Martin Summers Contributes Text to M3 - Morphosis Models Monograph

Martin was invited to contribute a short written piece discussing models that helped shape and inform the conceptual territory of the book. 150 different people were asked to contribute and were given freedom to discuss models in any way they desired.

Additional contributors include: Hitoshi Abe, David Adjaye, Stan Allen, Tadao Ando, Aaron Betsky, Marlon Blackwell, Preston Scott Cohen, Peter Cook, Neil M Denari, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Liz Diller, Evan Dougles, Winka Dubbeldam, Anthony Vidler, etc.

Book published by Rizzoli, Feb, 28, 2023 - Essay written in spring 2022

Full Text Submission:

Models hold a unique position among architectural representation types. They are physical and spatial manifestations of ideas at a smaller scale, and their physicality connects our bodies directly with our experience of architecture - speaking to our corporeal senses. This physicality is what can be felt and sensed in ways that drawings or renderings often are not, even when viewed as a 2D photograph on a screen or a page. The registration of its assembly, its tiny imperfections (even when 3D printed), and the removal of detail required at smaller scales simultaneously approximate an assumed future building and distances itself from this assumed future reality. This distance in most cases, allows the model to maintain the optimism of the idea(l) that the buildings under its contingent pressures of construction cannot. Is this what gives the model a unique power? It is architecture as purely spatialized ideas, and simultaneously not building. An example of this might be the comedic scene in Zoolander, “What is this? A center for ants?,” where the main character collapses the space between representation and architecture – bringing our attention to the model as a final outcome of the architectural process, the physical manifestation of ideas. The joke works because we assume a future building. In this scenario, the model is the ultimate physical manifestation of ideas, bringing our awareness to its objectness, a thing in and of itself. It is a thing that brings our attention to the here and now and to an