ARCHITECTURAL MODELMAKING AND TEXTURE

    At first glance, architecture and miniature-making have entirely opposite goals. Architecture as a discipline is entirely concerned with the production of real objects, tangible buildings that have real purposes and respond to the realities of human use and their physical context. Miniature making is, in many ways, an attempt to cloak the fantastical in the guise of objects and materials that exist in our world. These differences in purpose also correspond to differences in scale. A building first begins as a set of abstract drawings and models before being "blown up" during construction to an inhabitable size, while miniatures take objects from our everyday surroundings and shrink them down in scale and detail until they are more easily manipulable. 

    As these processes are inverses of one another and the inhabitants of our miniature realms must have a world to, well, inhabit, miniaturists have long taken inspiration from the built environment to make their terrain feel real while combining and shaping elements in novel ways. For instance, here are some photographs of New Orleans that I'm sure could be transferred to some long-forgotten graveyard or ancient necropolis:

    But the early stages of architectural design hold just as much textural and formal information. Architectural models are inherently experiential - they must communicate ideas about mass and void, shadow and light, material and space. All of these phenomena are things that we as hobbyists are attempting to capture, but most importantly, architectural models are already at a miniature scale. Brad Cloepfil's firm Allied Works completed an exhibition of textural models called Case Work: Studies in Form Space and Construction in 2016 examining novel ways of producing textures, among them pouring melted wax into curing concrete, and the results provide an example of just how rich this materiality can be:

    If any of this interests you, I highly recommend checking out the catalogue of the Allied Works exhibition here. Going forward, I'll be looking at specific artists and architects who have taken a unique approach to atmosphere, material, and form with an eye towards applying their processes at a miniature scale. But this is also a hobby blog, so here's the as-of-yet unnamed lil guy I've been working on:

    It turns out checkers are real fun to paint. Next time I should have some progress on his vehicle, which continues the nautical theme...