Architectural models on display
The same day I went to ACCA for snap photos of Jenny Holzer's light show, I visited the Melbourne Museum to look at architectural models on display. The Wednesday before, I had been invited for the opening night of this exhibition, but I couldn't attend because I had made a prior appointment. Undeterred, I visited the exhibition that Saturday.
The exhibition was at the lower levels of the Melbourne Museum. There was a gala opening the Wednesday before but no one seemed to know that they were still on display when I asked the museum staff.
I appreciate the fact that there is more dialog and engagement between the public and those who produce architecture. Just the week before this exhibition, Alain de Botton gave a public talk about his new book The Architecture of Happiness - which sits next to this computer, yet to be read completely by me. De Botton's lecture opened up a dialogue with the public initiated by a non-architect. Architecture has almost always been decided by an elite few - those with political power or with wealth and at the bottom of the decision process is the architect.
When architects constantly face the constraints of time vs client requirements, the exploration of design suffers and many buildings are built without the proper care and consideration during the early design process thus ignoring many factors which could lift the quality of the architecture. Early explorations of an idea should always include the making of a model. It adds a 3-dimensional quality to a sketch, yet leaves the building largely unresolved.
Within challenging constraints the architect finds himself subject to commercial forces... time tested solutionswin over new designs. Very little time is spent thinking of the best solution to a brief. It has become rare for offices to use model making as a primary design tool.
Offices who have successfully designed through models tend to stand out from those who primarily develop a design on the computer screen. Frank Gehry, for one, remains the most written about superstar architect who has achieved acclaim in this area. Design through modelling challenges the boundaries of form making and allows a designer to intimately understand the structure of the form they wish to make.
Because model making allows a designer to intimately understand form and space, the final outcome tends to come from the result of a natural process rather than a mechanical one.