“Tear it down!”. Agency and afterlife of full-size models

The history of architecture design might be told as a quest for the most exhaustive and involving envisioning tool, able to offer architects multisensory anticipation of the design space and to provide the clients with a heartening confirmation of their economic efforts. Drawings, models and even 3D digital models animations can only partially fulfill these different expectations. Sometimes more significant doubts require bigger models,even full-size models. These are occasionally built to study experimental elements and structures, to involve and persuade people in project development or to judge at least a piece of the building in its planned context. While the cost has generally limited the use of 1:1 models, the diffusion of rapid prototyping techniques is today fostering their spread. At the same time, their nature is questionable as they offer a mediated physical experience of design space suspended between representation and building. Full-scale models are part of a consolidated design practice often linked to the art of scenography and ephemeral architectures for public events: from Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s “direct forming,” to the picturesque English gardeners’ practice of making temporary models of wooden rods and white clothes. They have contributed to give the work of architects a spectacular character, as testified by the success of Jacques- Germain Soufflot’s mock-up of the façade of Saint Genevieve in Paris in 1764. At the same time, their effect on a client, a commission and the architects themselves may be unpredictable, especially when they are conceptual models made of poor materials. The experience of a mock-up model made of different materials may disappoint people called to judge design. On the other hand, as a physical interface between the body and the virtual dimension of the project, full-size models both fulfill architects’ secret desire to exert complete control on their work and reorient it as well. For example, the Italian architect Umberto Riva expressed the desire to build a project, to experience it, and then to demolish it to later design and build a perfected version of it. Rem Koolhaas conjectured that Mies van der Rohe’s architecture was radically readdressed in 1912 by the experience of the wood-and-canvas mock-up of the villa for Madame Kröller-Müller that he had conceived in brick and stone. Despite the high cost and importance in the decision-making process, any 1:1 model is going to be destroyed after use, eventually depriving historians of a fundamental step of the design process. While the tactile and kinesthetic experience of models is limited in time, generally to a short number of people, their image may enjoy a visual afterlife in the surviving pictures or films. What Koolhaas suggested from a single image of Mies’ model, is an example of how the after-life of full-size models may affect the development of architectural knowledge. Sometimes, the after-life is the only life of models, like the 1:1 moveable model built by Marcello Piacentini to perfect the design and show the effects of the nobile interrompimento in front of St. Peter’s square, which had been destroyed before Mussolini could see it. Through the photographs, it challenges not only cinematic scenography, but also offers unpredictable fragments of an alternative city demonstrating that the photography mediation may help full-size models provide effects far beyond the original intents.