Paper short abstract:

Based on on-going fieldwork with architectural practitioners in Copenhagen, Denmark, this paper discusses models in architecture. As architecture continues to change, becoming less and less the domain of one discipline or profession, it examines how architects attempt to re-model architecture.

Paper long abstract:

Existing anthropological scholarship on architecture has stressed the role of physical or digital models (e.g. Yaneva 2005) in the design process, enabling processes of scaling that bring about buildings. Such models are only briefly discussed here. Instead, this paper situates models for practising architecture in a discussion on aesthetics. According to what models should architectural projects be conceived, drawn and built?

In the move from speculative architectures to the 'built environment', architecture typically becomes, and means, business, with a variety of professions and specialists sharing in. However, the primacy of economic models with a narrow focus on construction costs can, at worst as some architects lament, lead to a loss of architectural control over designs and reduced architectural quality. How architectural projects are modelled in this process, and by whom, - e.g. as images, texts, physical models or spreadsheets - is considered to have lasting impacts on both how the project is seen in the design and construction phase; and also, once built, how its aesthetic qualities - how it is perceived, experienced and lived in - are judged and met. It is discussed here, based on fieldwork with architects keen to reshape their profession, how giving form to architectural qualities in this business equates to in/forming design rhetoric and practice with models, tools and information that are, or aspire to be, measurable, research-based, or broadly termed scientific.

Thus, this paper situates practices of modelling in a broader discussion on the aesthetics of persuasion.