ABSTRACT

This study argues that the concept of ‘model’ has a fundamentally ambiguous relationship with the ideation, the representation and the construction of architecture. It is this ambiguity that enables the model to engage with the multiple relations that affect the definition of architecture as both a discipline and an edifice. As a prototype, a template or a guide for the production of the edifice of architecture, the model both proclaims and obfuscates the point of origin of the project, triggering a multiplicity of variations that render the discipline and the practice of architecture possible. As an object, the model offers a description, a presentation and, more significantly, an anticipation of the architectural object. Engaging in the making of architecture a plurality of agents beyond the historical figure of the artifex architect, the model challenges the single authorship of architecture. The model’s oscillations between object and concept – and object again – engage the production of the architectural project in a dynamic set of references, tensions and variations that continue to involve the viewer/actor/inhabitant. When the model loses its dynamics between transition and translation and presents itself as a resolved object, it is no longer ‘model’.