Model and Reality
Module: Wahlfach / Wahlpflichtfach, 3 CP M.Sc. 2015
Lecturers: Prof. Thomas Heinrich Schmitz, Tobias Becker
Working with the model is an elementary part of any architectural design process. The model serves to clarify and explain spatial proportions and structures, it helps to discuss detailed questions, shows the embedding of the building in a topographical context and much more. In this functional context, the model is used with its very own qualities: as a referencing and as an assertive element. These are qualities that hold great narratives within themselves. For models represent above all an "in-between", between imagination and realization, between past and future, between promise and fulfillment. They thus provoke questions about desire and reality, about the possible and the impossible, and not least questions about the relationship between factuality and staging - our environment and ultimately our self.
While the model, due to its structure, always formulates itself in the mode of reference to something else and thus is never what it claims to be, one of the essential characteristics of sculpture is to be embedded as part of physical reality in the here and now and thus to be exactly what it is. In its juxtaposition and creative combination, this formal opposition holds a rich reservoir of forms of appearance and expression that are the focus of interest here.
The publication This is not a model. Tobias Becker, Thomas Heinrich Schmitz (2019) summarizes the results of a series of seminars held between 2009 and 2015 on the topic of architectural models, each with a different focus (including 'Model and Reality', 'Fake Realities', 'Re-Models').