metaphoric

temples, places of pilgrimage in both physical and intellectual

landscapes. Although bringing them together makes a new

entity, no new relationships between the parts is necessarily

elucidated simply through juxtaposition or conflation. Here,

I wanted to inflame the desires that architectural pilgrims

harbour to visit such canonic temples and begin a debate

about the translating entailed by taking elements

of architecture and re-using them.

The originals are more-or-less able to be recognised even

though there are varying degrees of abstraction and mutation.

Number might be preserved while the construction materials

and colours vary. Elsewhere, number, position and proportional

size are preserved, but not form or materials. Selection must

be carefully judged – aspects require an appropriate degree

of inclusion and maintenance if recognition of the original is

to be possible. (From the limited tests conducted, it seems

that the roof plan shape of Ronchamp can be recognised by

architects; presumably others will need greater numbers of

clues, or will need it fully explained.) The maker has to evaluate

how much of the original must be maintained, and in what

way, to allow recognition – if this is desired. Clearly, an original

can be used for the designer-maker’s own purposes and, in

this case, it may not be of concern if it is recognised or not.

Finally, someone viewing the piece may discern an unintended

allusion. The selections, substitutions and preservations that

are intentionally made, parallel translations of texts between

languages. Here, the translator may endeavour to address

the alteration of a cultural context and a set of meanings

surrounding the text and then offer a parallel rendering

in another language and culture rather than give simple

substitutions for the words in the original. This results in

a new work possibly extending the original.

FROM IDEA TO PHYSICAL FORM

In the two pavilion models, processes of translation and

transformation can both be seen; on the one hand a certain

stability of ideas from original to new work is discernable,

and on the other, change, evolution and alteration. These

ideas and elements are treated like ingredients in a brew

requiring combination, appropriate mixing and a period

of fermentation to achieve something beyond the original

parts. While there is no recipe, there is constant judgement

on the part of the designer-maker – constant evaluations lead

to additions, decisions to go no farther in a particular direction

and even decisions to retreat.

The Music Bridge pavilion deals mostly with ideas that are not

architectural and attempts to make something architectural

from them, while in The Pilgrim Temple of Canonic Desires

nearly all the informing ideas derive from examples

of architecture. In this second case, as discussed above,

the puzzle is to maintain and/or alter existing architectural

ideas and forms. In the first case there is a mixture. One

clearly musical shape is used – a cello. Similarly, a somewhat

transformed piano shape is highly legible, but is then subjected

to strategies likely to confuse an overly literal reading. The use

of computer parts and claims of their involvement in music

are less literal; their use as mechanical elements in the piece

involves further abstraction.

The overall form is not strongly shaped by the informing ideas

in either of the pavilions. In both there are parts that are not

derived from the idea set for the piece; they are a separate set

involved in composing the whole or contributing something

to the idea of a pavilion that could potentially be occupied –

a ramp or a seat, for instance. Overall there are decisions about

materials and colours that are not driven by the informing

ideas, but are drawn from the interests and tastes of the

maker-designer. These contribute to each work being a whole

and to them each fitting into a set of works formed from

my prior pavilion pieces. Additions, or choices, such as these

PETER DOWNTON THE PILGRIM TEMPLE OF CANONIC DESIRES

cannot be avoided or denied; there is no possibility of a direct

transformation of an idea into an architectural form without

such interventions.

How does an idea become a physical form? I suggest above

that translation and transformation are involved. In fact,

dictionary browsing suggests a number of concepts labelled

by words with the prefix ‘trans-’. It is the work we make

the prefix do that seems significant. It suggests crossing

something, moving through and changing from one state

to another. As well as translation and transformation,

we can call on transposition, transferral, transportation,

transcendence and transmogrification as descriptors to

illuminate the migratory passage from idea to model. Each

term can contribute something, but not one of them is entirely

convincing when operating alone. Two that deserve a little

elaboration are ‘transposition’ and ‘transmogrification’.

The first has similar senses in a number of fields and involves

transfer of the original to another position – a change of key

in music, the re-positioning of a number in an array or in an

equation in maths, or the transfer of a DNA segment

to a different position in a chromosome in a biological use.

In the case of the models, a re-positioning is also apparent,

but this is a change of system or context, not a change

contained entirely within one system such as these examples

suggest. Transmogrification also entails an alteration – in this

case within the thing itself, as it is a change in the appearance

or form of something. Moving from idea to form, as examined

here, requires crossing from the realm of ideas to that of

things. Although both ideas and models can be understood

as human constructs, they display sufficient differences to be

characterised as separate systems. We can paint the move from

idea to physical model as being examined in one system and

made in a new form in another system; there is a change of

system, not simply a change within one system, or a change

within one element of a system. Although there is beguiling

resonance with various concepts labelled with the prefix

‘trans-‘, the idea of translation seems to best parallel the

processes that have been described. The way in which

the translator has an idea that might ‘translate’ the original

in a new system is not much illuminated, however; the slower

process of evaluating and perhaps accepting the suggestion

is more obviously amenable to scrutiny and less reliant

on the apparently magical. Evaluation also requires ideas

such as ‘testing’, ideas underpinning means and methods

of testing, and ideas of making – a rich swirling of ideas

of differing types around the entity finally taking form

as a model.

1 Seen in an illustrated lecture given Mark Goulthorpe, 2004.

2 See Thomas Schumacher and Giorgio Ciucci, The Danteum, Princeton Architectural Press, Second English Edition, paperback, 2004.

3 Detailed drawings of the unbuilt version appear in Arata Isozaki, (with various contributions), Osaka Follies, London / Tokyo: Architectural Association / Workshop for Architecture and Urbanism, 1991.PETER DOWNTON

THE PILGRIM TEMPLE OF CANONIC DESIRES

year interior design students titled ‘Manual Ideas’. The specific

aim of the studio was to investigate the modelling of ideas

through manual means as opposed to the modelling and

communication of specific designs. This paper discusses two

objects produced in response to these concerns.

IDEAS OF MAKING: REDUCTION

The two objects employ two diametrically opposite ideas

of making, those of reduction and those of assemblage.

In the first instance the idea of the process of removal

or subtraction is employed. In this case the body of its

architecture has been sculpted from a block of balsawood.

Form is given to the block through the reduction of its material

content by the removal of its surface area. As a reaction to

previous work which was constantly being referred to as

reminiscent of ‘shell-like’ forms the body of this object was

worked to produce a ‘different kind’ of form. Although

a conscious effort was made to move away from the ‘shell-like’

forms there was no premeditated idea of what this sculpting

would ultimately result in. However it must be stated there

is always an abiding idea of producing objects that carry with

ANDREA MINA

INTRODUCTION

Small scaled objects and manual modelling are at the core

of my research which is being undertaken through a doctorate

which at present has as its working title ‘Intimate Immensities;

miniatures, an interior architecture’.

The central focus of this research investigates the manual

making of small scale objects which for the ease of this

discussion may be referred to as miniatures. However these

objects do not refer to a larger scaled version of something

else nor do they reference any particular precedent. They are

‘things’ unto themselves and are made at a scale which is in

fact one is to one. In this sense it is preferable to refer to them

as objects rather than as models as the reference to models

would have the implication they are smaller scaled versions

being used to represent something else which would be

manifest at a larger scale.

This discussion is made more complex by virtue of the fact

that in this particular instance the objects were used to run

a parallel investigation to that undertaken in the design studio

offered together with Peter Downton for second and third

GIVING FORM TO IDEAS

them the resonances of architectural form. As it transpired

the form engaged the ideas of a continuous surface defined

by compound curvatures which are governed by symmetry

about the vertical axis. The idea of achieving compound

curves is a logical extension of the manual manipulation of the

material and a bodily desire for a close and comfortable fit of

the object into the palm of the hand during its manipulation.

Sharp edges are naturally uncomfortable in one’s grip and

induce unnecessary bodily distractions during this process of

making. Two ‘tower-like’ extensions emerged as a result of

introducing a further curved negative form which was achieved

by removing a central portion of the apex of the object.

As my research is also concerned with ideas of the production

of interior space the next step involved the removal of interior

material from its containing form. The process of removal

to produce interior space engages with an abiding idea that

architecture has as one of its most fundamental principles

the making of space for human occupation. Solid form simply

cannot satisfy this. There are pervading simple rules which

govern this process of removal. First is a desire to work the

material to the finest thicknesses possible especially at all

24

ANDREA MINA OBJECT #1

exposed edges because it is at these areas that thicknesses

are perceived. This is in order to achieve a material thickness

which is in keeping with the small scale at which the objects

are made. The process is in turn governed by removing as

much material as possible up until that point of rupture when

the surface of the form dissolves through lack of its material

substance. To my mind this ultimate moment of resistance

produces openings which have a sense of authenticity.

However in this case there was a preconceived idea of

producing an opening which ran the full height of the object

in order to achieve a front elevation for the object whilst also

fully exposing the interior space of the containing architectural

form. For ease of the discussion this object will be referred

to as Object #1.

IDEAS OF MAKING: ASSEMBLAGE

In contrast to object #1, object #2 has been made through

the assembly of parts. In this case the object slowly evolves

through the accumulation of parts which are assembled in

response to what has preceded their inclusion. The inference

here is there are no preconceptions regarding the form that

is to evolve other than a knowledge something will emerge

through careful engagement and refined sensibilities.

This method of making bears its genesis in the habit

of doodling which I have nurtured over the past forty years.

My obsessive wanderings with pen on paper have developed

into a three dimensional doodling which involves making

a ‘mark’ and responding in some manner to the initial and

subsequent actions. This type of drawing has no embedded

narrative and serves no purpose other than to satisfy an innate

craving to put pen to paper during moments of reflection

or during times of the many excruciating meetings which

are part of any professional life. Experience has taught me

the most successful doodles are those whose beginnings are

in response to a given condition whether it is a smudge of ink

or crease or tear in the surface of the paper. This may be an

answer to the dilemma of the artist confronted by the tyranny

of a blank canvass – how and where to begin?

In essence my three dimensional doodling is governed

by a sense of composition whether it is achieved through

symmetrical or asymmetrical balance. Rhythm is achieved

through the repeated use of particular elements which are

not necessarily exactly the same in size or shape. Contrasts

are achieved through the juxtaposition of different and at

times opposing materials, for example transparency against

opaqueness, robustness against flimsiness. Scalar shifts

between elements are used to induce not only contrast

but to enhance a sense of interest. Differing areas of density

further add to a sense of interest. Sometimes a conscious

effort is made to obscure the clarity of detail in order

to produce textured surfaces with the hope of affecting

haptic viewing.

Object #2 had its beginnings with my fascination in the

structure and beauty of cicada wings. The first move was

to select a wing that basically corresponded in size to that

of the size of the object I was contemplating together with

the decision this would be a tower of sorts. This contemplation

produces a fuzzy mental image which is void of detail and

loose enough to accommodate the myriad of opportunities

which arise during the making. Keeping in mind the working

title of my PhD and the reference to miniatures I have been

endeavouring to make smaller and smaller objects whilst still

retaining the characteristics of the initial pieces which are

possibly between five to ten times the sizes of the piece I had

in mind. With a little poetic licence it may be envisaged I am in

effect producing miniature scaled versions of the characteristics

of the initial body of work.

Having selected the most appropriate wing the objective now

became to undermine the visual reading of the object as wing

in order to move ‘it’ more towards a reading of an architectural

element. This was achieved by adding a skeletal truss-like

structure made from cactus spikes to one face of the wing

upon which pieces of iridescently coloured butterfly wings

were overlaid. The idea of using iridescent coloured wings

was to achieve surprise and wonder through the startling

effect the iridescence has through the visual movement and

changes that take place as the angle at which they are seen

changes. From one angle there appears to be a dull surface

behind the transparency of the wing which suddenly bursts

into an electric blue as one changes position about the object. ANDREA MINA OBJECT #1

At this point a series of small flat cuttlefish-shell pieces were

glued to both surfaces together with cactus-spike supporting

structures in an effort to evoke the idea of planes for

occupation and to further undermine the visual reading

of wing

With the wing established as a prime element efforts were

now made to hold the piece in a vertical position. This required

the use of a smaller section of wing located at right angles

to the main element and again positioned vertically. Cactus

spikes were again used to connect the pieces. As a response

to the curvature of the base of the wings I decided to complete

a tripartite composition by introducing a third but angled

wing thus forming the base of the tower and enclosing what

I imagined to be a relatively enormous civic space. A decision

was made to angle the placement of this element in an

effort to provide a sense of visual movement from the base

up towards the apex. In contrast to the prime element this

structure is completely transparent thus providing visual

access to the enclosed space.

Because the production of interior space is one of the

fundamental ideas driving the making of these objects care

is taken to reveal these spaces and to not obscure the interiors

by completely enclosing space with opaque materials. Once

the object could stand upright without external support other

smaller wings and more cuttlefish shell plates were attached

at various points to this structure. At this point vertically

positioned cactus spine was introduced to induce the visual

perception of columns supporting these plates. A decision

was made to introduce a number of longer red cactus-spikes

with the aim of reinforcing the vertical whilst simultaneously

complementing the vertical green stripes contained within the

cicada wings. In this manner the composition was built

up to achieve the desired density; the measurement of which

is determined by what appears to satisfy my sensibilities.

Much in a similar manner to my doodles I decided the

iridescent colour needed to appear in other areas of the

composition. This resulted in the insertion of a prefabricated

rectilinear container bound by horizontally placed

cactus-spikes at the top of the tower. This shape was

intended as a contrast to the curved wing forms at the base

of the tower, the horizontal spikes meant as demarcations

of possible floor plates.

Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of making through

assemblage is in achieving that point of resistance which

signals completion. Unlike making through reduction and

its companion moments of rupture assemblage may proceed

unabated. In this instance closure was achieved through

an abatement in my patience with and interest in the object.

With the wing established as a prime element efforts were

now made to hold the piece in a vertical position. This required

the use of a smaller section of wing located at right angles

to the main element and again positioned vertically. Cactus

spikes were again used to connect the pieces. As a response

to the curvature of the base of the wings I decided to complete

a tripartite composition by introducing a third but angled

wing thus forming the base of the tower and enclosing what

I imagined to be a relatively enormous civic space. A decision

ANDREA MINA OBJECT #2

was made to angle the placement of this element in an

effort to provide a sense of visual movement from the base

up towards the apex. In contrast to the prime element this

structure is completely transparent thus providing visual access

to the enclosed space.

Because the production of interior space is one of the

fundamental ideas driving the making of these objects care

is taken to reveal these spaces and to not obscure the interiors

by completely enclosing space with opaque materials. Once

the object could stand upright without external support other

smaller wings and more cuttlefish shell plates were attached

at various points to this structure. At this point vertically

positioned cactus spine was introduced to induce the visual

perception of columns supporting these plates. A decision

was made to introduce a number of longer red cactus-spikes

with the aim of reinforcing the vertical whilst simultaneously

complementing the vertical green stripes contained within

the cicada wings. In this manner the composition was built

up to achieve the desired density; the measurement of which

is determined by what appears to satisfy my sensibilities.

Much in a similar manner to my doodles I decided the

iridescent colour needed to appear in other areas of the

composition. This resulted in the insertion of a prefabricated

rectilinear container bound by horizontally placed cactus-

spikes at the top of the tower. This shape was intended

as a contrast to the curved wing forms at the base of the

tower, the horizontal spikes meant as demarcations of

possible floor plates.

Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of making through

assemblage is in achieving that point of resistance which

signals completion. Unlike making through reduction and

its companion moments of rupture assemblage may proceed

unabated. In this instance closure was achieved through

an abatement in my patience with and interest in the object.

IDEAS OF EMPTINESS AND DECORATION

As previously mentioned the form of object #1 was consciously

worked to produce a shape unlike an egg form. Subsequent

to the removal of its interior material I was struck by the idea

of emptiness and the vast potential inherent in void space.

Contrary to the idea of void space being empty this space

is in effect charged with the potential of its futures and thus

becomes a site for engagement and the opportunity for

new manufactured interventions. However this potential is

immediately dissipated once any actions are taken to materially

occupy this space. Material occupation determines a specific

condition within the void hence limiting future options for

interventions within the space.

With this in mind I determined to intervene in the least possible

intrusive manner in an attempt to maintain the charged nature

of this void interior space. My concern now became how best

to fill interior space whilst maintaining its characteristics of

ANDREA MINA OBJECT #1

emptiness without limiting its potential for future occupations.

One possible course of action was to address the enclosing

surfaces which define this void space. By only addressing

the surface without altering its form the void remains intact

through the maintenance of its volumetric integrity.

To achieve this status quo I decided to employ the techniques

of decoration, that most ancient of all artistic practices.

It has often been quoted that Architecture is ‘the mother’

of all arts. One need only contemplate the practices of

prehistoric populations decorating the surfaces of caves to

appreciate the fallacy of this of this quotation. In effect we

may consider Decoration to be ‘the mother’ of all arts.

Considering the aforementioned I decided to appliquè butterfly

wings onto the enclosing surfaces of the void space. This was

an appropriate strategy given the cave-like appearances of this

void. The choice of which wings to use was influenced by their

patterning and not so much by their colourations. Portions

of wings with simple dot and circular patterns were selected

for their simplicity and the possible interpretations of the dot

and circle as prehistoric and universal symbols. Their different

shades of brown were an appropriate fit against the light shade

of brown of the balsawood in that there was no discordant

visual relationship between surface and decoration.

A contrasting approach was adopted with the decoration

of the external surface of the object. In this case an effort

was made to use colour to highlight a specific area on the

surface of the object for the purpose of subverting the visual

apprehension of the shape of that area. To this end the semi-

circular concaved shaped area at the top of the object was

covered with strips of iridescent coloured butterfly wings.

The idea was to exploit the strength of this vivid magical

colouring in conjunction with the resulting striped patterning

in the hope for the vivid colour to be visually projected out

from its defining surface thereby undermining the concavity

of the surface. It is contestable whether this idea has been

entirely successful in its execution, however the affective

qualities of iridescence add further dimensions of surprise

and delight when encountering the object.

IDEAS OF STITCHING

I began to apprehend anthropomorphic qualities in the final

form of object #1 with the emerging dominant image being

that of a headless human torso; this possibly due to the

curved symmetrical nature of the form, its tapering shape

from ‘shoulders to waist’ and the image of shoulder blades

manifest by the concave semi-circular excavation at its apex.

Not being comfortable with this image, especially the idea of

an opened and empty medical cadaver, I decided to intervene

through the idea of stitching the surfaces together along the

length of its continuous vertical opening; a redemptive gesture

of healing intended to secure the interior of the form by

intimating the making whole of its ruptured surface.

To this end I introduced white coloured cat hair to span the

gap between surfaces with the hope their slightness, stiffness

and straightness would elicit visual readings of tension. It was

never my intention to produce an overt medical reading of

stitching but to rather work with the word as a verb describing

the process of joining together. As a result the hairs were

cut short both in keeping with the scale of the object and

for the purpose of being subtle in the communication of my

idea. Consequently this necessitated joining the hairs across

the breadth of the opening whilst also providing a degree of

structural stability to the hairs and joints during this process

ANDREA MINA OBJECT #1

of fabrication. Despite the fact of their relative stiffness it is no

easy task to keep the end of a very fine piece of hair stationery

in an exact spot in space for long enough to join another piece

to it at exactly the correct spot.. The fundamental principles

of triangulation were employed to provide stability which in

turn produced visual readings of a type of trussed structure

in keeping with the architectural nature of the object.

Small pieces of red sea-urchin spine were used to locate the

points of connection between the hairs and the object’s

surface. In a similar manner more of the domed ends of

the spines were used to articulate the points of connection

between the hairs with the added intention of encouraging

visual movement across this complex surface.

IDEAS OF LIGHTNESS

An idea of lightness was central to my thinking throughout

the making of object #2. This was obviously influenced by the

decision to work with cicada wings however it also became

a guiding principle against which decisions could be made.

The transparency of the wings together with their inherent

fragile characteristics provided an immediate sense of lightness.

This metaphor was complimented and made more complex

through the combination of cicada wings with iridescent

coloured butterfly wings. Both wing types have an immediate

and direct connection with flight thereby establishing

an association with air and its evocation of lightness;

as light as air.

Once one apprehends the iridescent colouring of the butterfly

wings, for a nanosecond the effect of shimmer and sparkle has

the propensity to project itself beyond the surface of its being.

Lightness is thus manifest through this visual radiation and its

sense of upliftment.

The manner in which the object touches the ground was

limited to the minimum number of points. This was further

exacerbated through the curvature of the wings effectively

limiting contact in each to a single point thus allowing

the object to stand above its ground plane. This is unlike

object #1 which is firmly grounded by the continuous

contact between base and ground plane.

Perhaps the idea of lightness is best manifest through

the diminutive size of the object and its negligible weight.

ANDREA MINA OBJECT #2

ANDREA MINA OBJECT #2

a concept into a design, how do we recognise the optimum

‘stopping point’, and how do we know when we have gone

off beam? This quest for poise highlighted design as a process

rather than celebrating any particular designed outcome.

Students worked on individual projects for half the semester,

and collectively for the remainder.

MODELLING CONCEPTS

Having observed an apparent predilection for representational

modelling at the first Homo Faber exhibition held in June

2006, we were interested in learning a little more about the

status of the concept, and modelling concepts. Was practice

shy about revealing its working or ‘dog’ models in a public

forum, favouring more finished outcomes? Were practitioners

so experienced in ideation that they could leapfrog over

an exhausting process that can keep students busy for the

majority of the semester? Were students more shy of making

the commitments that practitioners routinely make in nurturing

ideas through to completed building, or simply more indulgent

through not having more capital-driven impediments?

As a set of questions, answers could not be sought in

MARK BURRY

The ‘Poise Studio’ ran for the first semester of 2007 and

involved students from the Architecture, Fashion, Industrial

Design, Communication Design, and Landscape Architecture

programs, in broadly equal numbers. The studio had several

objectives. First and foremost it was an investigation into

the status of the concept as part of the design process,

and especially the role of the model in spatially articulating

concepts both from a view of aiding the individual’s singular

thought processes through to their desire to communicate

their design intentions to others. Secondly, the studio looked at

how conceptual 3D design differed, if at all, between related

and less obviously related design disciplines. Thirdly the studio

looked for benefits in a transdisciplinary approach to design

development, and the status of ‘authorship’ in that regard.

There were two objectives to the studio: one abstract,

and one concrete. The concrete objective was to work

around the theme of the politics of water – by the end

of the studio, mixed discipline groups had worked together

through projects at the scale of buildings on, near and / or

about water. The abstract theme was also the driver: poise.

How many iterations might be necessary in order to mature

a single studio, but at least we could thoroughly investigate

ideation, conceptualisation, and design development

in a time frame that a typical architectural practice cannot

routinely afford. Furthermore, by assembling a diverse group

of designers, initially looking at more abstract themes such

as ‘poise’ and ‘self’ and ‘water’ rather than ‘library’

and ‘hospital’, we could look across disciplines and assess

the role of conceptualisation more generally without the

influence of ‘partisan contaminants’ that an architectural

(or any other design discipline) perspective would most likely

bring to the mix.

Mark Burry, Alison Fairley, Juliette Peers formed a team

and we ran the studio together seeking collaboration from

the participating disciplines for the several design reviews

that punctuated the semester. The studio ran in a progressive

mode starting with individual enquiry and leading steadily to

transdisciplinary group work. In terms of a thematic, students

began with an introspective focus to their design research

through to working in groups with an imaginary clients in

mind, and developing designs for projects in teams within

which the project’s original designer was not included.

POISE: AN OVERVIEW

32

DAVID DANA WATER MODEL

The following account documents the studio from start

to finish, and the accompanying images give voice

to the outcome.

PROJECT 1: PERSONAL REAL ESTATE

How best to get a group of twenty four students from

5 distinct disciplines to meld together into young and

enthusiastic groups of committed design researchers?

The first project was designed as an ‘ice-breaker’: each

student was asked to create a vision/self portrait of “yourself

through the metaphor of your design discipline/training”.

Using a 150mm square footprint, each student produced a 3D

tableau that provided an insight into his or her world, personal

history and preoccupations. At the end of the week, each

model was presented by its maker to the rest of the class

of which at least 80% would have been ‘foreign’ to them

through virtue of having come from other disciplines.

The purpose of the first project in terms of pedagogy was

to “learn something of ideas and aesthetic priorities of

everyone in the class, see a variety of different approaches

to creating models and prototypes, combine individual

pieces of design work into a whole, and explore context

and interaction of different models as a ‘studio cityscape’

is constructed”.

PROJECT 2: SPATIALISING WATER

Moving from a purely personal take on the world, students

moved to a more abstract theme: water, and the politics

that go with it. They had three weeks to produce a model

that captured their take on water as an element, as a subject

literary or otherwise, as a polemic, and as a life force. Their

assignment in detail was as follows:

‘Students should think about the politics of water not

only as an environmental issue but as a social, cultural and

artistic concern. The topic is wide and you are not expected

to become an expert in the field. Perhaps you could think

about such things as water sourcing and collection, disposal

and recycling, irrigation and garden sprays, waste run

off and water borne pollutants, salination and drainage.

Water plays a part in many aspects of our lives from health

to recreation. Yet water has strong symbolic and poetic

references as well as unique physical characteristics. Our

traditional understanding of boundaries, borders and edges

as contained and fixed might be challenged by addressing

and considering water’s characteristic flow and fluidity. What

insight and hints can water offer to our understanding of

practice and the design process? This assignment will provide

an important initial phase which will form a basic foundation

to be developed in the latter stages of the studio.

A 5 minute (maximum) presentation of your research into

water, your research can be on anything to do with water.

It should reflect your interests in the topic and will form

the basis for the rest of your semester. The presentation

should be in either a PDF or PowerPoint presentation.

You can include images, movies, research sourced from

the Internet (YouTube, Flickr etc.) Note: Everyone will be

heading for Wikipedia first, so do think twice before basing

your research on the water article…

Model making: the student will; represent quality of water

by providing a digital and or physical model representing

an aspect of water and its many functions and contexts.

You may address water in a number of ways such as

its gaseous, liquid or solid state; high speed imaging;

magnification; surface properties; subsurface currents,

splash patterns etc. You can develop your idea within the

boundaries and language of your own discipline – please

support your model with a visual diary of working sketches

and idea development – material can be posted on the

‘Poise’ wiki as well

Position your thinking relative to water in any respect,

for example, sourcing treatment and supply, surface tension.

Please do this by providing a short written statement

evidenced by researched material. (800-1200 words) -

and provide a comprehensive list of source materials that

you consulted

While certain themes emerged as common concerns, each

presentation was uniquely informative, and provided an

extraordinary array of ideas and sensibilities sponsored from

a single word subject.

TRAZ POON TRANSFORMABLE WATER PONCHO

PROJECT 3: WATER BY DESIGN

Moving from concept, students migrated to forming projects

individually based on their research into water.

Their tasks were formulated as follows.

‘Taking the driving narrative content as water:

‘make visible and explore in 3-D design-based thinking issues

around the process of design itself.

• Write their own brief, it should be within your own

discipline but with thought to possible interaction and

connections with the other disciplines

• Brief and resulting design should springboard from your

original research into water

• Brief and resulting design should respond to the content

of your original research and place it in a context relevant

to your discipline

• The design outcome should find a state of poise on the

border between concept and design. (i.e. Designs should

not be fully realised, or finished)

• The design project should address questions that we are

already discussing around design and its processes

• The project should explore the role of decision making

and judgement in designing

• The project should explore the stopping point or the

tipping point in the design process.

Students to work in any medium, virtual or physical, and in

any combination. The outcomes should follow the stipulation

of the brief as they have been set out in conjunction with

your home discipline. The level of finish and the format of

the outcome

in your home discipline should be adhered to.

Back up documentation: Throughout this second project – as well as producing

a model - students will record, document and map their

design process in a design diary – sketches, research,

and reflections, which can be physical or virtual (wiki-based).

The visual representation will capture a critical aspect of the

project and be used to demonstrate the desired intention.

Support and preparatory material should be included as

textual back up and as charting the design process.’

Obviously with so diverse a group of students, at this stage

we invited them to work within their own areas of discipline

expertise. We made suggestions on how to proceed on that

basis as follows:

Prepare models (physical or virtual) that produce the

following:

1. Function / Program (what is it you’re designing. It should

connect with the concept of water in some way. This can

be VERY LATERAL)

2. Concept (what is driving the design, what is it you wish

to achieve with it, it should also connect with the concept

of water in some way)

3. Site (only applicable to Architecture and Landscape, but

the other designers might wish to have a site as well. The

site must be in the Greater Melbourne area and have some

connection to water.)

Architecture

Design an inhabitable building. The building must have a

use that relates to water, i.e. a water treatment plant, a

swimming pool, a water education centre. You must pick an

appropriate site that also has a close relationship with water

within the greater Melbourne area. Think about connections

your design could have to other disciplines, i.e. could it make

a fantastic chair, or landscape, or book if scaled down and

altered in small ways?

Landscape Design

Design a landscape. It can be of any size and any scope.

The landscape must be influenced, created, contain or inform

water. You must pick an appropriate site that also has a close

relationship with water within the greater Melbourne area.

Think about connections your design could have to other

disciplines, ie, could your contours inform a dress pattern,

or your design become inhabitable and turned into a

R’M’B

FLIPBOOK ANIMATIONbuilding

if altered in small ways?

Fashion

Design something that has connections to the body

and water. It should deal with materiality, i.e. surfaces,

membranes and materials that deal with water, either

keeping it out or keeping it in. Think about connections

your design could have to other disciplines, i.e. could your

patterns be scaled up and form

a building? Could your material choices also be used for

book coverings, could your outlines inform Landscapes?

Communication Design

Design something of your choosing that communicates water

in some way, i.e. a book, a series of catalogues, a way of

communicating an aspect of water to the public. This work

can push the boundaries of what these designs are supposed

to be, especially in the areas of scale and materiality. i.e. a

giant book, an underwater marketing campaign, a liquid

catalogue. Think of connections your design could have with

other disciplines i.e. Could your design inform textiles, could

your graphic

be embedded across a whole landscape?

Industrial Design

Design an object that has some relationship to water. It can

be of any size, scope, materiality and budget. i.e. an

umbrella, a water bottle, scuba gear. The design can push

the boundaries of what is possible or what is commonly

done i.e. a giant umbrella that shields 10 at a time. Think of

connections your design could have with other disciplines

i.e. Could your umbrella become a permanent feature of the

landscape,

a pavilion from rain? Could your bottle design inform the

shape of a piece of fashion?

PROJECT 4: TRANSDISCIPLINARY UNDERTAKING

For the final project, students came together in trans-

disciplinary groups. Five projects were selected from the pool

of more than twenty deemed most likely to afford design

teams challenges that reached-out to all their various discipline

strengths. Each team (in most cases) had no more than one

representative from each participating discipline. And each

team worked on a project without the benefit of the original

author, who was participating within a separate group on the

same basis. At the final review, each group presented their

projects fully to a suitably diverse range of critics. At no point

was it clear to the visitors who was who in relation to their core

discipline judging from the work itself.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Only tentative conclusions can be drawn at the time of writing,

as the project has only just finished. From the students’ point

of view, it was an outstanding success judging from the

feedback we received. The last three weeks of the semester

were characterised by night and day activity within the studio

space dedicated to the assignment with many of the students

prepared to work in areas that were beyond their experience

in terms of their previous learning experience. The results speak

for themselves: while finished projects some may well lack the

degree of polish that each discipline might assume to have

been an outcome were the studio dedicated to that discipline,

there is a different kind of maturity evident in the work.

As a research endeavour into the prominence of the concept

and its associated modelling, and the enrichment that working

POISE

PERSONAL REAL ESTATE

In the first exercise students in the School of Architecture

and Design together with students from the School of

Applied Communication created their personal stories

in a model format. The project brief asked students to use

typical materials and techniques associated their home

program. Apart from a maximum dimension of 150mm x

150mm for the base, there were no restrictions. Students

worked alone on their models and brought them into the class

where they were discussed by lecturers. For the final step the

models were assembled into a “city scape” to form a collective

group portrait. These personal models introduced students to

each other’s creative ideas and demonstrated many different

approaches to creating models and prototypes. Combining

individual pieces of design work into a larger entity launched

the process of cooperative sharing of ideas and skills.

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

JESSE NEWSTADT CAITLIN SMOOKER BEN OLIVER

36

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

TZE EK NG CAMILLA ZANZANAINI INGRID RIDDERVOLD ANDRIA SKOUMBRIDIS GREG TEAGUE DAVID DANA

(FROM LEFT TO RIGHT)

JARROD MANEVSKI PANLIKIT BOONYACHAI

POISE

SPATIALISING WATER

Water was the theme through which Poise studio members

explored model making, design development, and solving

the “stopping problem” of finding the right design solution

amongst multiple alternatives.

Students were asked to model water in digital and physical

formats. Water is a fertile source of design ideas. The physical

characteristics of water are unique. For instance, as a liquid,

it has unique surface properties, subsurface currents and

splash patterns. Water makes an impact on many aspects

of everyday life from health to recreation. Moreover, it has

an equally strong symbolic and poetic resonance. Current

popular opinion focuses on the political issues of water:

supply, wastage, shortage, recycling, disposal, pollution

and salination. The models developed by the students

represented such issues.

Water was not only a topic for research. The fluidity and

flow of water offered insights into the design process itself.

From their focus upon the nature of water, students began

to question certainties and broach the comfort zone of

familiar ideas.

The models of water were developed within the boundaries

and language of the students’ particular disciplines and

were supported with a visual diary of working sketches

and idea development.

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

ANDRIA SKOUMBRIDIS PHIL SMITH JARROD MANEVSKI INGRID RIDDERVOLD

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

CARLOS BUENO CAITLIN SMOOKER DAVID DANA TZE EK NG

(FROM LEFT TO RIGHT)

CAMILLA ZANZANAINI GREG TEAGUE

(FROM TOP TO BOTTOM)

JESSE NEWSTADT MICHAEL ASBOECK

POISE

THE FINAL ASSIGNMENT

The final assignment in Poise involved two tasks.

Firstly, students were required to develop the concepts

of another designer. Secondly, they were required to work

with designers from different disciplines working on a single

project. Students were asked to form themselves into teams

where every member came from a different program in RMIT.

Models were made in various scales, from reduced scales

to one-to-one detail. Working in different scales revealed

how changing the scale of a model impacts not only upon

its physical properties, but upon the information the model

communicates. Students were required to select the detail

of construction that suited each type of model, with particular

attention to how their choices affected the information value

of the model.

POISE

LECTURERS

Professor Mark Burry

Dr. Juliette Peers

Alison Fairley

PARTICIPANTS

DESERTLEAC

Lauren Gillard

Anette Gunstensen

Tze Ek Ng

Caitlin Smooker

KIDIAMI Michael Asboeck

Diane Baini

David Dana

Kin Li

JAC’T

Jesse Newstadt

Traz Poon

Andria Skoumbridis

Camilla Zanzanaini

R’M’B

Panlikit Boonyachai

Ricky Lau Hin Yau

Ben Oliver

GROUP ONE

Carlos Garcia Bueno

Ingrid Riddervold

Greg Teague

DIESES MOGEN

Julian Faelli

Jarrod Manevski

Timothy Derreck Massuger

Phillip Smith

DESERTLEAC CONSTRUCTION OF ‘POD’

DESERTLEAC

The Desert LEAC group are fashion student Anette Gunstensen,

communication design student Caitlin Smooker, landscape

architecture student Lauren Gillard and architecture student

Tze Ek Ng were assigned a project by architecture student

David Dana. He designed a community sports centre at

Docklands. The centre is embellished by a decorative motif

abstracted from the complex lines of turbulence and stasis that

can be measured in moving floodwaters. The group decided

that the dominant curving elongated forms created as the water

spread though the flood plain would sit better in the elevated

landscape of the Kings Domain than in the flat paved and

industrially degraded landscape of Docklands. They also felt

that the growing residential community around South

Melbourne City Road and the established community around

Domain Road needed a public library. Desert LEAC’s vision

is of a library that welcomes visitors— “an active … source

of inspiration. Libraries should be door-openers showing visitors

new ways of learning and experiencing”. The spaces in this new

library are warm and inviting. They include the moveable pods

for group study and a series of outdoor rooms with grass seats

echoing the flowing forms. The water patterns also reflect the

behaviour of the building’s users, media and staff—they form

different patterns and flows. Thus the centre’s public spaces are

flexible, easily transformed either temporarily and permanently

to respond to new patterns of use.

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

PRELIMINARY CONCEPT MODEL POD CONCEPT MODEL FINAL 1:2 SCALE GRASS CHAIR MODEL (1200 X 900 X 500mm)

(FROM LEFT TO RIGHT)

FINAL 1:100 SCALE BALSA MODEL OF LIBRARY CLOSE-UP OF FOLDING ROOF CONCEPT MODEL

KIDIDAMI

The KididAmi group: landscape student on exchange from

Germany Michael Asboeck, landscape student Diane Baini,

communication design student Kin Li, and architect student

David Dana were assigned a project by communication design

student Camilla Zanzanaini, a large scale projection of words,

music and visual imagery intended to be shown on public

buildings or even large bodies of water, “beautiful, sensuous,

moving [projections] that make people stop and think about

the beauty of water”. The group took the basic concept

of large scale projections onto buildings and married it to

the proposed Centre for design at RMIT on the old CUB site.

The design centre was envisaged as a complex of multi-

functioned buildings for a variety of short term projects

that collectively formed a screen for multiple projections.

These projections can be curated as art or design events,

long or short term, or they can alter content in response to

movement and activities in the buildings at different times

of the day or deliver alternative, contemporary approaches

to signage and direction around the site, or even fuse these

varied functions. The buildings were laid out to suggest

a liquid flow of people through the slight from the slighter

higher North end to the south portal to the city, as streams

flow over rocks. Landscaping proactively emphasised sweeping,

water-like movement, and the lyricism of Zanzanaini’s fusing

of words, images and music around water. The models

drew upon the discipline practice of their makers including

traditional architectural layouts in cardboard and perspex

and a rich oeuvre of digital artworks, which were projected

onto the cardboard models and then filmed in a further layer

of model making. The governing narrative of the project

across all the media was creating a contemporary design

aesthetic matching the predicted future-looking quality

of the Centre for Design itself.

FINAL !:200 MODEL OF DESIGN CENTRE

EXPERIMENTING WITH PROJECTIONS ON CARDBOARD MODEL OF DESIGN CENTRE

(FROM LEFT TO RIGHT)

FINAL 1:1 SCALE MODEL OF ONE OF WALL PANELS 1:50 SCALE MODEL OF ONE BUILDING

R’M’B

BUBBLE ROOM ANIMATION INTRO REEL TO INTERACTIVE BIKE PARK

DIESES MOGEN

WORKING MODEL OF TURKISH BATHS: ATMOSPHERIC IMAGES

JAC’T (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

1:2 SCALE SECTION OF PIPE 1:200 SCALE MODEL OF TRANSPORT HUB PROFILE CIRCULATION MODEL

GROUP ONE

FINAL 1:200 SCALE MODEL OF UNDERGROUND STREET ART GALLERY

FIRST PROJECT WORKED ON BY STUDENTS AS INDIVIDUALS

“WHO ARE YOU ANYWAY…” THE MODEL IN A FACEBOOK ERA

Create a vision/self portrait of yourself through the metaphor

of your design discipline/training

Faced with a topic that was open and abstract and a group

of students of different disciplines, what would happen when

they were asked to make models, some for the first time during

their study at RMIT? The first presentation of work, two weeks

in from the start of class would give an indication of future

progress of the students as a collective organism and the

studio as a whole. Whilst architectural students were familiar

with a vocabulary of balsa wood and laser cut cardboard,

other students had not presented their ideas in a 3D format

before. Although the process was not fully alien to the

students as some form of provisional and experimental

productions are inherent to all the design disciplines

represented in Poise: “as a comm designer I am constantly

making models of a different type, prototypes maybe others

The last few days when we all spent crazy amounts of hours together, there was such a sense of family, if you needed something and another group had it there was no hesitation in handing it over.

Caitlin Smooker

Mark Burry has given an account of the Poise Studio,

its learning outcomes and its exercises in bringing students

together with the model and seeking some reflection

of the importance of modelling in the contemporary design

process. From a large oeuvre of documentary material and

from a range of observations of each week of the studio

here are some more intimate views of moments within the

studio focusing on models and the processes of design and

the academy.

would call them, but a mock up of a book, to play with size

shape and layout for example”. Likewise fashion students

mostly work on a one to one scale and for final assessment

produce finished objects rather than drafts; students’ work is

expected to be able to stand up to the rigours of the runway in

a show or competition. They also make use of toiles – a version

of a given set of pattern pieces in a plain cotton or other cheap

fabric – to test that the pattern does achieve in 3D what was

envisioned in 2D. The cheap and plain fabric allows for the

structure to read without extraneous embellishment and does

not waste expensive fabrics on proto-typing. Modelling and

testing practices from discipline to discipline had variations in

format and usage. Throughout the studio, the students began

to learn of each other’s processes.

The lecturers knew that the Poise experience was going

to be fruitful and valid when the first models were brought

in. They deployed a whole lexicon of the possible life of hand

skills in the current era, from sewing to carving. Concurrently

other students presented computer driven outcomes.

Materials employed range from homely substances or even

the scavenged and recycled, whilst other models were finely

JULIETTE PEERS

POISE DIARY: MOMENTS FROM THE STUDIO

53

finished. The physicality of the substances also ranged from the

solid wood and metal to fabric and paper. Narrative tone was

almost as equally varied from the factual to the playful, from

the intellectualizing to the expressionistic, from the extrovert

to the introspective. There was a shared theme but infinite

variations of approach and vocabulary

The student group laid on the table models of eloquence,

beauty and sometimes a touching openness in a world where

true sensations are increasingly mediatised. Conversely was it

the near universal mediation of personality and selling of self,

that sense of ongoing suave performance of the performed

not-me which is also me from blogs and from chatrooms

that gave the sense of veracity and self confidence to these

models? The model was not dead in the age of Facebook. The

wiki pages maintained by each student, not only provided

backup materials, working drawings and 2D support for their

modelling activities, but also continued that engagement with

actualising, ordering and choosing ideas and putting them

forward for discussion than threaded through the course.

Modelling in the public context of the class, in which it was

always assumed and expected that every gesture was to be

made in an open context of mutual respect and offered for

comment by peers and lecturers, was a similar process of

publication and self-commitment to ideas set in circulation.

One could also pause a moment to consider the issue of self.

Students drew on a wide range of vocabularies and constructs.

Some conceived very direct images of themselves. Others

saw themselves as made up of the sum of their personal

interests and concerns and drew imagery for their model

from hobbies and leisure time activities. Others used the

model to describe the current state or phase of their lives, or

perhaps to actualise their interpretation of the current state

of their lives. Some passed up psychological and personal

mapping to create models of ethical and political values that

engaged them. Another approach was to situate the self

geographically – referencing journeys, distance, national and

cultural elements that may distinguish them from their peers.

The students revealed a degree of cosmopolitan backgrounds

– not only the most obvious candidates of the overseas and

exchange students, but also some of the “Australians” had

spent time overseas in childhood, as well as in more recent

work and travel and drew upon folklore/imagery and the

physical experience of these different places to inform the

personas which they constructed. This alertness to a global and

interconnected world would especially later come to the fore

in the more intellectual exercise of researching water where

comparisons were frequently made between the Australian

patterns of unthinking and hedonistic squandering of water

and the developing “crises” of water in other countries

Another moment of revelation was when the models were

placed together on the table top to make a single entity, a

Poise cityscape. The only real restriction that was written

into the brief was the base was to be 150 x 150 cm. This

allowed for a shared fixed point between these very diverse

interpretations of modeling the self. The laying out of the

models side by side and also manipulating the lighting on the

models indicated how much the physical nature of the model

does impact upon how the model is read, how the audience

views the model and also what information is drawn

SECOND PROJECT WORKED ON BY STUDENTS AS INDIVIDUALS

MOZART, HITLER AND WATER

For this part of the assignment students should think about

the politics of water not only as an environmental issue but

as a social, cultural and artistic concern.

Students had two tasks to complete to present to the class

on successive weeks with a research project to act as

supporting documentation.

This project moved the question from the model as the telling

of the self to using the model to represent a story of wider

cross-reference. Partly this step meant a return to a more

familiar type of research activity, the gathering of information,

rather that the actualising of it as a model. Rather than

focusing on and interpreting the self, the process involved

the familiar study task of locating a problem/issue, gathering

of information and the answering of the question. As water

is now a universal subject for concern in the popular press

internationally, there was no shortage of current information DESERTLEAC POD UNDER CONSTRUCTION

DIESES MOGEN TIM MASSUGER HARD AT WORK

and the Powerpoint and PDF-supported spoken presentations

generated lively and thoughtful debate amongst the class.

Beyond the issue of modelling, lecturers and students had

a fast track education in arcane and surprising facts about

water at a local and international level. There was a strong

undercurrent of concern about sustainability, which perhaps

is not surprising given the increased prominence of these issues

in both education and journalism. Consideration of spiritual

and ritual aspects of water was frequently foregrounded even

though the stress of the class was on practical issues around

the role of models in the design process. Could this tendency

towards a spiritualising interpretation be a commentary on the

current zeitgeist, or a manner of thinking amongst younger

generations, who are drawn to a more holistic approaches than

older constructs of formal post-enlightenment thought?

The work of Dr Masuro Emoto’s water crystal experiments

around the emotional properties of water, and the possibility

for Mozart’s music to cleanse water whilst photographs of

Adolf Hitler set molecules into a frenzy, appeared concurrently

in the presentations of a number of students with no apparent

collusion other than they all as individuals found that Emoto

resonated with their own feelings about water. Though

appealing, some quick internet research revealed – at least

for this author - that Emoto’s experiments have not yet been

repeated outside his laboratory; his published accounts of them

often lack sufficient experimental controls although sceptics

have offered large cash rewards for anyone who can provide

verifiable and repeatable results. Lest anyone think Poise was

a crucible of “bad science”, or “post-modern physics” other

students tracked high level scientific research into water

by organisations such as NASA.

The second assignment returned to an easier series of

constructs and more familiar study and research patterns.

However this step brokered more visible difficulties. The pitfalls

that became apparent were in moving from the relatively

easy task of communication via text – which was something

that all the students had been engaged with throughout their

tertiary years – towards simultaneously producing a model

that represented an essence or core of the contention. Whilst

everyone is nowadays expected to be able to talk fluently

about themselves, the second assignment offered the hardest

briefs. The translation of ideas from conventional lecture

presentation to distilling these ideas into formats and images

that could be conveyed through modelling was a particularly

complex one that required a mixture of analytical and intuitive

skills. Many of the best models also had a sculptural, fine

arts presence, with a subtle appreciation of the materials in

a formalist sense. Again it is possible, as with the spiritual

aspects of the Poise experience, this was not an intended

outcome, but the sculptural, like the emotional established

a toehold in the outcomes of the studio. The downside

at this stage of the studio was the likelihood of students

of being unable to locate the right balance to achieve

maximum communication. The verbal presentations were

densely packed with content, but it was more difficult to

be able to conduit that content into the model, and in some

cases the presentations could become top heavy in relation

to the model. The relationship of the model to the carefully

researched presentations could be obtuse, haphazard or even

somewhat trivial. There was a sense in some cases of model

making being a secondary consideration after all that exciting

time on the net and in the library.

The model seemed unable to sustain and communicate all that

heartfelt research. One of the skill bases that consolidated

with greater experience as the studio progressed was

a greater capacity to match model to intention, to shape

ideas so that they could be effectively communicated as

a model. Many students sought to make the often subtle

and ineffable qualities of water visible through their models.

Those who achieved this aim in a plausible manner provided

much fascinating evidence about how selection of formats

and imagery facilitates communication of ideas and concepts

via models. With a maker/designer who is alert and adept in

both conception and physical process, no idea seemed beyond

capture by a model. The richness and variety of student

responses to the brief was notable.

Failures could be as informative as the poetic and sculptural

successes – such as the attempt to freeze water into

architecture, by dripping liquid plaster through cloth.

This model was a failure in practical terms as the plaster

was too liquid for the shell to survive for long before it

shattered, but photographs of the model before

it set testify to the interesting questions that it set

up by this and the ambitiousness of the nearly realised project.

Again materials ranged from those traditionally highly

expensive and prized such actual gold leaf and silk, substances

that have been prized in many eras and cultures, to discarded

plastic bottles (themselves a comment upon waste and land

degradation), from stone to wax. Models were not only

present in the room. Students posted their models as films

on the Poise Wiki and You Tube as an element of their search

to find processes and formats that communicated their ideas

as models.

THE FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: A-HA WITH DESERTLEAC AND PLAYING DOWN AND DIRTY AT THE SWIMMING POOL

Our process, as you say, was very fluid, we didn’t allow ourselves to be held back by time/cost/space requirements

Caitlin Smooker

The fourth project was the penultimate, students forming

groups who worked on a project from the previous

assignment. There was an extended period of work on this

assignment, allowing for testing and revising. There was the

overall development of the concept. There were also the micro

tasks placed upon the students in that they had to explore

certain scales of modelling and finally produce an element

of their project in a one to one scale. Models provided

an essential driving energy in this project which deserves

an essay to itself.

No better demonstration of the role of models in the design

process emerged than the work of the DesertLEAC group,

which had taken some false steps at the very start of the fourth

project. Models not only brought a potential disaster to heel,

but offered up an extraordinary range of different explorations

of a single issue through alternative models,

DESERTLEAC PRESENTATION

which starting from different premises, began to interact

and inform each other. DesertLEAC produced some startling

outcomes, architecture from fabric and seating from turf,

which were brought to a high degree of completeness as

one to one models.

Conversely Dieses Mogen who were accomplished model

makers enacted a mannerist attention to their extraordinarily

dramatic model. This model almost drove the makers rather

than the other way around. The model generated its own

creative energy and dictated terms to the makers and became

a site for reflection rather that prototyping. That the model,

which was highly architectural, did not convey much of the

information expected from such a classically formed structure

never quite registered on viewers, as the documentation took

on a cinematic poetic impetus, enhanced by photograph and

films. The studio was given a lesson in power of model making,

not so much in making a model of a specific item, but how

models could transcend the relatively simple technologies

that produced them and create illusions that offered more

avenues for thought. The inconvenient truth that the building

could never exist for OH&S and public safety reasons was

banished by the total illusion of credibility and purpose given

out by the model. Nor was there any hint of the public unease

that in real life would have greeted a building that combined

the Baths of Caracalla with pre-aids New York, with vaulted

Victorian sewers and the local municipal pool complex with the

social function and self consciously eye catching avant garde

architecture of a bar - all on a walk up basis for fee paying

customers. It was fairly solid for a model, and in some ways

quite pompous and demanding in its footprint, especially in its

massive physical quality. Quite the opposite to the evanescent,

shimmering structures of Andrea Mina, yet the baths captured

the emotions as readily, through strategies of representation.

Dieses Mogen’s project raised questions about the real versus

fantasy, the functional model versus the dollshouse and offered

the possibility that both these strategies were valid and could

be informative about spatiality. All of the architecture was

interior, the outside of the model was in effect buried deep

underground. Moreover no questions were asked about the

energy and piping that would service these labyrinthine series

of dark and moist spaces. As in love and war, is all fair in model

making, when done with panache?

STUDENT REFLECTION FROM POISE

COOPERATION/DISCIPLINE MIX

As one of the lecturers I could note that not only did Poise

combine students from five different programs but it also

combined local, overseas and exchange students and enriched

their understanding of practice. This intermingling does not

always happen at a personal or a project level in the class,

often students stay in their particular friendship circle.

Personally I took away, a better understanding for working in

different medias. I also walked away with a greater knowledge

of working in a group …It was so good to work with other

students from other disciplines, I learnt a lot from others in

this studio. It made the semester a lot more interesting. It also

made me appreciate, other design fields.

Lauren Gillard

The interdisciplinary aspect of the studio was one of the

biggest highlights. After three years in any design program at

RMIT, you already know how most people in your year level

operate. Disciplinary conventions have already been adopted

and there in not much impetus for experimentation...you put

your head down and do the work. Immediately when put in

the situation of working outside your discipline you have to be

on the ball again, start listening and learning. It was interesting

to see the group dynamics unfold during the first few weeks

of the group work. Who was going to do the work? Who turns

up on time? It all was sussed pretty quickly in our group, after

a few beers the first week we got the project. The majority of

the group was fairly committed. In the studio on weekends...

happy to take phone calls early in the morning etc... This studio

atmosphere was great and unlike and other studio I have taken

at uni.

Julian Faelli

Understanding of collaborative work has skyrocketed.

A lot of people learnt some valuable lessons in this respect…

An amazing experience. Having idea’s thrown at you that

u would never think of was very prosperous and made design

quite easy sometimes. I guess u could call it a much more

streamlined process.

Timothy Massuger

It showed that designers can work cohesively together even if

they aren’t from the same discipline, also that sometimes it’ll

be the industrial designer who comes up with the best graphic

representation and vice versa.

Caitlin Smooker

The most valuable achievement is the experience through

working with different design students. A lot of ideas and

presentation methods were being exchanged and developed

through the processes of the studio … my design techniques

have developed because [so many] ideas [were] being renewed

and exchanged within the group. It is really different but

special… because the studio provided a good environment for

students who can [listen to] and communicate with different

kinds of students and teachers.

Traz Poon

MODELS

Working with models, was the best part of the studio.

Lauren Gillard

Models give people an understanding of an idea that would

not be conceivable on screen or paper. It leads to new ideas

and makes you see the flaws or notice the details. It also

creates a connection with the work.

Camilla Zanzanaini

With models people relate more to things they can move

around, and feel. Models can have a strong presence, but work

very well when captured with a good picture.

Carlos Garcia-Noriega Bueno

Working with models was central to the whole studio.

I really enjoyed spending the majority of my time at uni, doing

something physical and tangible. Not in front of a computer.

Such a refreshing and liberating thing to do. Developing the

skill to stop being so anal about them. Pushing them out one

after another... quickly testing and developing your ideas. I am

still not mercenary enough with my time to do this. However,

labouring over them does give you time to think a little harder.

Who knows which approach has the most merit? Models

are particularly suited for spatial visualization, proportions,

idea generation and finally used traditionally as a tool to

communicate a concept.

Julian Faelli

Models communicate a range of ideas, aesthetics, and

problems. They are also a good tool to test possibilities that

drawing and digital aids may not [help]. …They are amazing

tools in design. Allowing other people to see quite fast what

someone could only ever explain in a [longer] time. What can

be gleaned from 5 seconds of staring at a model is so much

more than any type of medium.

Timothy Massuger

One of our earlier meetings when we had decided on the site

and what we were going to build, and Anette, Ek and I just

cut random bits of board and started to develop our building,

as a model sketch, a medium we could all work together on

and then stand back and say ‘no don’t like that part’, remove

it, discuss, it created a forum where we were all equal. If the

models hadn’t been part of the studio I don’t think I would

have got much out of POISE, the building of models put us

all on even ground and forced us to talk and work together. I DESERTLEAC JULIETTE PEERS RELAXING IN POD

POISE STUDIO STUDENTS HARD AT WORK

learned that you never really know how an idea in your head

is going to work until you have attempted to make it work.

Models communicate sometimes more than what you as the

model maker think, for instance, in the final submission/crit

session I was afraid that it would be difficult for the board to

see the way the graphic thought was coherent throughout the

project however it was one of the first things observed. It was

also pointed out in that session that for our group they would

not be able to tell who had done what, and the use of models

helped us to achieve this as we could communicate amongst

ourselves through the models and what we brought into talk

about from week to week.

Caitlin Smooker

Before “Poise” I saw models only as a means of representation.

But through working with a group of multi-disciplinary

students it helped me better understand the role of models

in design - In terms of expressing my ideas to other disciplines.

For instance, when I drew a plan, everyone in my group could

not really understand what it meant except for the landscape

student. But after, when a sketch model was sort of produced,

the plan drawings became visible in terms of understanding to

the rest. Maybe… I’m narrow-minded. But I really don’t think

[model making] can be [improved] not like hand drawings was

improved with computer software). We’ve tried using the laser

cutter to help with modelling but it seemed too complicated,

too slow and too restricted in terms of design. I much prefer

using my hands.

Tze Ek Ng

PRACTICE

It was loose and interesting… I just found it relieving most

of the time because it was very engaging.

Camilla Zanzanaini

The studio has extended my understanding of practice because

in real life you contribute with people from other disciplines all

the time.

Carlos Garcia-Noriega Bueno

MOMENTS OF BREAKTHROUGH/POISE

Seeing all the final products, the input of so many people into

very interesting and diverse 6 products.

Carlos Garcia-Noriega Bueno

Overall I think the studio achieved a greater understanding

of model making in design. I also think it achieved a strong

knowledge of collaborative work and also the need for more

spaces, for example having access to the university system…

The time when the groups started mingling and helping each

other with ideas, created an environment that made designing

easy and was aided by the space we were using … it was

a turning point in the studio.

Timothy Massuger

I think the studio achieved something which it had set out

to from the beginning – designing using models (from my

understanding – it’s also one of the reasons I chose this studio)

another great experience was that I got to work with fashion

students who usually deal with materials on a 1:1 scale,

but for me as an architecture student, materials for buildings

seemed distant.

Tze Ek Ng

DIESES MOGEN 1:20 WORKING MODEL

THE MODEL AS LONELY PLANET GUIDE WHAT ELSE WE LEARNED

The idea of collaborative practice was introduced in the third

brief that led to the fourth brief as each student also needed

to consider the possible connections that their design could

have to others in the course. All the students knew that from

the third project there would emerge a core of projects which

would move into the final phase and effectively sustain the

work of groups of students from different disciplines.

The projects brought into the final phase reflected the

range of students in the studio and included the idea of

a garment that would recycle urine to solve the water crisis,

artistic projections that raised public consciousness about

water, a wave driven power station at the entry to Port Phillip

Bay, with a CBD sculpture cum gauge recording how much

energy the power station was generating, a building that

drenched itself in a curtain of Yarra Water, garments that

soaked and wick-ed water, public interpretative centres

in Studley Park and a Docklands sport centre.

The third assignment had returned to a more conventional

idea of the model. Students were asked to produce the model

of an object specific to their design training and develop

in terms of the expected practices of their media but also

still centrally referencing water. Again the sheer versatility

of the outcomes impressed as did the sharp upwards curve

of the mutual education set in motion when students explained

about their concept in detail. As the landscape and architecture

students were specifically asked to interact with a site around

Melbourne, Poise became a sort of alternative tour guide

in a Lonely Planet idiom for Melbourne, and it was not only

overseas students who were brought up to speed on hidden

attractions of the city.

Thinking of guide books raises the issue of where does one

go looking, and how ought one to look, for a catalyst for

matching the brief’s requirements. Then having looked and

found, what can one make of the gathered material and the

response to the brief. Surviving this process of dealing with

ideas, of evaluating a project’s potential for future outcomes

was another skill that was implicitly tested and explored.

Model making was not only informed by physical skill but

by this ability to judge and select in the early exploratory

phases. In both the third and fourth assignments this “Poise”

of judgment was implicitly present at the very foundational

steps. These steps were matched by a more sophisticated

integration of narrative and content with the chosen design

product, at least in the high achieving presentations.

Modelling, however, also allowed for less than successful

outcomes to be turned inside out and gain a new life. Not only

the poetics of model making and design came to the fore,

but also the issue of time, the classes fluctuated as each group

had different phases – from stagnation and lack of outcome

to an intense burst of activity that began to produce results.

For some students this intense burst of activity came at once,

for others ideas had to be worked doggedly upon, in order

to move beyond the impasse. For the white-heaters, the model

was essential to forcing this process into life, for the slower

workers, models needed to be analysed in detail, but not so

that a bigger trajectory was lost in the unessentials and wrong

turnings. Within the modelling process the solution that would

set the project in a more productive direction was often to

be found if the right questions were asked of it. The resulting

images and models speak for themselves.

DESERTLEAC RORY HYDE ON GRASS CHAIR

The ambition of exploring model making in these Landscape

Architecture courses was to investigate the process of making

as one that is simultaneously analytical and generative. In this

manner the outcomes captured here are of equal importance

to their process of becoming, or what they might yet become.

This notion determines a making of models ‘for design’1

where ideas are challenged and transformed through the

confrontation of the laws and possibilities of becoming. In

these models the dynamic making process is revealed as

being analogous to the medium of Landscape as one in a

constant state of flux, and embraces the notion of an idea as a

transformative entity that remains open and inclusive.

Making ideas challenges and transforms them through seeing

possibilities through a process of association. Comprised of

the phenomenon of spatiality, temporality, and materiality, the

dynamic medium of Landscape is continually re-making itself.

The making of models embraces this notion of change and

changeability which enables an outcome (a model) to remain

open, inclusive, and plugged into the landscape it is exploring.

This describes making of models as an act of re-making in

congruence to the re-making in the landscape. If the act of

MAKING LANDSCAPE: THICKENED GROUND & RE-MAKING

CRAIG DOUGLAS & ROSALEA MONACELLA

CHANTELLE MATTHEWS

looking at something in the world is considered as an act of

violence that essentially rips the subject from its environment,

the making of models ‘for design’ necessarily does this, yet

at the same time has the ability to remain plugged into the

context of its existence, and subsequently the resonance of its

being concurrently informs that environment. In this manner

the model is ‘less a finished “work of art,” and even less a

tool for communicating instrumental ideas, than it is itself a

catalytic locale of inventive subterfuges.’2

The notion of re-making as a process of both the Landscape

and the act of model making determines that a model’s critical

state may exist prior to, or after its present state of being, or

in fact be a combination of many states over time. Time in the

process of making and becoming can then be considered as a

‘destabilising but creative milieu … to bear each thing along,

generating it and degenerating it in the process’.3

Making models ‘for design’ in the Landscape has been

employed in these courses as simultaneously a device of

analysis and generation. The process of making models

that describe the Landscape as a system of material and

62

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

JASON FLAHERTY GEMMA FENNELE (2 WORKS)

SARAH BORG

performative relationships is facilitated by its inherent use

of physical materials which are assigned performative values

relative to forces identified in the Landscape.

The act of making models develops and comes to imbue a

sense of emergence associated to the Landscape through

the creation of its own sensibility or internal logic. Physical

materials for making are thus selected and employed according

to their performative characteristics related to an aspect of the

Landscape. The model inherently becomes enabled by its own

performative internal logic to describe the forces, and their

convergence, in the Landscape. In this manner the analytical

model indexes the complex workings of the Landscape and

offers a set of criteria in which to act.

Simultaneously, the materials of the model that are imbued

with performative tendencies and specific qualities are

engaged with through various techniques of making which

overlay a new set of criteria onto the ideas ‘being’, explode

and transform. These criteria may perform two functions; to

be associated with a force in the Landscape, and therefore

act accordingly in the model through the materials, or, act as

another avenue of exploration privy to the behaviour of the

model and its maker. Therefore the intelligence of the making

process is not only to be found in the hands of the maker, but

in every cell of the body, this includes the physical body of

the maker and that of the model. A resonance is enacted that

defines reciprocity, an internal logic, between the material

tendency and its behaviour as defined by a technique of

transformation. The productive ambiguity of this act suggests

the doppelganger of making as being simultaneously specific

and vague. By departing from its projected trajectory, a

model may reveal other valid potentials. ‘Catastrophe theory

recognises that every event (or form) enfolds within it a

multiplicity of forces and is the result of not one, but many

different causes’.4

Landscape Architecture as a field event embraces the notion of

relational forces where form is a production in the Landscape.

Furthermore, it engages with the idea that the field may

be altered through the manipulation of these relationships.

Making that engages this idea constantly tests and records

‘spatial and tactile qualities through a process of association’5

that describes the emergence of a field event at moments of

convergence, or divergence of forces and positions the process

of making as one of the production of emergent form in the

Landscape field.

1 Ranulph Glanville, lecture: Models and Intentions, Homo

Faber Symposium, June 1st, Melbourne, Australia, RMIT

University, 2006

2 Corner, James, ‘Representation and landscape’, in Simon

Swaffield (ed.) Theory in Landscape Architecture: A reader,

Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2002, p.165

3 Kwinter, Sanford, ‘Landscapes of Change’, in Assemblage

(19), Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 1992, p.52

4 Kwinter, Sanford, ‘Landscapes of Change’, in Assemblage

(19), Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 1992, p.60

5 Corner, James, ‘Representation and Landscape’, in Simon

Swaffield (ed.) Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader,

Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2002, p.145

is to highlight the possibilities and power of investigative,

interpretive making. This brings to bear the important role

of interpretation, the act of seeing and reading as both

a catalyst and enabler of the making process. The act of

seeing recognises critical moments in the making process

that may define, or re-define the trajectory of exploration;

recognising moments which may prove or dispel, connect

or disconnect, reveal and infer other potentials. In this light

John Rajchman writes of “…finding within things the delicate,

complicated abstract virtualities of other things”. The making

process is a catalyst for the transformation of an idea, and

the model outcome a container of knowledge. What became

interesting during the exploration of making models with

the students was that outcomes presented by individuals

acted as a knowledge trigger that posed different knowledge

for each class member, therefore generating new potentials

of exploration. No model can unequivocally present one set

of meanings or convey exact and precise knowledge; they

act as metaphors act. Models trigger a range of possible

readings that draw on the extant knowledges of their

readers to provoke journeys into new territories.

CRAIG DOUGLAS & PETER DOWNTON

The medium of Architects and Landscape Architects

encompasses a diverse range of representation modes,

from drawing and text to physical modelling and virtual

constructions. This is a necessary requirement as we are

abstracted from the actual medium of our disciplines for

we do not physically build the architectures of our design.

The process of making models of an idea is not a surrogate

for this condition, but instead offers a fertile ground for the

transformation of ideas through the confrontation of the

laws and possibilities of becoming.

Making models of ideas where acts of ‘making’ are embraced

as part of a process of investigation and discovery may be

likened in some ways to the act of drawing. James Corner

suggests that “…as a vehicle of creativity, drawing is a highly

imaginative and speculative activity, entailing both spontaneity

and reflection. It first involves the making of marks and

the ‘seeing’ of possibilities. Such work is both imaginal

and theoretical, making images and recording spatial and

tactile qualities through a process of association.” Models so

often ‘illustrate’ designs already made. The aim of paralleling

model making with the kind of drawing described by Corner

RE-MAKING: IDEAS AND MODELS

SARAH BORG

65

KIM HO HYUN

Critical to this exploration was the notion of the reciprocity

of making that engages the intelligence of the body of the

maker, and that of the body of the model. This established

a framework of spontaneity that allowed the model to have an

unfolding life of its own that includes mistakes and failures as

necessary events. Class discussion revealed that the perceived

‘accidents’ were often discoveries enabled by the making

process; the residual escalating effect of a misaligned part

may have undermined the rigid order of the whole, yet more

accurately described the forces at work in a body. Clearly,

in a model intended to accurately represent a preexisting

design, such accidents must be remedied. In investigative

modelling ‘accidents’ lead to new paths of discovery.

They require a degree of adjustment to the narrative

surrounding the making for the maker – story the maker

tells him or herself about the meanings, directions and

concerns of the modelling evolve in concert with the making

to take advantage of the events of modelling and shape the

future explorations. The maker must adapt and accommodate

to the dictates of materials and events.

Iteration is also a necessary component of model making

that aligns itself with the potential of discovery. “The iteration

is a self similar but non-identical repetition betraying a drift

in form which bears a certain similarity to its original but

which, nevertheless, avoids identity”. The iteration within

the construction of a model, or between different models,

builds on the potentials of the former, and creates new effects

through difference. Incremental changes amplify the ideas

modelled; the end outcome has survived through processes

of ideation and evaluation by the modeller.

The fundamental issue here is that the process of making

is a continuous and dynamic one based on the fundamental

attributes of space, material and time. Within this equation

of the making of an idea, and therefore its being, a state

prior to (or yet to be) may be of equal or greater importance.

This notion is significant as it describes making as a continual

process of re-making.

The ‘Re-making’ course explored this notion of making

as a continual process of re-making where an idea came

to be understood as a transformative entity rather than

a static one. Possibilities emerged in the process of making

models through a series of exercises in the form of a brief,

a specific material, and a technique. What quickly became

apparent was the contestation and transformation of an

idea by the roles associated with the material and those

of its inherent tendencies relevant to its performance under

various techniques. A complex feedback loop of simultaneous

relationships was established. Each week students were given

a new design brief to explore through a specific material and

presented with the characteristic tendencies of that material.

A set of techniques was demonstrated which afforded

a manner in which the material might be engaged.

This equation of a material performance and technique

acted as the driver for the interrogation of the brief,

and its inherent transformation into the real.

As previously discussed it quickly became apparent that an

idea is necessarily a transformative entity. The understanding

of what an idea actually is, and where it comes from became

CAITLIN PERRY

a constant discussion point in the class that revolved around

an idea as the connection between elements of knowledge

(what is known to an individual) in new ways, establishing

new relationships that inherently change the nature of the

elements themselves. The making, or in this case the re-making

of the idea was seen to extend this notion by making new

relationships in the material world. Furthermore, the physical

actuation of the idea came to be understood as a catalyst

for this condition.

Similar findings were apparent in the Manual Ideas studio

although it employed different attitudes to materials.

In that case the materials palette was not controlled

except for the proscription of card, balsa and foam core.

Metals, timbers, resins, fabrics – usually in combinations

– were utilised to express and explore the individual’s ideas.

More time was necessary for each model with these materials

and iterative investigation on a given brief was limited and

usually undertaken in mock-ups using simpler materials or

rough versions of the final materials. There was a rich cross-

pollination between materials and ideas: the materials shaped

the ideas as frequently as ideas led to particular patterns

of material use. That there was iterative development

of themes and approaches by students across the five

projects they undertook in the studio was revealed in their

own reflection on, and curation of, their work in the form

of portfolios.

There was a sense in which ‘re-making’ occurred as a group

process, for as ideas and projects developed in the studio

a shared set of ideas also developed over and above that

of each individual. A group attitude and a group approach

could be discerned that was constantly reforming and

transforming the collective knowledge. The role of the

models in this was not only as vehicles for exploration

by the individual and as transmitters of knowledge,

but as facilitators of the group conversation and learning.

CHANTELLE MATTHEWS

(from the tiny flat in Sydney where he was born, though his

rooms at Cambridge and subsequent family houses around

the world, to the nursing home room where he lived the last

year of his life) and gathers all their various spaces into one

aggregated and re-membered house. A series of floor plans

drawn from memory by my father, constitutes the initial

conditions of this project. These re-collected plans, conceived

as a kind of generative data-set, produce two divergent

spatialisations of memory: one architectural, one topological.

These two spatialisations of memory, first digitally modelled,

were then pursued through the materials of my fathers

professional life, in particular his catalysis research archive.

Using both digital and manual paper cutters, a series of

contour and sectional forms in positive and negative modes,

were cut into his research card index file. His experimental

log books, and his father’s machine tools are deployed in this

iteration of the work to re-arrange and ‘pose’ the forms.

It is through these combined digital and manual operations

with their nuances of precision, delicacy, fragility and intimacy,

which, together with propositional procedures of compression,

CHARLES ANDERSON

The Greeks called art and the work techne, which also includes the meaning knowledge. Art was art not because it was produced but because through it something becomes visible.

Martin Heidegger

These ‘process forms’ are from the first part of a larger

ongoing project titled A House for Hermes. This project is part

of a meditation on modernity and place making. By hybridizing

generative procedures to materialise processes of time, this

project endeavours to reformulate the spatial hierarchies that

characterize the lived spaces of our world.

The House of My Father*, the first iteration of this larger

ongoing project, explores the relationship between memory,

place, movement, and ‘home’.

This project recalls the many houses that my father lived in

A HOUSE FOR HERMES: THE HOUSE OF MY FATHER

CHARLES ANDERSON PROCESS FORMS: THE HOUSE OF MY FATHER

69

CHARLES ANDERSON INSTALLATION: THE HOUSE OF MY FATHER

interleaving, leaning, balancing, holding, and weighting,

combine with the specificity of matter to enact memory

rather than model it.

I refer to these works as process forms. These forms are not

models of (some extant thing) nor are they models for (some

future action). They may suggest these attributes by association

or even assume them at some time after the event of their

making, but they are primarily ‘the thing itself’.

Rather than intermediary abstractions, simplifications,

or distilled essences they are direct spatio-temporal operations,

momentary configurations in matter of an evolving idea.

Indeed it is in the performative mode of their making and

in the particularity of the material that the idea ‘becomes’.

In other words, process forms do not fall within the

representational paradigm: they do not model an idea

they are the idea.

* A House for Hermes #1: The House of My Father was first

exhibited at the Tarrawarra Museum of Art in the first half

of 2007.

CHARLES ANDERSON PROCESS FORMS: THE HOUSE OF MY FATHER

The distinction between a model and a tool is blurred in my

process of making holograms.

1 THE VIRTUAL WINDOW

This model (or two bits of cardboard) was used investigate how

the ‘virtual window’ of master holograms translate into the

final holographic image.

2 STENCIL PATTERNS

My master holograms are composed of a number of exposures

that are recorded into different parts of the holographic

emulsions using stencil masks. The stencil pattern determines

which recording is seen from each perspective, allowing for a

spatial animation of the object. As the animation occurs in a

dark lab, sometimes over long periods of time, it is important

to have both a plan and a procedure.

These stencils were used to make the hologram but can also be

used with the model of the virtual window to plan the image.

MARTINA MRONGOVIUS

The process of making holograms relies heavily on geometry.

The hologram itself is a recording of the shape of the laser

beam, created by the interference pattern of two or more

beams of light.

The physical space and optics in a holography lab shape the

practice of making holograms. Holographers often combined

precision equipment with home-made bits to manipulate the

laser light.

To record a hologram the light from the laser is split,

manipulated with optics (mirrors and lenses), optical processors

(such Digital Mirror Devices and Holographic Optical Elements)

and objects, before being recombined at the holographic

recording material.

Since the hologram records the inference pattern of light the

split laser beams must all arrive at the holographic emulsion at

the same time, so the distance travelled by each beam should

be the same. One of the most useful tools in holography is

string, allowing for the translation between the designed and

physical arrangement.

A COLLECTION OF MODELS FOR DESIGNING OPTICAL GEOMETRY & CREATING HOLOGRAPHIC IMAGES

MARTINA MRONGOVIUS THE VIRTUAL WINDOW

72

MARTINA MRONGOVIUS THE OBJECT MODEL

3 THE OBJECT MODEL

This object is made from found and inherited bits, combining

natural forms with manufactured designs.

In traditional object-based holography the model needs to stay

very still for the duration of the exposure - if the object shifts

even half a wavelength of light (0.0000001m) the hologram

will appear completely blank.

A sandbox offers one good solution for both moving the object

and keeping it stable.

In the early 1970s the west-coast school of holography

encouraged artists to be independent of scientific laboratories.

One of the signatures of this movement was the sandbox table

that was used to mount all the optical components.

4 GEOMETRY PIN BOARD

The pin board marks out the positions of optical equipment

on the holography bench, this particular configuration

shows the transfer geometry used to make the hologram on

display. The pin board is a 1:4 scale model that can be used

to plan holograms and/or to record the set-up, allowing for

measurements of distances and angles.

5 THE INSTALLATION

The installation of this hologram with a mirror in

a sandbox refers both to the physical and poetic process

of making holograms.

MARTINA MRONGOVIUS (CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT)

ANIMATION PLANE CALCULATIONS STENCIL PATTERNS GEOMETRY PIN BOARD

MARTINA MRONGOVIUS THE INSTALLATION

all disciplines in building and construction. The hegemony

of paper based design and physical model-making has

gradually been augmented by the possibilities offered by

digital tools for drafting, analysis and simulation of design-

related aspects. Computer aided architectural design and

manufacturing (CAAD/CAM) offers a variety of interfacing

possibilities for communicating ideas, passing on information,

and working on diverse aspects of design in a more concurrent

fashion across disciplines. Rapid prototyping assists in the

automated generation of physical models directly off a digital

3D geometry file, which enables instant (or at least fast)

visualising. These developments have brought benefits to the

students in the field by augmenting their design-capabilities

and allowing them to explore design in a playful manner.

The use of specialist software for drafting, 3D modelling

and performance analysis is offering assistance in the rapid

generation of design options for evaluation and design

decision support.

Working on projects individually, students have investigated

how analogue and digital means of design can complement

each other as a matter of course and how they can be applied

DOMINIK HOLZER

The choice of an adequate design methodology is an essential

ingredient to any creative process in either education or

practice. This essay discusses the case-study work undertaken

by architecture students at RMIT University to scrutinise

their design methodology when confronted with the task

of optimising a specific aspect of building performance.

The student’s design methodology is based on –

amongst others:

- their conceptual framework

- their skill level

- the available tools to them

- and the craftsmanship

One aim of the class was to investigate the ways architecture

students communicate design performance and share

information by seamlessly integrating sketches, physical

model-making and digital modelling in a holistic approach

to reach their goal.

The past two decades have seen a drastic change in the way

design is being communicated within architecture and across

COMMUNICATING IDEAS – SHARING INFORMATION MOVING SEAMLESSLY BETWEEN THE VIRTUAL AND THE PHYSICAL IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

SIMON PEARCE WAVE MODEL

76

jointly to drive the design process and bridge across disciplines.

The semester was run in two parts. During the first half

students generated a series of small projects which address

issues of building performance for structural, acoustic and sun

shading/daylight criteria. They were asked to produce physical

models and to test structural, acoustic and environmental

performance in order to demonstrating their functionality.

Guest lecturers from outside the architectural domain have

joined in to discuss issues of information-sharing and report

from experience in practice and to give feedback on the quality

of the models. In the second half of the semester students

were asked to focus on one project in order to develop

a design methodology which allows them to optimise

geometry and material usage in relation to a particular

performance requirement. The focus of the exercise was

to explore the ‘aesthetics of performance’ and understand

the various implications of using analogue and digital media

to achieve this goal.

Assessment criteria encompassed originality of the conceptual

approach, the adequacy of media chosen and the quality

of information provided for relating the design-idea to the

performance requirement.

Influenced by their experimentation during the first half

of the semester, most students chose to focus on working

on a sustainability project which included the generation of

sun shading options for achieving maximum daylight entry

with minimum solar gain for a façade. The process of

addressing performance optimisation for the shading

device included simple tests to comprehend the effects

of the changing summer-winter solstice as well as changing

solar angles during the day. Once the students were aware

of the basic implications various shading options bring

to bare, they were encouraged to start designing with

shading performance in mind. This implies a step away from

understanding shading as a technical add-on to a façade,

to creating shading options which strongly influence the

appearance of a building. To this point of the semester most

students had been relying on their physical model-making skills

to gain tacit knowledge about the relation between shading

options, sun angles and the shadows that were cast. SIMON PEARCE BUSAN MODEL

SIMON PEARCE (FROM LEFT TO RIGHT)

BUSAN MODEL SHADE MODEL

Once students had reached a point where they wanted

to explore more complex, non repetitive shading options,

or shading devices for irregularly shaped buildings, they were

willing to extend their investigation into the virtual world.

In many cases this occurred by first re-modelling their latest

physical model by computer to compare it to the virtual one.

This was undertaken to gain confidence in the accuracy of the

tool they were using and their capability to simulate a real-life

scenario by computer.

The uptake of digital technology to drive the design varied

from student to student as did the goals that could be achieved

by it. Whereas some students used their digitally augmented

models to test a plurality of versions to choose from, others

used them to refine one specific design solution and others

again used them to extract bill of quantities to compare

material usage to shading efficiency. The immediacy of gaining

feedback from daylight analysis under varying conditions was

of greatest importance to advance the design in all cases.

As a final step some of the students went back to refine their

physical models once the digital investigation had given them

satisfying results.

During class students were asked why they preferred

to focus on sustainability issues rather then structural

or acoustic ones. They responded by explaining that there

were no tools available to them which would assist to conduct

rudimentary, structural or acoustic analysis to understand

how these performance aspects would influence their project.

In retrospect, the investigation of sustainability was seen

as the most appropriate task given that each student could

instantly comprehend the subject matter, produce hands-on

physical models using simple materials like paper/cardboard

and simulate sun-angles by positioning spot-lights. Further,

the students were able to gain the skills needed to reproduce

the models virtually and to run basic daylight-analysis software.

This allowed them to consequently read-in geometrical

information generated with any common modelling 3D tool

and they were able to visualise geographically-specific daylight

scenarios in real time.

ALLISON CLANEY SUN SHADING DEVICE

of models to create a 3D light-point matrix, the Spatial

Dynamic Media System. In the following the 8 different models

built in the experiment series to achieve a prototype should

be explained.

The narrative of the design of the LED stick started with

an experiment which proves the possibility of designing space

with light. Experiment series I should prove the question

if space can be defined by light points. This will be done

using a model where Christmas lights will be attached onto

a net. This net will then be physically moved to analyse if

a dynamic surface can be perceived. This perceived surface

will then be further developed where technical components

will deliver a surface or form within a 3D matrix.

From this, the development of the research project will

be based on tests to improve and find evidence for a final

product. Here most knowledge is gained from the results of

the undertaken experiments. This experiment series led the

research in following methodology. A research question which

has occurred in will be answered by a series of experiments.

The questions will be answered but on the same time it could

M. HANK HAEUSLER

The core project within my PhD research has been the

development of a system as an extension of existing media

facades that allows me to test the representation

of information and ideas as ‘form’ within space that is

constantly generated and regenerated as a result of fresh

input. The hypothesis of my PhD is that this real time re-

configuration of space using light offers a variety of new

perceptions ranging from information sharing to public art

never experienced previously. During my research, I have

established an extensive body of evidence that points to

a growing scholarship around the details and impacts of media

façade technological developments and the content displayed

on them. In the thesis I define the boundaries of these

technology shifts and enhanced content combinations limited

to 2 dimensions. In my research I consider the technical and

media implications of extending conventional 2D screens which

are limited currently to architectural cladding into a 3D matrix

thereby causing an alteration to spatial perception through the

content animating the 3D matrix.

The development of the above discussed system, the LED stick

has been processed by designing an experiment series

DEVELOPMENT OF THE LED STICK AS A SINGLE COMPONENT OF THE SPATIAL DYNAMIC MEDIA SYSTEM THROUGH AN EXPERIMENT SERIES WITH MODELS

M. HANK HAEUSLER DETAIL SPATIAL DYNAMIC MEDIA SYSTEM AS A RENDERED IMAGE

80

M. HANK HAEUSLER (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)

WOOD FORM TESTING TO PROOF BASE OF PROTOTYPE PROTOTYPE LED STICK AS A RESULT OF SIX PREVIOUS EXPERIMENTS TEST OF SURFACE VISIBILITY WHEN DEFINED BY LIGHT POINTS

M. HANK HAEUSLER LED STICKS ARRANGEMENTS ON AN ARMATURE TO ESTABLISH A SPATIAL DYNAMIC MEDIA SYSTEM

cause a question which then has been addressed in the next

experiment, etc.

When using LEDs embedded in acrylic sticks and arranging

them in a 3D matrix the next concern of experiment series II

is the masking of one stick with another. Which quality of LED

is necessary in regards to the brightness and perception of

LEDs? With answering this question a certain type of LED

can be specified to used in further experiments.

After having defined a surface generated by light points

in experiment series I the question of how a beholder can

perceive a surface must now be defined. A test surface was

firstly generated in a 3D model environment and then altered

to a surface defined by light points. This surface defined

by light points will then be rebuilt in a physical model in

experiment series III. The physical model will be used to

answer the question, if a surface created by light points can

be perceived if parts of the lights are masked by a substructure.

After answering this question there are further experiments

to determine from which angles/positions the beholder

can see the full surface (all lights) or can see enough light

to understand the form or the shape of the surface. These

two experiments allow a first conclusion of the appearance

of the proposed system. The experiments allowed a critical

understanding of how much masking is caused by the

substructure and how much is caused by the LEDs and if

there is any possibility of improving the set-up to eliminate

these problems. Solutions for the masking problem were

found when improving the system by actions such as using

water-clear LEDs; using SMD LED technology; through

a different arrangement of more than one LED to create

light points; through using invisible conducting layer instead

of cables, and; through placing LEDs into small chambers

instead of tubes.

As most masking caused in the physical model is a result

of the wires, experiment series IV is an experiment to reduce

the wires was set up. This experiment did not result in an

improvement of the system, due to the inability of reducing

the amount of wires per stick with the method used in the

experiment. Nevertheless the possibility of using conductive

layers, as seen in experiment series V will render obsolete

the masking caused by wires.

The design of a product based on the previous five experiments

will thus complete the experiments in experiment VI till VII,

where first form testing of the LED stick has been made

in experiment series VI. The rod of the LED stick with the

chambers of the LED stick has been built as a negative

for vacuum forming in experiment series VII to manufacture

the rods out of acrylic. Experiment series VIII shows then the

final prototype of the LED stick. Here different model making

techniques such as 3D plaster printing, CAD CAM milling,

vacuum forming, laser cutting have been combined to build

the model.

The eight experiments demonstrate a shift of resolving the

design from a sketch level at the beginning to a model with

state of the art considerations on two levels. Firstly, the

experiments have in the duration of the design been more

professional in their making by having increasing model making

skills and techniques available and secondly with increasing

the level of sophistication in model making the out come

of the model have moved from a speculative level to a level

where decisions have been made by an increase of knowledge

of the topic.

M. HANK HAEUSLER DYNAMIC SURFACE GENERATED OUT OF MOVEMENT IN A MOVIE CLIP BASED ON DIFFERENT COLOUR INFORMATION OF PIXELS

material as possible and to become as strong as necessary

to perform their function”. Contemporary computation

techniques such as Bidirectional Evolutionary Structural

Optimisation (BESO) and the Soft-Kill Option (SKO) are tools

for removing low stress regions and adding material to high

stress areas of a 3D digital model under specified loading

conditions including consideration of dimensions, topology

and material properties. These evolutionary algorithms

produce forms that demonstrate the Axiom of Uniform Stress

and exhibit complex geometries reminiscent of naturally

occurring structural systems. This methodology can be applied

at numerous scales and enables the evolution of optimised

macrostructures, microstructures and substructures suitable

for use in lightweight context-specific building construction.

The models on display demonstrate various possibilities

for engaging the BESO algorithm to generate optimised

architectural structural systems. Illustrated are potential macro,

micro and sub-optimisation schemas that can be applied to

achieve enhanced strength to weight ratio components that

combine a bionic elegance with functional and structural logic.

JEROME FRUMAR

When modern man builds large load-bearing structures, he uses dense solids; steel, concrete, glass. When nature does the same, she generally uses cellular materials; wood, bone, coral. There must be good reasons for it. Professor M. F. Ashby, University of Cambridge

Naturally occurring structures such as trees, bone, coral,

sponge, foam and bio-mineralised protist shells exhibit

flamboyant geometry that simultaneously negotiate several

environmental conditions with minimal energy and material

consumption. This negotiation of contextual factors achieves

a near uniform stress distribution throughout the structure.

The Axiom of Uniform Stress is a phrase coined by theoretical

physicist Claus Mattheck to describe “the tendency for all

self-optimising structures to make as economic a use of their

CONTEXT-SPECIFIC LIGHTWEIGHT STRUCTURES IN ARCHITECTURE

JEROME FRUMAR COLUMN

84

JEROME FRUMAR COLUMN RENDERS

JEROME FRUMAR COLUMN RENDERS

These models have been directly fabricated from a virtual

3D model using the Z-Corp Spectrum, a typical Solid

Freeform Fabrication (SFF) system. Prior to this recent

technology, these complex forms would have been very

difficult and time-consuming to produce. Although presently

limited to the industrial scale, SFF technologies also enable

direct manufacturing of functional end-use parts. Further

development in a variety of SFF technologies and materials

suggests a future ability to support the direct fabrication

of functioning large-scale components that could be suited

to the architecture, engineering and construction industries;

particularly for the crafting of geometrically complex

building elements.

The models represent the first stage of an ongoing

research project that explores contemporary and emerging

manufacturing processes to economically fabricate

geometrically complex structures at the scale of architecture.

The complexity of evolutionary-based structures amplifies

the need for clear and precise 3D representation in the form

of both virtual and real models. Traditional 2D representations

can no longer be used to accurately communicate concepts

and modifications. In this exploration, physical models are

an integral part of the design development/evaluation process

for concept communication between designer/architect,

engineer and manufacturers. Throughout this investigation

it is envisaged that SFF models will play an increasing part,

culminating in a digitally fabricated “investment” to be used

as an indirect manufacturing tool for casting a context-specific

steel structural column.

JEROME FRUMAR COLUMNS

used as a rule that influenced the component geometry.

For example, proximity to a projection locator triggered a

closed cell type, whereas proximity to an area of gathering

determined cell colouration. The final component is a

combination of responses to each of the 7 different locators.

This digital process was informed by constant physical

modelling and testing, during which connection details,

material properties and fabrication limitations were explored,

understood and later translated into code.

As a field, these components act collectively to express

properties of porosity, colour, and the interplay of light and

shadow. This collection of properties generates a moment in

a continuous state of change. It demonstrates the potential to

generate new material properties by assemblage, and shows

this to be practical state of the art design and prototyping

technologies.

PAUL NICHOLAS AND TIM SCHORK

TOO MANY COOKS MAKE THE BROTH

This project was undertaken by MESNE in collaboration with

7 Interior Design students at RMIT University. The series of

models represents research into the synthesis of generative

design processes and contemporary fabrication techniques.

At the core of this research is the idea that models are at

the centre of both the digital and physical design process.

By developing strategies for synthesising the abstract model

(the code) and the physical model (the materialisation) they

operate as generative and synthetic tools. The models should

be understood as representational of this working method,

rather than being ‘bonsai architectures’, or small scale

representational versions of the final built outcome.

The models were produced for an installation for an exhibition

at RMIT. Two sets of models were presented, a 1:1 prototype

of a screen and a series of exploratory models in form of rapid

prototypes. Each model is unique and consists of an array

of non-standard components, which were generated via a

collaborative digital design process, in which multiple authors

collectively designed a system written in computer code, that

was able to produce multiple outcomes. Much like the same

recipe can produce 500 different types of Spaghetti Bolognese.

Because of this, there is no single author to the outcomes

- which are very tasty nevertheless!

After establishing a common and generic component based

assemblage, each author investigated material and fabrication

constraints as well as a particular area of individual design

interest, such as colour, porosity and light transmission. These

were coded as a set of instructions that defined the way

components adapted to the environmental and programmatic

requirements of the exhibition, which were placed as locators

on the site. The proximity of each cell to these locators was

SCREENRESOLUTION: PROTOTYPES MADE FROM NON-STANDARD COMPONENTS Makes 1 Cardboard Screen And 4 Rapid Prototypes

PAUL NICHOLAS AND TIM SCHORK DETAIL OF CARDBOARD SCREEN

88

PAUL NICHOLAS AND TIM SCHORK 1:1 CARDBOARD PROTOTYPES

PAUL NICHOLAS AND TIM SCHORK 1:N RAPID PROTOTYPES

INGREDIENTS

7

2

1

80m2

1kg

500ml

PREPARATION TIME

1

fresh and enthusiastic students

carefully selected tutors

Rhinoceros 3D™ modelling software

Microsoft Visual Basic™

wiki

cardboard, sliced

plaster

infiltration glue

semester

PAUL NICHOLAS AND TIM SCHORK RAPID PROTOTYPES FOLDING SEQUENCE

STAGE 1

Select a structural surface pattern that occurs in nature and

investigate it for their underlying formative geometric rules and

explain them in English.

STAGE 2

Replicate these rules in form of a set of instructions written

in Visual Basic to generate a 2D model in the 3D modelling

software Rhino. Continue adding information while stirring

thoroughly.

STAGE 3

Completely cover a NURBS surface with your code and let

it rise into 3D. Expand and reduce, taking into account the

physical limitations and constraints of cardboard. Fold these

constraints into your code, until code and cardboard model

are combined synthesised. Place some cardboard in the laser

cutter, and built a prototype. Test vigorously.

STAGE 4

Select an area of design interest and develop a strategy

through which a generic component can respond.

STAGE 5

Compile your code into functions and place them in a common

script library that is accessible to everybody.

A ‘script’ – or simple software program – was written which

automatically generated a simulation of pleating inside the

3D virtual space of the computer model. Various inputs could

be fed into this script, including the density of pleats and the

shape of the surface they were to follow. Numerous design

options were explored by varying these inputs and evaluating

the results in 3D space in a simulation of the traditional process

of trial and error.

Once a desirable outcome was arrived upon, physical models

were then produced both as a way of exploring the real

qualities of the computer-generated form, to demonstrate

the buildability of the proposal to the competition jury.

The first model made was a 3D wax print. A 3D digital

model file was emailed to a rapid prototyping workshop,

and a physical facsimile was delivered back to the office

a few days later. In many ways this was the least valuable

of all the models produced. The translation between digital

and physical is almost too seamless, there is no hands-on

intervention, so that no accuracy is lost, but equally no

understanding is gained.

RORY HYDE

In addressing the exhibition theme of the role of models in the

design process, what is interesting about the way models were

used in this project, is that they were produced directly from

a central digital model.

Working design models are traditionally used as a way to

explore a design concept through making, by cutting out

pieces and sticking them together as you go, using judgement

and evaluation while testing subtle variations. In contrast,

the models presented here have been produced using specific

templates or 3D prints where little or no interpretation

or improvisation is possible.

These models were produced during the competition phase

for a new home for the Monash University Museum of Art in

Caulfield by BKK Architects. The concept for the scheme was

to interrogate the repetitive glass façade of the existing 1960’s

office building that the new space was to be inserted into. The

language of pleating was adopted as it has a repetitive quality

which could be integrated into the rhythm of the existing

structure, allowing the intervention to appear both respectful

and disruptive of the existing building.

DESIGN MODELS FOR BKK ARCHITECTS MUMA GALLERY COMPETITION 2006

RORY HYDE DESIGN MODEL FOR BKK ARCHITECTS MUMA GALLERY COMPETITION 2006

92

RORY HYDE DESIGN MODEL FOR BKK ARCHITECTS MUMA GALLERY COMPETITION 2006

On the other hand, making the card models forced us to

engage with aspects of the project which we may not have

by working purely digitally. Building a complex 3D surface

out of 2D material requires a process that is very similar to

the process of describing this geometry for the real building.

Ignoring issues of engineering, and to a certain extent

structure, the principles of building out of card and building

out of glass are the same, in that they are inherently scaleable.

In this instance, another script was written which layed-out,

numbered and tabbed the pleated panels, automatically

producing a set of highly accurate 2D templates which were

then cut out of card and glued back together to produce the

computer generated form in physical space.

Through this process and others like it, the use of models

in design goes beyond the traditional role as medium for

formal exploration, and begins to inform the very specific

and concrete realm of construction.

RORY HYDE DESIGN MODEL FOR BKK ARCHITECTS MUMA GALLERY COMPETITION 2006

and other idealised notions at the outset of the design process

and instead asked that they focus on data driven environments

in which topographic form making is informed by varied

dynamic systems associated with the occupants and activity.

This methodology is more closely aligned with bottom-up

thinking allowing for complex interactions between parts,

whilst bringing together disparate entities. Understood

as a flexible system it is able to respond to and influence

its own effects. Such methodology runs counter to traditional

systems in which the linear process of hypothesis, analysis

and intervention are understood as being less adaptive and

responsive to data input.

The use of metric and observational data is advocated in

order to generate specific spatial and surface descriptions

that affect, interfere and overlap, creating intensities that are

responsive to the changing nature of information. Importantly

the process is designed to realise multiple virtual potentials

generated from the lived traces of inhabitation and occupation.

These include such things as kinetic responses to shifts in

activity or occupation, as well as connections realised through

interference and interaction. Moreover complex interrelations

between operational parameters and material form derived

from localised climatic conditions, suggest that form

generation is not anticipated but is formative.

Maps and diagrams are used to describe interior surfaces

as a spatial presence of occupational activity. The degree

to which objects and people structure the environment by

casting shadows, leaving imprints or impressing themselves

on or through objects and each other, evolves a building

typology responsive to socio-spatial climate. Specific conditions

including dead zones, overlaps, and interferences contribute

to a diagram not unlike ‘hertzian’ space identified by Anthony

Dunne and Fiona Raby. While these researchers focus on

the spatialisation of electromagnetic waves radiating from

electronic objects, this experiment reads interior environments

as connected space, bounded not exclusively by ‘construction’

but as a spatial delimitation that contributes to the making of

surfaces. That is, differentiated spaces providing for individual

MARK TAYLOR

This studio is focused on conducting design research through

digital and physical modelling. It is undertaken not to reify

‘modelling architecture’ or ‘modelling ideas’ in a universal

sense, but examines the performance of an architectural model

when ideas are yet to emerge from local climate conditions.

This is a conscious decision based on a desire to test whether

the ambiguity of traditional conceptual models can be

overcome by engaging directly with modelling as process.

That is, whether it is possible to model ideas as though they

are real rather than a representation of something yet to

appear, and if so can the process provide ‘real-time’ feedback

on effects and outcomes such that they inform design decision

making. With emphasis on learning through researching

properties, effects, combinations of form and material, and

software programming, modelling is understood as an iterative

process rather than finished ‘presentation’; a process that

may enable students to move beyond traditional reliance on

sketches and verbalisation to communicate concepts and ideas.

For this experiment conducted at Victoria University

Wellington, New Zealand we invited students to suspend

belief in design dependent on ‘concepts,’ ‘metaphors’

HERTZIAN SPACE: MODELLING SPATIAL PRESENCE

INTERIOR OF ‘POD’

95

occupation, use and preferences of inhabitants are directly

informed by social occupations. Boundaries become a relative

notion determined by individual and collective inhabitation,

and localised temporal states.

To accomplish this site data is gathered and recorded through

photographs, sketches, notes, and audio/video interviews.

Early analysis through participation, site observation and

documentation of variable and changing data on such things

as the body’s occupation of space, placement of artefacts,

operational requirements, environmental factors and so on, are

used to re-describe an interior lining that is a specific rather

than general spatial envelopment. Moreover photographic

documentation reveals that many places are simply furnished

generic commercial spaces with equipment necessary for

their specialisation organised in an ad hoc manner. For

example the full body massage suite captured in a series

of extraordinary covert images, depicts the uncontrolled

accumulation of equipment and paraphernalia suggesting

a dissonance between space and function. With little room

to get changed or hang clothes, the client’s body is literally

forced onto the only remaining free space – the massage table.

Any sensuality of the semi naked body or intimacy between

form and materials is lost, an observation noted in other site

visits concluding that generally these interiors are conditioned

by the existing functionally-neutral environment of ‘generic

commercial space’.

Working from an initial conceptual design a small student

group worked collaboratively to examine and develop the

project through new propositions. To be effective the sharing

of information involved collective conceptualisation of the

design when there was both partial knowledge about the

design and the mode of representation. To advance ideas the

group generated form by registering the body’s movement in

space as the massage is performed, and mapping how space/

surface is changed when the masseur’s body presses against it.

Initial physical experimentation with plaster of Paris and textile

materials was conducted through full size modelling against

the body. This included stiffening the textile to provide a solid

form where it came in contact with the body leaving other

material loose, and vice versa. At the same time a simple 3D

Studio Max™ model was used to simulate deformable surfaces

and their interaction with a digital body. But despite the

FULL-SCALE ASSEMBLY OF PHYSICAL EVA MODEL USED TO TEST BEHAVIOURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ONE ‘STRUCTURAL’ ZONE

(FROM LEFT TO RIGHT)

“INVERSE MODELLING”

BIPED ANIMATIONS DEFINE THE INNER ‘RELAXED’ AND DEFORMED ‘STRETCHED’ SURFACE ENABLING THE OPTIMISATION OF ‘STRUCTURAL’ ZONE AND DEVELOPED PATTERNS

OCCUPATIONAL ACTIVITY USED TO DEFINE TOLERANCE VOLUMES AND MATERIAL ARRANGEMENT OF ‘POD’

provided the data for a subsequent feedback process that

included biped animations. Two bipeds animated with

appropriate movements related to ’moving centres’ and

positioned relative to the massage table defined the inner

‘relaxed’ and deformed ‘stretched’ surface. This time the

generation of the pod using a digital ‘drape’ technique resulted

in a direct relationship between curvature and body position,

visualized through density of faces indicating greater curvature.

Optimization of the form enabled the development of one

‘structural’ zone through other software packages to be

flattened into developable strips for pattern cutting. Full size

physical form was constructed using Ethylene Vinyl Acetate

(EVA) foam with three-dimensional shape defined by the

patterns resulting in a non linear articulated surface.

Approaching design through collaboration and modelling as

the primary instrument of enquiry, rather than representation,

has an impact on working methods and outcomes. Of

importance to the group is to move away from more

traditional approaches to creating a design before it is tested

through construction and materials, as this method reduces

potential for creative input. We found that to test open ideas

through modelling requires shorter, more frequent iterations,

a process that demands more frequent communication

between collaborators; a process that leads to more cohesive

understanding of the issues by all members of the design team.

realistic rendering appearing tangible, there was no material

possibility nor any physical experience associated with this

representation. This type of testing forces the limitations of

the various software to be revealed, which is set against the

backdrop of the difficulty that comes with full scale physical

modelling conducted in a studio setting.

Further design data came from considering massage practice

itself and the position of the masseur relative to the client’s

body, rather than any preexisting homogenous space. Two

students of differing physical stature simulated massaging a

client, documenting the process through a series of digital

images that were then used to generate a description of the

body moving through space. Head, shoulders, lower back

and feet position were imported into a Sketchup™ model.

These parameters were used to define tolerance volumes

accommodating data from both students’ simulation. The final

digital model was generated from a series of U-lofts made

from vertical/radial sections through the bubbles.

To account for membrane transparency and determine

deformable surface areas from areas of rigidity, the students

returned to the positions of both ‘masseurs.’ From this data the

enclosing membrane followed the profile of the inner (smaller)

body, and stretched to accommodate the larger figure. That is,

when the head, lower back and feet press into the membrane

the surface expanded. Elasticity was achieved by reducing the

thickness of material and introducing cuts and folds.

During this process the problem of excess information is very

real and at times seems to overwhelm design decision making,

opening data and material to intuition, interpretation and

evaluation as architecture. That is, different forms of data

whether ‘read’ through photographic images, measured on

site, or obtained through focused group interviews needs

evaluating and actualised through modelling. And since there

is no traditional ‘concept’ acting as partí, data is not edited

until all relational constructs are explored, thereby allowing for

architectures that are unknown and impossible to preconceive.

Following completion by the student group a small research

grant enabled further progression into full size prototype.

During this period the final 3D Studio Max™ digital ‘pod’ PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES USED TO

APPROXIMATE FEET AND BACK POSITIONS

This experiment was conducted at Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand by Mark Taylor and Mark Burry.

Mark Taylor is a Senior Lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is the guest-editor of Surface Consciousness the March/April 2003 issue of Architectural Design and co editor Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, 2006 published by Wiley-Academy.

Mark Burry is a visiting Fellow at VUW. He holds an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship and is Director of RMIT’s Design Institute and state-of-the-art Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory. He is also Consultant Architect to the Temple Sagrada Família.

The studio tutors gratefully acknowledge the ARCH 412 students and research assistants Matthew Randell and Elizabeth Chaney.

Original author ‘full body massage suite’ Yijing-Xu

Collaborative design team: Diana Chaney, Matthew Randell, Yi Wen Seow

project was understood in new ways that cannot be achieved

in the absence of this iterative process1.

Over the past few years Terroir have cautiously integrated

digital modelling into the design process. Through my

involvement in SIAL’s ‘embedded research’ program the

firm as a whole has gained a greater awareness of the

implications of expanding the conventional toolset of an

architectural designer. This experimental stage has challenged

the office with ideas about how and why this form of

modelling may enhance or indeed impede the ideation

design process.

Early experiments gave us confidence in the potential

of the digital where a digital model/animation resulted

in a conceptual breakthrough in a project and presented

a way of seeing the project’s concept with greater clarity.

These modelling explorations enhanced contained design

exercises in the ideation process and we became aware that

certain digital techniques were not about to become formulaic

or their usefulness easily reproducible.

SARAH BENTON

My experiences with SIAL’s ‘embedded research within

architectural practice’ program offers many opportunities

to explore the role of models within a forward-looking

architectural firm and within a context of academic post

graduate study in Architecture. A particular interest of mine

is the introduction of digital modelling into practice and what

digital tools offer an enterprising and respected firm, especially

one such as Terroir which is frequently involved in professional

interchanges across different Australian states. This following

essay explores the specific nature of Terroir’s use of models

and how models have extended and further facilitated

innovative structures of practice and communication that

are specifically associated with the firm in the public eye.

‘Terroir began as a conversation between 3 people and

the model emerged early on as a tool for giving material

form to ideas emerging from that discussion’. We reached

the conclusion (at HomoFaber 2006) that physical models

were conceptual and sought to capture an idea rather than

to represent a building. We found they related closely to our

conversations (words) and diagrams (lines). They allowed

for very rapid adjustments, and in making these models the

EXPLORING THE ROLE OF DIGITAL MODELS

TERROIR BURNS MACDONALD MODEL

99

(FROM LEFT)

FERNTREE ANIMATION FRAMES MAITLAND CITY BOWLING CLUB

So again we faced the question of what exactly is the benefit

of the digital media to our design process. After focusing

more closely on how we design we became aware that media

can be far more than merely tools to be deployed for already

determined ideas. Rather media can begin to be interactive,

be understood as operative and play a role in shaping our

intentions. Thereby, whilst Terroir design remains driven

by overarching ideas that result from collective conversation

and that these are held as primary, the role of the model, both

traditional and digital, can play a part in working up the idea.

For example in a project for a New National Library

in Prague, ideas began through gathering a comprehensive

and wide ranging body of information about the project.

One of the first visualisations of the project was an abstract

speculative physical model that I constructed in response

to an idea about how the building could be an articulation

of a violent landscape rupture. This idea was based on the

team’s assumption that there needed to be a visual and

circulation link to the existing Prague Castle.

This physical model was complemented with a digital model

in which it was possible to work with a larger and more

accurate context. Through the digital model it could be seen

that the fall of the land and the circulation patterns through

it differed from our initial readings. The previous idea was

thereby built upon a somewhat distorted and contrived

understanding of the landscape and a debate ensued.

In Terroir, particularly in response to multiple people’s opinions,

the firm often works through ideas and models to look for the

best outcome. In the Prague project, the physical and digital

models were integrated into the conversation to assist at

points of crisis. Resulting from differing readings of the

site a contrary idea was put forth to build upon the site’s

immediate context; a park with a smooth velvet character.

Iterations of both of these ideas were modelled and compared.

Ideas about mysterious cases rupturing from below the park,

to house the archive section of the library, were added to the

mix. In the Prague competition the final design for Prague was

critically selected from this pool of many ideas and models.

The project’s final idea intertwined this mix resulting in

rupturing cases shielded under a velvety roof.

As the firm continues to integrate digital tooling into

the ideation process, it is becoming more necessary

to complement those digital tools and processes with

equally sophisticated physical modelling techniques.

The idea of the velvet parkland was modelled in a digital

simulation by locating control points across the site, applying

a surface to those points, and then modifying the smoothness

and fall of that simulated surface with the computer. Due to

the many controlling factors and the laborious nature of the

task the digital simulation seemed to suppress the potential

of the idea. On viewing the digital iterations the design team

was not convinced that we were gaining any understanding

into how such a material may want to operate. At this point

physical models were used to investigate the operation

of actual velvet material. These explorations were much

more convincing and the knowledge was taken back into

constructing the digital model.

In Terroir, where designing occurs during an email

conversation, representations of the digital models sit

alongside photos of physical models. As such the firm fully

integrates the traditional craft and more modern modelling

methods. In Terroir today the term model is used abundantly

and ambiguously to describe physical and computational

explorations. The final image of Prague was modelled in

the computer, rendered and then manipulated. It is both

a digital model that holds a high level of information and

an ambiguous image that presents a strong idea framework

but which could go on to be modified within the confines

of that idea framework.

The Prague competition called for a physical model to be

submitted. Having designed the building with an exterior

form with the characteristics of smooth velvet in a digital

model we faced the problem of translating that into

a physical form. Our first attempt produced an average

quality vacuum formed model. Seeing this result the team

looked for other methods.

In working up an idea a body of work goes into finding

and visualising the idea and an equally important body of work

goes into presenting that idea. If it is done well, the production

TERROIR PRAGUE LIBRARY COMPETITION ENTRY

of the representation can become a continuation of the

ideation process. With the time constraints of the competition

the team agreed to create a Perspex laser cut model. This was

not meant to directly mimic the images on the presentation;

rather by being abstract the presentation model maintained

a sense of a working model. It was meant to maintain a level

of ambiguity and thereby reinforce that we were presenting

an idea framework upon which the client and Terroir could

build on in the future.

To conclude these observations that I have made in reflecting

upon practice and the model, Terroir acknowledges that the

exciting thing about a working model is not accuracy and

beauty rather it is the understanding and discoveries that

happen through the process of making. Through modelling

our own ideas, or a team member’s idea, we can see that

a level of interpretation occurs. Only by making the ideas

can the Terroir design team see and interact with them.

This interaction can result in unexpected results and this

ultimately expands our ideation design process.

1 Blythe, R. (2007). Afterword: On Models. Terroir:

Cosmopolitan Ground. Terroir. Sydney, DAB Documents, UTS:

p164-165.

TERROIR PRAGUE LIBRARY COMPETITION ENTRY

TERROIR PRAGUE LIBRARY COMPETITION ENTRY

Literature around architectural models was sparse until

the 1970s, despite the major role that they have played

in training and practice.2 The discourse, like the technology,

is still evolving and the Homo Faber project is an act of both

explicating the process and culture of the model and publicly

pushing that culture forward and outward by documenting

interactions with the model.

This essay takes this breadth, the ability to elude categorization

as a starting point for considering issues around the cultural

meanings and purposes of small scale representations of

buildings. The central focus will be on models, particularly

architectural models. Generally the words “model” or

“architectural model” will refer in this essay to models

used in a professional context, recently described by the

Royal Institute of British Architects as “design process models”3

to distinguish them from models of small buildings used

in education, religion, ethnic customs, craft activities, public

ceremonies, tourism, museums, retail, amongst many other

contexts. Other small buildings are also considered especially

the dollshouse, but also toys, ornaments, hobbyist’s homages

to known buildings, folk and vernacular artforms, elaborate

JULIETTE PEERS

Models are extraordinarily versatile. They enable archietects to convey a range of information about a project, which may be factual, or conceptual, or both. They are also like drawings, a rich and vivid means of expression offering an infinite range of possibilities.1

The omniferous nature of the model attested in recent

literature such as Modelling Messages by Karen Moon,

makes it hard to grasp in analysis despite its unequivocal

presence in professional life. Any discussion of the model

– even before considering digital options – can be frustrated

by its very plurality of options. What does the model actually

mean, represent and do when we step back and refuse to take

its naturalness, its expectedness, for granted? If considering

the meanings of the model, especially in a historic context,

one is thrown back onto a set range of sources and examples.

BEAUTY AND BRAINS: THOUGHTS AROUND MODELS & MINIATURE BUILDING FORMS

craft and bespoke objects, but also mass produced items such

as construction sets or published printed material such cross

sections or cardboard buildings for home assemblage. These

divisions are not arbitrary. A miniature building may fall into

more than one of these categories, whilst still retaining a role

in design practice. Miniature buildings can “shape change”

or perhaps more particularly function change in different eras.

A functional model from a studio may end up, centuries later

as an expensive museum piece. A discarded competition entry

can finds a new life as a family dolls house. The context of

user and audience may also determine the current function

of a miniature structure. Even a small building once used to

forecast the final outcome of an actual building, may, when

the large building is destroyed, be the only tangible reminder

and memorial to the building that had previously supplanted

it. The “shape changing” polyvalent model is not so much

an alien from elsewhere as a throwback from another, pre-

enlightenment era, a representative of what Barbara Stafford

called the “baroque sciences”.

104

The model’s ability to be everything, to conduit to larger

and broader concepts is not simply a question of the lax

scholarly paradigms of overviews like Modelling Messages,

which explore a very wide range of possible formats in both

concrete and allusive modes. This same quality of plurality

almost to the point of negation of meaning is seen in an early

text from a known heyday of the model in professional life:

the 1920s. Percival Marshall’s Wonderful Models4 is almost

meaningless in its liberal definition of what a model can be.

The remarkable list that forms its notably unwieldy subtitle:

The Romance of the World in Miniature and a Complete

Encyclopaedia of Modelcraft – Comprising the Construction

and Use of Representative And Working Models in Advertising,

Architecture and Building, Civil And Mechanical Engineering,

Naval Architecture and Railway Engineering and the

Application of Electricity to their Operation: Also the

Romance of Historical Models and the Modern Development

of Model Engineering as an Aid to Invention, as a Recreation

and as an Essential Element in Education demonstrated how

the model is a practical facilitator of new and effective thinking

in many different contexts. Here the model is an essential

part of modern architecture and the modern adventure of

unanalylitcal optimism. Here models can be both proscriptive

and suggestive, conservative/fixed but undeniably liberating.

This plurality hints at the model’s seductive quality of

a thought captured and made tangible – herding cats or

catching dreams. Marshall validates many types of models

from the playful to the scientific, from the passive to the

mechanical, from the illustrative to the abstract/allusive.

He sees the model as informing and supporting a number

of professions and ascribes seemingly limitless merit to

models in modern life.

Furthermore he believes that models demonstrate their intrinsic

merit by various means and in various contexts. They can

derive their unique power from this diversity and universality.

Whilst for Marshall models do on occasion “excite wonder due

to “merely … clever craftsmanship” or “the patience of the

maker”5, and thus display the fetishised detailed craft skills,

over-close focus and elaboration, that Susan Stewart6 would

later claim in one of the few philosophical considerations of

the miniature as a state of mind and aesthetics, as integral

to the small scale. Equally models can be shorthand to the

“cleverness of conception”.7 Thus models and miniatures

may be provisional, temporary and not always necessarily

dominated, rendered trivial, by the fetishising of their own

extreme physical properties, as suggested by Stewart.8 For

Marshall, valid models can cost only a “few shillings” and cut

to the quick of a “basic principal” as much as provide detailed

illustration. However the text is unequivocal in its emphasis

on the importance of models of all types to formulating and

conceptualising advanced research and provisional thinking.

They are tools of effective experimentation and prediction,

allowing for proto-typing and the collection of “valuable data”.

They also allow for “succinct communication when the original

is too large for convenience”.9 These skills ascribed by Marshall

to the model of précis, economy, summation, overviewing,

and communication are both widely-accepted signs of

professionalism and supremely modernizing. Moreover

they are still valued generally in many workplace contexts

and pubic culture as an indicator of efficiency and ability.

The publication date, 1928, of Wonderful Models reminds

us that the model has flourished at certain periods.

These periods when the model is prominent often can

be characterised as periods of transformative and speculative

thought. The Renaissance and early modern period provide

a number of 3D constructions, which also are repositories

for cognitive functions. They include the Wunderkammer

and its miniaturized derivatives the dollshouse, and the

Wunderschränke. They provide a blend of metaphor, creativity,

technical skills and practicality. They were quintessential

examples of what Barbara Stafford called Devices of Wonder11

– tools of a pre-modern science that was capable of extremely

complex processing and cognition around serious ideas and did

not shy away from big picture issues such as the nature of the

world and the multiple relationships of its many constituent

parts. However unlike modern science, Stafford’s pre-modern

sciences did not cut themselves off from the emotions,

creativity, art and artifice. They even freely hybridised

themselves with spectacle, illusion, performance, mysticism

and downright fraud. A thread of educative popularism also

distinguished these professional knowledges from those of

the later eighteenth century and onwards. Thus there was

great emphasis upon visual explication, concrete demonstration

and even self-guided exploration of intricate physical objects.

These objects were not mere toys; they brokered users

who were active and informed. Play was a test/extension

of given capabilities and understandings. Stafford also notes

that modern digital technologies have jumped over post

enlightenment science to share the rich and almost random

imbrication of seriousness and pleasure, entertainment and

functionality of pre-modern science, as well as its potential

to take up any given position on the spectrum between

utilitarianism and fancy.

In this context I am fascinated by the dollshouse/architectural

model interplay.12 This is a relationship replete with significant

chasms of male/female serious/trivial meaningful/vapid.

Associated with this anxiety, the conventions that uphold

belief in the demarcation of child and adult cultures as an

appropriate cultural value have also delimited the possibilities

of discussing dollhouses in relation to architecture. For some

Miniature buildings can “shape change” or perhaps more particularly function change in different eras. A functional model from a studio may end up, centuries later as an expensive museum piece. A discarded competition entry can finds a new life as a family dollshouse. The context of user and audience may also determine the current function of a miniature structure.

the dichotomies are so broad and obvious as to negate any

possibility of a relationship, but there are cogent historical

links between the two and the schism between the two is

less finite than suspected. Historically the architectural model

has interacted with the dollshouse, especially if the dollshouse

is read as an exploration and meditation upon social life within

the constructed environment, such as in the complex dolls’

village Mon Plaisir commissioned by the Princess Augusta

Dorothea of Schwarzburg Arnstadt from 1704 onwards.13

Discarded architectural models have sometimes ended up

as dollshouses. The best documented example is a model

submitted for the possible design of the Radcliffe Camera

by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1734. Unsuccessful as an

architectural proposal, it was used as a dollshouse in the

Dillon family until it was finally presented to the Bodleian

Library in 1913.14 One point of difference claimed in a major

text on dollshouses between the model and dollshouse is that

the former “does not open”.15 This assertion can be disproven

by the many architectural models that reveal the relationship

between inner and outer spaces or that document inner

treatments as well as exterior. Karen Moon illustrates a model

from 1746 with an open front and a series of three sided

rooms that is identical to a dollshouse, as well as a military

model of a fortress: the Tour Martello 1836 that opens like

a dollshouse.16

Both dollshouse and architectural model exist as vivid

testament to the enlightenment’s splitting of head and

heart, their imbricated function now rigidly split between

the rumpus/family room and the studio. The dollshouse,

relegated around c.1800 to the nursery, and losing its

individualised, architectural presence, found a secure,

but utterly irrelevant, role in the new world of masculinised

intelligence, whereas the architectural model temporarily

lost prestige as a professional tool.17 Large scale treatment

of details of the decorative schemes of building – which

could even include one to one constructions of small parts

of the façade in situ, even outdoors, as much as complete

representations of buildings, were a format that flourished

in the nineteenth century. In their capacity for interaction,

for welcoming touch and rearrangement, for opening out

and exposure the dollshouse and architectural model are

linked. Other forms of miniature buildings such as the ex

post facto modelling by amateurs of architectural icons as a

demonstration of diligence18 or elaborate representations

of buildings in porcelain, glass or precious metals with closed

inviolate surfaces invite far less interaction and speculation

than either the dollshouses or the architectural model.

The hobby of building miniature representations of known

buildings certainly testifies to the public appeal of architecture.

In their overt assertion of skill and concentration, they also

have linkages to older forms of trade education such as

apprenticeship and the guild system, when the masterpiece

was often a bravura piece of craftsmanship with little

functional rationale, such as miniature wooden staircases

leading nowhere that were a popular testpiece amongst

nineteenth century woodworkers or skeletal brass or fretted

wood cathedrals.

Whilst modelling never disappeared from architectural practice,

there seems to be periods when its role in the design process

attracts more professional recognition and inquiry. From

evidence of contemporary publications the second decade

of the twentieth century appears to have marked the beginning

of another period of flow tide for the model. This increased

validation of the model seems to also indicate changes in

paradigms of architectural language or the requirements made

upon architects and clients to respond to new technologies

and aesthetics. The model came to the fore in both explicating

unfamiliar and newly evolved stylistic vocabularies and formats

in a manner devoid of negative emotion and also selling with

a certain charisma and fascination. This importance of the

model as an eloquent plaidoyer for modernism is recognised

in original literature from the era of dawning acceptance of

modernism in architectural patronage and culture, as well as

in historical overviews of the model’s status in the twentieth

century.19 Kenneth Reid wrote in 1939 that models had become

a “necessity” in the wake of “the development of newer and

less familiar contemporary architectural forms”.20 In 1942 J.

Prince Nunn warned of the ease with which “the directness

and simplicity of contemporary architectural expression”

could be read by the untrained eye as “deceptively stark,

almost arid”21 when rendered in 2D, yet in modelled format

modern formats had greater eloquence. Marshall in his

Wonderful Models suggested that perspective models of urban

layouts, gave a better understanding of the spatial distribution,

contours and relationships, than a 2D drawn or written

document.22 Thus the model made new initiatives in town

planning more appealing and the benefits of new development

could be communicated more effectively to counter the

inherent emotional tendency towards conservatism.

The model was not only a recorder of ideas or a point of trial

and prototyping, but became part of an increased theatre of

visibility and performance around the uptake of modern ideas.

It actively expressed the crusading transformative energies

that were, by implication, an essential element of modernism

in many creative expressions. There is a twentieth century

corpus of photographs of architects posing in dramatic and

intriguing fashion with small scale versions of their buildings.

This oeuvre continues to the present day with images

of architects seemingly playing with their model, bending

down before it, reaching into it, as if it were a dollshouse.

A celebrated and relatively recent example features the model

for OMA ‘s sadly unbuilt Jussieu University Libraries, 1992.

The metaphor in these photographs not only seems to be

one of well-roundedness imbrication of play and work,

but a demonstration/realisation in visual terms through

gesture and implied narrative of action of the specialized level

of insight and skill that is read as a harbinger of professional

status. There is also a visual pun, a contradiction, involved

in seemingly rendering the skill and status of the professional

as artless and childlike, if the model is read as a toy, or to cast

the professional as god, towering over the world of his or her

creation, if the model is read as analog of the actual world.

Concurrently and seemingly on cue with the increased focus

on architectural models, there was a new adult non-toy interest

in the dollshouse.23 The catalyst appears to be an Edwardian

Anglo-Irish general, Sir Neville Wilkinson, who built a copy

of his wife’s English country seat in 1907 and then moved onto

developing a miniature showcase of late – and increasingly

establishment – elements of the Arts and Crafts style titled

Titania’s Palace, 1908-1922 neatly blending in the ascendancy

of English cultural heritage,24 but also the sense of fantasy

and faerie that is – via the early modern sciences – an urtext

of even the straightest architectural models. The 1920s and

1930s saw the building of a number of “adult” dollshouses,

many of them overseen by, or made for, women of high

social and economic standing.25 During the same era the

development of elaborate and enduringly popular architectural

toys – construction sets – which had been produced in earlier

eras with less emphasis on structural functionality and a

generally aesthetic and art historical approach,26 also testified

to the importance of miniature structures – real and speculative

– to upholding and extending the mythos of the modern

imperial and industrialised nation. Whereas the dollshouse,

made and decorated by and for adults, spoke perhaps more

of aesthetics, the detailing and decoration of buildings,

the social life and function around buildings, privilege and

genteel rituals of public life, its partner, the construction set,

referenced a different but no less important set of values,

the masculine themes of engineering and industrial progress

and foregrounded system, routine and interconnectedness.

Particularly with the highly developed products comprised

of elaborate series of function-specific components and equally

sophisticated ranges of outcomes such as Meccano,27 Erector

Set or Bayko, a nexus could be read between the probity and

responsibility of the individual and the structure and demands

of the well-governed modern state, as each small bolt and

plate – relatively meaningless in itself – could, through the

skill of the maker/designer, be combined to form a miniaturised

representation of the white man’s technological sophistication.

Yet the model may also be a familiar sign of a less than heroic

post-war commercial manifestation of the international style

and a debased watered down interpretation of the utopian

vision of architects such as Le Corbusier at particularly

a local and suburban level. We have all seen on display

a sad, somewhat dusty Perspex case with perhaps blond

Nordic wood, white enamel or matt silver aluminium fittings.

Inside to advise us of the future prospect is a cleancut, square

usually starkly black and white series of international style

towers or horizontal blocks with their concomitant plazas,

forecourts, walkways and terraces, garnished with trees

of gathered twigs with green spray painted foam foliage,

inhabited by small frozen plastic citizens clustering in groups or

stopped in mid-stride. In the last decade the Australian artist

Callum Morton has brokered an international reputation from

This increased validation of the model seems to also indicate changes in paradigms of architectural language or the requirements made upon architects and clients to respond to new technologies and aesthetics.

exploring the banality of the emptiness of expected rituals of

post war western townplanning and urban development, and

raising the spectres of popular fears of this particular subset

of architectural progress represented by models in the post

war era. Although the appeal of his work is not only about

hostility and rejection, it also references insider trading of the

architecturally informed and their respect for key and acclaimed

buildings and also the popularist blend of skill, intrigue and

education that Stafford identified in pre-modernist sciences,

indicating that not only the digital should be identified as the

heirs to mannerist and baroque science, but the hand-built

model remains a “device of wonder”. His lovingly rendered

reproductions of famous buildings are not only perfectly

finished and historically accurate, but fitted with soundtracks

and lighting effects. Thus these miniature buildings bleed into

memories of popular culture and films. Morton devises new

dramatic narratives for the implied residents of these miniature

buildings and thus raises questions about discipline boundaries

and functions. Are his models architectural commentary,

conceptual art, sculpture, an amusing novelty or all of these

things simultaneously? What messages are they giving to

a viewer. These celebrated miniature buildings prompt

questions about the role of architecture as a cultural narrative

and metaphor beyond practice, as well as issues about scale

and cultural significance. The meticulous and learned craft skills

of Morton’s artworks testify to the ongoing viability of the

model as a creative and aesthetic medium beyond professional

design development and places it at the highly visible celebrity

level of contemporary arts. The model has played a role in

fine arts in the later twentieth century, especially sculpture,

at least since Pop Art and possibly as early as the surrealist

Joseph Cornell whose sculptural boxes referenced dollshouses,

Wunderschränke, shrines, apprentice pieces and architectural

models.

As with the teens and interwar period, the 1980s also are

informative about the model. The model came to the fore

in a series of projects and debates exploring its function and

identity.28 This was partly due to the inherent qualities of the

model itself but also partly due to the extraordinary extension

at this era of the culture of debate and commentary around

architecture that is not necessarily related to the process of

fulfilling a specific commission. This culture of debate around

architecture partly unfolds amongst professionals, but is partly

a lay debate, and moreover it has continued without apparently

losing momentum to the present day and this debate also

extends into interests around design and an increasing

governmental and official exploration of the relationship

of design, new technologies and new media formats to

national political and economic development in a volatile

world. The enlightenment head is co-opting for its own

functional agendas the once despised heart of the feminine,

the childish, the primitive and of course the counter-

reformation. This process is rendered plausible because

architecture has been since the 1980s a driving metaphor

of cultural and intellectual life. Architecture is not simply

a function or a profession – it adds meaning and value,

even enchantment, to the public’s construct of their cultural

environment. Fantasy and speculation around architecture

is widespread far beyond architecture itself and has brokered

a new fascination and popular acceptance around the

contemporary built environment.29

Play in the sense of Homo Ludens30 – always the ghost

at the feast of Homo Faber, its twinned Other (and for some,

Ludens and Faber may be even inextricably entangled) was

quintessentially of the 1980s. There is an antic quality about

much the 1970s and 1980s design which often encompasses

an affectionate tribute to post modernist architecture, such

as Michael Graves’ tea service of 1983 for Alessi, entitled

Tea and Coffee Piazza, which referenced an imagined series

of pavilions. In the 1980s reduced scale representations

of architectural features, which were simultaneously to

be read as playful and as having a significant reference

to something larger, more serious and canonical, can be

tracked throughout diverse media. Quirky but intellectual,

architecturally informed cross-reference and quotation forms

an identifiable visual stream in 1980s design and applied

art. The phenomenon has vivid manifestations. Architectural

forms and images appeared across the decorative arts from

furniture to jewellery. They were matched by the popularity

of cardboard cross sections and models of architectural

icons as both a leisure time activity and also as a display

items in domestic and commercial interiors. Teapots, and

other domestic table wear in both ceramic and metal were

shaped as buildings. The Royal Institute of British Architects

and the Victoria and Albert Museum maintains a delightful

on-line museum of such examples from the collection of the

RIBA.31 The latter institution has proactively collected a wide

variety of 3D representations of buildings, including models

by celebrated firms and all manner of popular cultural items.

The RIBA’s open-mindedness about the potential identity and

functions of building models is persuasive on both cultural and

intellectual terms. They identify a number of functions of the

miniature building from tourism to religion to design process.

Yet plethoras of examples of small buildings do not overwrite

its ongoing relevance in practice. The comments around

model making proffered by the Poise students represent a

new generation of practitioners exploring the format and

discovering what it offers them.

“Models communicate a range of ideas, aesthetics, and

problems. They are also a good tool to test possibilities that

drawing and digital aids may not [help]. …They are amazing

tools in design. Allowing other people to see quite fast what

someone could only ever explain in a [longer] time. What can

be gleaned from 5 seconds of staring at a model is so much

more than any type of medium.32

Working with models … made me realise that … models are

a fantastic way to diagram. It also helped me think ‘bigger’ in

the sense that there are so many opportunities with models to

show different ideas.33

The dollshouse also engaged attention at this date, gracing

a much remembered volume of Architectural Design

commemorating an international dollshouse competition

in 1982/1983 completion held by the British magazine

amongst international architectural firms. Certain judges and

competitors were hampered in considering the physical and

conceptual format of the dollshouse by too rigid a conception

of the role of the dollshouse in relation to childhood.

Therefore it followed that the functions and responsibilities

that architecture and architectural objects associated with

childhood ought to facilitate were equally contained. These

narrow proscriptions then also limited the formal and design

possibilities open to the architect by suggesting that paying

due care to the expected norms of the dollshouse had already

set the boundaries of architectural choice and exploration.

Unlike real “architecture” the brief of the dollshouse – and toys

generally – by necessity ran along “tram-lines” of what they

are “expected to be”. In the words of architect James Gowan:

Finally the designer does not have a lot of license with a child’s

toy. There is, or was, a linked range: dolls’ house, [sic] Wendy

house, fort, farmyard, railway, building blocks, constructional

kits, theatre. Each represents its bit of a simplified outside

world. When the designer shifts off the “tram-lines” of what

a dolls house is expected to be he finds himself immediately in

the province of another toy.34

One notes that for Gowan the identity of the “toy” is

essentially mimetic, a reproduction of a slice of the “real”

world. This mimesis limits the speculative and forward

looking possibilities of toys in favour of order and clarity

of reproduction.

However another judge, architectural historian Bruno Zevi,

whilst he rued the strictly formalised and curtailed patterns

of thought frequently revealed through the competition,

delivered a dissenting minority report in which he pinpointed

the problem not as pertaining specifically to dollhouses

per se or the intellectual limitations and lacks of the smallscale,

but as an architectural issue, a failure on the part of both

architects and their clients.

I am against miniatures of traditional house types and,

in stylistic terms, against primitivist, vernacular, classical,

Post-Modern and eclectic. I am for progressive and imaginary

contemporary architectural thinking...35

Like a model, the dollshouse spurs Zevi onto an extended

frame of reference, generating further analytical thought

around the values of architecture. This function of catalysing

fluid and innovative thought around architecture matches the

freewheeling potential that was ascribed to the model in the

1980s “… as studies of a hypothesis, a problem or an idea

of architecture.”36

I do not want to heroicise the dollshouse because placing

classic examples of dollshouses as collected and made

by hobbyists today alongside models does indicate some

...the dollshouse, made and decorated by and for adults, spoke perhaps more of aesthetics, the detailing and decoration of buildings, the social life and function around buildings, privilege and genteel rituals of public life, its partner, the construction set, referenced a different but no less important set of values...

...small scale does not speak of closure, reduction and the culturally invalid, but a trajectory of possibility, excitement and openness.

distinct physical and intellectual lacks, such as unimaginative

use of materials and designs, but Architecture Design’s

competition suggests that some of these lacks are due to

hobbyists not wishing to challenge the accepted tropes of

dollshouse building. The frontality of decoration and clustering

detail and features and the repetition of a box like structure

that is not far removed from a display cabinet are typical

examples of lacks when placed against the more 360 degree

viewing point assumed by a model. However what is most

remarkable about the dollshouse is not so much its lacks or

architectural shortfalls, but the tenacity of the desire to affix

fictive architectural features onto what is essentially a display

box. In the 1983 competition, many of the entries fell into two

streams; firstly those that sought to replicate the expected idea

of the dollshouse as box cum mimetic building and secondly

those entries that sought to provide a radical exploratory

solution to the issue of building construction and spatial design

freed by “the absence of constraints which usually plague

architectural practice, namely those of a precise brief and

a fee-paying client”.37 A radical approach was often expressed

in the construction of the dollshouse by discarding the

firm outer walls of the box structure. The more exploratory

entrants were very similar to the ground breaking exhibition of

architectural models The Idea as Model of a few years earlier.

Dollshouses evoke the cultural anxieties that unfold around

smallness per se. For over a decade Susan Stewart’s On

Longing has been regarded as the key English language

theoretical text around the issue of physical size in written

and visual culture, standing as a must-quote academic

benchmark.38 Yet Stewart’s vision of the small-scale, when

put alongside architectural writings on models, is limited,

condescending and negative. She sees only one overall

trajectory of the miniature leading towards the artificial, the

effete, the over-formalised, the trivial, the limited. The small

ultimately deserves a predominantly scornful assessment.

The miniature offers a world clearly limited in space but frozen

and thereby both particularised and generalised in that the

miniature concentrates upon the single instance and not upon

the abstract rule.39

The miniature here erases not only labour but causality and

effect. Understanding is sacrificed to being in context. Hence

the miniature is often a material allusion to a text that is no

longer available to us, or because of its fictiveness, never was

available to us except through a second order fictive world.40

In the advertisements for, and catalogues of, miniature

articles issued by firms such as the Franklin Mint, the Concord

Miniatures Collections, and Federal Smallwares Corporation,

`period furnishings’, `storybook figures’, the `charming’,

the `picturesque’ and the `old-fashioned’ are presented

to a bourgeois public immersed in the discourses of the

`petite feminine’.41

These anxieties and lacks expressed around the small are

usually absent in architectural discussions of the model, which

can extend to acceptance of its playfulness beyond its use

value. Karen Moon views miniature structures – and not only

the obvious candidate of the architectural model – as deserving

more positive comment. For her the small scale does not speak

of closure, reduction and the culturally invalid, but a trajectory

of possibility, excitement and openness.

Models hold further attractions for architects. They free them

from the pressures of reality, the need for practicality or even

realism. They embody as Toyo Ito holds `a labyrinth of reality

and fiction’. Models can be singularly functional working

tools, but they also offer the opportunity to experiment

with imaginary ideals, impractical or unbuildable. They offer

creation without responsibility, a release from the real world.42

Few who write about architectural models have failed to

mention their mysterious appeal. Architects’ models are, after

all, miniatures and have been favourites at expositions for

centuries.43

Reducing the scale has the unaccountable effect of

concentrating and intensifying the model’s significance.

By the same account it also increases its value… The jewel,

like the model, holds value disproportion to its size.

Considerable amounts of money are spent on both –

the Great Model of St Paul’s for instance cost as much

as a three story house.44

Moon identifies equally positive qualities in small items and

structures that have no relationship to professional practice.

Miniatures “intrigue” even if non-practice based models

could be regarded by some as, in the words of Helen Buttery,

“the male equivalent of netting purses or embroidering fire

screens”.45 Moon does not seem fazed or threatened by

the hint of the meretricious or trivial in meaning or identity

that haunts Stewart’s value judgements. Nor does Moon

see any great difference – except of chosen physical format

– between male and female interaction with the small-scale.

“Battlefields and model railways have traditionally been the

male counterparts of the dollshouse generally preferred by

girls, and neither loses its charm for adults.”46 For Moon a lack

of practice-based functionality does not alienate professional

architects from the dollshouse, rather it is an “object, strongly

favoured by architects”,47 not the least because it offers

opportunities for “unencumbered play”.48

The long-standing modernist fear of the small clouds

Stewart’s discussion and informs her negative responses.

Modernism has traditionally kept faith with the large scale and

sweeping as expressing authority, maturity and insight whilst

The architectural model is a representation on a smaller scale than reality. It can some-times be fanciful embroidery over reality...

harbouring concomitant anxieties about the small as lacking

credibility.49 “Tininess in art has always been anathema to

modernists.”50 Despite her own (presumed) post modernist

stance, Stewart validates the big on clearly modernist terms as

revolutionary, boundary/paradigm-shattering, threatening to

the conservative and the encumbered. Whereas the miniature

promises a fetishised containment and order, the gigantic,

through the grotesque, takes its place amongst moments of

cultural becoming and extension, as in carnival and rituals of

inversion.51 “[T]he gigantic moves from the occupation of the

body’s immediate space to transcendence (a transcendence

which allows the eye only imperfect and partial vision) to

abstraction.” The display modes of the gigantic “ma[k]e

public”.52 “Just as we have emphasised the relation of the

miniature to the invention of the personal, so must we finally

emphasise the relation of the giant to the invention of the

collective.”53 On such terms the small and the miniature can

only fail to register. “For the system of signification works

by means of a rhetoric of significance; to be marginal to that

system is to be cast from the centre (authenticity, sincerity,

consensus), to live the abstraction of the secondhand.”54

As well as modernism’s concern that size does matter, the

association of the miniature with the child-like also cause

anxieties. In a broader context the material culture associated

with the world of childhood is seen as limited by precedent

and expectation. The significance of small buildings could be

delimited not only by their small scale, but by their association

with the intellectually limited world of childhood’s culture.

These anxieties around the small certainly have a cultural

basis. For example Japan apparently does not have the anxiety

about the small and the childlike expressed in Western culture,

according to Donald Ritchie. Whilst “in the West we are

admonished by the highest authority ‘to put away childish

things’”,55 by necessity of finite resources of available space,

Japan has to deploy the compact and miniaturised in various

disciplines, including architecture, at all opportunities to

provide for more people and their needs.56

There are also some intriguing contradictions when considering

the miniature which thread through professional literature.

If the small can be read by some theorists as a priori anti-

modern, if a post-enlightenment construct of modernity is seen

as a touchstone to cogent and mature thinking then this line

of thinking is seriously interrupted by the architectural model.

Whilst the status of the small has been read as ambiguous and

negative, this value system is overturned by the status of the

architectural model. The architectural model is a representation

on a smaller scale than reality. It can sometimes be fanciful

embroidery over reality, yet was widely believed – as discussed

above – in the early twentieth century to be an aid and an

ally in the cause of modernism and was frequently employed

as such. Stewart has made a vast generalisation when she

assumes that smallness invariably means banality, a suppression

and reduction of meaning and erasure of content. If the small

is believed to be devoid of all but the most ritualised and

stereotyped meanings, then working on a small scale can only

deliver a meretricious display of technique for its own sake and

offer nothing creatively or intellectually that can not be done

more effectively on a one to one scale. Yet this essay

has provided multiple examples of the small, the miniature

that have either a demonstrable cultural validity or have

a viable function in working life. Postmodernism contested

the truism that a functional purpose or trajectory towards

translation into the full-scale and real is the only plausible

The model has always had partly a state of liminiality sitting between these worlds of fantasy and factually-grounded.

identity of the model.57 Practitioners working today aver the

validity and richness of a non-functional relationship to the

small scale structure, untarnished by commissions or workplace

tasks.58 At personal and direct level, the model is cherished

– even in practice and especially in the context of selling

a project to a client or entering a competition – on account

of its theatricality and its charismatic qualities. A whole

range of skills from meticulous handwork to virtual reality

programming are deployed on behalf of the model and the

project that it represents. The attractions of the small scale

threaded through the catalogue essays of the first Homo Faber

catalogue Modelling Ideas alongside its exploration of the

role of models in the working processes of leading Australian

architects.

As said above the discourse is still evolving and there has

been little attempt to unpick – or document in detail the

mechanics – these fairly broad contradictions. This essay has

segued through a wide range of themes, set against a broadly

historical overview of architectural models. Rather than

attempting to force a firm resolution, the essay throws up ideas

to indicate possible affinities and resonances in familiar and

unfamiliar issues and across disciplines and contexts. It moves

freely through history, cultural commentary and ideas drawn

from professional architectural texts. If the essay has merely

set up its own series of convenient and fictitious strawman

arguments, its dichotomies of play and practice, male and

female, valid and invalid, large and small, dollshouse versus

architectural model, baroque versus enlightenment, emotions

versus analysis, ornamental artefacts versus practice models

versus toys, its selection of texts to quote, it has done so as

an act of textual modelling to indicate how these ideas could

sustain far greater scrutiny than is usually devoted to them.

One can contrast the anxieties tracked by Susan Stewart to

Stafford’s proactive embrace and exploration of the hybrid

and the adaptive. Stafford is post modernist to the degree

that she makes no overriding judgment about the mix of

intellectuality and emotional sensation that she tracks. Firstly

she indicates that it has a de facto validity in that these

elements have always been associated with the supposedly

rational intellectual workings of the Western European mind.

Secondly there is an implication that not only can we find

shameful (but engaging) skeletons in the genealogical closet of

modern analytical professionalism in the sciences such as the

public displays of dying birds (themselves indicative of myriads

of fictional doomed innocents in eighteenth century culture

from Clarissa Marlowe to Cecile de Varens to Greuze’s Girl

with a Broken Pitcher) deprived of oxygen to prove scientific

theories or the celebrity medical quacks and occultists of

the eighteenth century such as Alessandro Cagliostro, Franz

Anton Mesmer and Dr James Graham who promoted better

fertility (and more) if one slept in his magic “Celestial Bed”

that was the talk of London at his Temple of Health, but that

our concepts of knowledge have far more random, wayward

and essentially arbitrary basis than we like to believe, not so

far removed from these eighteenth century fantasies as we

smugly assume. The model has always had partly a state of

liminality sitting between these worlds of fantasy and factually-

grounded. It often is capable of marking a clear and relative

honest point of transition between one and the other, perhaps

even indicating that both these polarities are in fact closely and

variously connected.

This essay draws upon material presented at the 2007 SAH

conference Pittsburgh Pennsylvania April 2007 under a travel

grant from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation

FOOTNOTES

1 Karen Moon, Modelling Messages: The Architect and the Model, New

York: Monacelli Press, p 11.

2 Ibid, pp. 6, 18.

3 http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1240_buildings_in_miniature/

[viewed 2 August 2007]

4 Percival Marshall, Wonderful Models: The Romance of the World in

Miniature and a Complete Encyclopaedia of Modelcraft – Comprising the

Construction and Use of Representative And Working Models in Advertising,

Architecture and Building, Civil And Mechanical Engineering, Naval

Architecture and Railway Engineering and the Application of Electricity to

their Operation: Also the Romance of Historical Models and the Modern

Development of Model Engineering as an Aid to Invention, as a Recreation

and as an Essential Element in Education, London: Percival Marshall and Co,

1928, Moon, op cit, pp. 43-46, 81-82.

5 Ibid, p. 1.

6 Susan Stewart, On Longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the

souvenir, the collection, Durham (USA): Duke University Press, 1993.

7 Marshall, op cit, p. 2.

8 Stewart, op cit, p. 60.

9 Marshall, op cit, p. 2.

10 Ibid, p. 1.

11 Barbara Stafford, Devices of Wonder : From the World in a Box to Images

on a Screen, Los Angeles, CA : Getty Research Institute, c2001.

Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual

Education, Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press 1994.

12 See Juliette Peers, ‘The Dollshouse as Architectural Fantasy and

Architectural Reportage: The Bratz Pad as Case Study’ SAHANZ 2005,

Celebration.

It’s a Small World? The contested cultural meaning of the small expressed

through narratives of miniature buildings, Contested Terrains SAHANZ

2006, Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand 23rd

Annual Conference Perth Western Australia.

Tool, Fantasy or Document? Early Twentieth Century Dollshouses,

Unpublished Paper, Society of Architectural Historians Annual Meeting 2007

Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.

13 See “Baroque Doll’s World” http://www.deutschland.de/sw/

sw.php?lang=2&&sw_id=5 [viewed January 2007] Official “Mon Plaisir”

website with virtual tour of the houses http://www.arnstadt.de/content/

kulttour/monplaisir.html [viewed January 2007]

14 Jean Latham, Dolls’ Houses: a Personal Choice, London: Adam and

Charles Black 1969, p. 99.

15 Ibid, p. 188.

16 Moon, op cit, pp. 62, 74.

17 Ibid, pp. 38-43.

18 I would argue that though akin to architectural models, these buildings

have a rationale that is distinct from models that are used as a medium to

develop or test ideas or the models that invite interaction with their internal

and external structure from the dollshouse to the competition model.

Certainly the thinking through architectural construction and or innovation

has already happened in the completed and full sized original and the

documentary model as homage follows the precedent set by another

preexisting full scale construction.

19 Marshall, op cit, Moon, op cit, pp. 43-46, 81-82.

20 Writing in Pencil Points, 20 July 1939 qtd. in Moon, op cit, p. 45.

21 J Price Nunn, “Models and Their Making”, Builder 162 June 26 1942,

qtd. In Moon, op cit, p. 553.

22 Marshall, op cit, p. 296.

23 Peers, Bratz Pad, op cit pp. 292-293.

24 Wilkinson was the last Royal Herald of pre-independence Ireland

25 Peers, Tool, Fantasy or Document? op cit.

26 One could think particularly of the Richter bricks, a nineteenth century

German toy loved by children the world around that contained many parts

that were pre-designed to include architectural historical codes in their

decoration and shape. The unavoidability of revival detailing in playing with

the bricks firstly indicates the importance of the gothic and the classical

to nineteenth century culture generally and in particular the importance

of historic precedent and the sometimes free and anarchic mixing of these

precedents in German Imperial architecture. There were a number of

similar products. Such art historically-minded sets often contained detailed

plans to ensure that canonical rules were upheld, though the possibility

for subversive macaroni formats could never be precluded once the bricks

were in the hands of the domestic builder. One could contrast this language

with the machine aesthetic of Erector and Meccano or the Scandinavian

modernist neutrality of early Lego – recent Lego is commodified and tied to

function and periodicity in the wake of Mattel’s changes of the toy trade

in the 950s and 1960s, so that many Lego sets need to bought to gain a

versatile range of components.

27 Meccano itself has been co-opted by Richard Rogers for the model of

the Tomizaya Exhibition Space, Shibuya Tokyo 1990-1992. One notes that

Lego has been coopted by Polish sculptor Zbigniew Libera for his Lego

Concentration Camp 1996, which again indicates the capacity of small

scale buildings to speak of larger narratives and metaphors, particularly the

manner in which the construction set seems to rapidly expand to reference

concepts of the state apparatus and social structure and also the nexus of

architectural representation and art projects. The Lego Concentration Camp

was banned from the Polish Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, although

the New York Jewish Museum has acquired some elements of the series and

regards it to be a valid cultural and artistic metaphor and not necessarily

anti-Semitic. The Lego Concentration Camp also speaks of the normalising

of repressive hierarchies in many regimes even in the present day.

28 Moon, op cit pp. 21-29.

29 Claire Caroline and Robert Wilson (eds), Fantasy Architecture 1500-2036,

London: Haywood Gallery in Association with the Royal British Institute of

Architects, 2004.

30 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, New York: Beacon Press this edition

1971.

31 http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1240_buildings_in_miniature/

[viewed 2 August 2007]

32 Timothy Massuger emailed comment to author 1 August 2007.

33 Diane Baini emailed comment to author 1 August 2007.

34 Qtd. in Andreas Papadakis, (ed.), Dolls Houses, London: Architectural

Design, 1983 p. 6.

35 Ibid p. 8.

36 Exhibition brief for The Idea as Model, qtd. by Richard Pommer, ‘The

Idea of “Idea as Model”’, Kenneth Frampton, Silvia Kolbowski (eds.), Idea as

Model, New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and Rizzoli

International, 1981p. 3.

37 Papadakis, op cit, Editorial p. 4.

38 Robyn Walton, ‘The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes’, Colloquy,

11 (2006), p. 233.

39 Stewart, op cit, p. 48.

40 Ibid, p. 60.

41 Ibid, p. 60.

42 Moon, op cit, p. 22.

43 ibid, p. 70.

44 ibid, p. 73.

45 ibid, p. 73.

46 ibid, p. 70.

47 ibid, p. 70.

48 ibid, p. 22.

49 Ralph Rugoff, ‘Homeopathic Strategies’, in At the Threshold of the

Visible: Miniscule and Smallscale Art 1964-1996, New York: Independent

Curators Incorporated, 1997 pp. 11-12.

50 Ibid, p. 15.

51 Stewart, op cit, pp.106-107.

52 Ibid, p. 102.

53 Ibid, p. 164.

54 Ibid, pp. 164-5.

55 Donald Ritchie, The Image Factory: Fads and Fantasies in Japan, London:

Reaktion Books, 2003, p. 54.

56 Ibid, p. 54.

57 Peers, Bratz Pad, op cit, pp 291-293 and Heinrich Klotz, (ed), Post

Modern Visions: Drawings, Paintings and Models by Contemporary

Architects, New York: Abbeville Press, 1985

58 E.g. Andrea Mina, ‘Mina’ture: Why are Cuttlefish Tickled Pink?, in Burry,

Downton, Mina and Ostwald (eds) Homo Faber, Melbourne: SIAL pp. 19-23.

PARTICIPANTS

MANUAL IDEAS Lecturers:

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