On Models: Reiser + Wiscombe
From Objects Models Worlds (2021)
Jesse Reiser and Tom Wiscombe
Tom Wiscombe: Jesse I’d love to continue our discussion the other day about models and specifically model kits which we both covet in different ways. For one thing, you do custom builds late at night, and go deep into the realism of the model, and sometimes its material history. Would be great to hear more about that. I’m more of an aficionado of models and model kit boxes, and all the things they might contain as a way to disrupt “full scale.” I think we might both be working on different aspects of speculative realism, but also some deep disciplinary issues here.
Jesse Reiser: Would love to. But you should know by now that for me the model making started so early that it was and, god help me, still is the fundamental way of seeing and acting on everything. It preceded reading, writing, and anything even remotely connected to rational or critical thought. It was and is the first lens or filter.
There is an apocryphal story about John Ruskin that resonates. The story goes that on his marriage night he was unable to consummate the union because he had never seen or expected the sight of pubic hair on a female body. He was so steeped in Classicism — particularly classical sculpture: pure, cold, hard, and white, that the body of a real woman was revolting to him. I had a similar experience when I finally saw a real airplane up close, one that I thought I knew completely through the model. It is the Mk 1 Spitfire hanging in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. 8-year-old Jesse was terribly disturbed by the experience — an experience, by the way, that I was looking forward to for months. The ripples, dents, and seams — the rubberiness of the duck-egg blue paint on the undersurfaces, and just the overall crudity of the construction was a complete shock. I was certain that the whole thing was a sham —so I then basically turned the whole issue of what I would later know as the real and the representation around: the museum Spitfire was just a shabby copy, a poor replica of the plastic model I so loved. Still do!
TW: I have a similar connection with the SR-71 spy plane, but in the opposite way. That plane is always discussed in terms of engineering feats like a shell that only pressurizes at supersonic speeds or its radar-blocking capabilities, but I think what is most enchanting is its shocking ‘model’ aesthetics. When you encounter one, it’s not clear what you are dealing with — it seems to exist between the realms of everyday reality and models. It’s broken up into strange components with weird seams and an intriguing lack of hardware. After a few missions, the stealth blackness weathers into a kind of ultra-matte crystalline surface that could be from a 5,000-year-old obelisk. And SR-71s are much smaller in person than you expect, which further disrupts your sense of scale and ability to consume them.
I like to think of this effect as gaining temporary access to a parallel and equal reality with independent aesthetics and physical laws. Have you ever read that cool little book from Meillassoux called Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction? The premise is basically that science fiction is all too often a mirror of human drama and never breaks through to something truly alien. Extro-science fiction is where the current laws of physics no longer hold, and something like a billiard ball can suddenly spin out of control and shoot through your opponent’s body. He’s not proposing a cliché notion of “alien” but rather that reality might be temporarily broken somehow.
I love that idea that something at model scale could break reality and appear at full scale in the world. When that happens, it resets your thinking away from the human/medium scale to awareness of things as small as bacteria and as large as a galaxy. Like the SR-71, a thing might have a totally different level of articulation and detail or none at all, it might appear to be made of impossible materials, and it ultimately won’t “mesh” into our human drama.
I’ve been thinking lately that the whole idea of a model becomes flat-out weird if you simply take away the function of the model as a tool to visualize something else at another scale. If you break the relation there. When a model becomes an entity in its own right, and does not exist to point at something else, you are suddenly able to talk about “model ontology.” What is their world like? I think this idea has potential far beyond kit-of-parts or kit-bashing techniques in architecture, which promote reductionism on the one hand and mashup culture on the other. Model ontology feels fresh, like an intellectual framework for engaging contemporary reality.
JR: Interesting. Meillassoux, who I have not read, points to a performance of architecture that to my mind more or less defines the field; architecture is built impossibility. Not a particularly new thing, after all the ideal/real paradox is as inherent in western classicism as it is in spitfire models! And certainly the built “ideality” that Eisenman so celebrates in Palladio — for example, the ultra flat built drawing effect of the Redentore facade — or, even more, the ceiling details at the crossing express this backflow of abstract dematerialized geometry into the real. In this particular scenario the even older tension between matter and the ideal, like the stone blocks in the Parthenon and its geometric lineaments, transmutations from wood construction, etc., gives way to a dematerialized appearance of materials: stucco, paint, dryvit, cardboard and coming into relationship with an idealizing geometry. Indeed this tension is sustained up through postmodernism and into post po mo today!
Likewise the issue of a definitive scale of reference is elusive in these classicisms. A temple, a tempietto, or a tempiettino the size of an ant would all be true scales. Interestingly the optical corrections like entasis, curvature of a stylobate, etc. are scale dependent based upon the subject scale and the building scale.
I recently have become fascinated with certain, let us say ontological issues. And they began with perplexity and irritation at certain artifacts coming out of the work of our immediate predecessors: Mayne, Holl, and Libeskind. However different their architecture is, what binds them together is the primacy of drawing as a means of architectural ideation. Drawing for them was not only the primary tool; it was, and arguably still is, the primary referent — not the building. The consequences of this priority in their buildings is interesting and sometimes perplexing. There are certain artifacts in drawing that result in strange orphaned constructions in building; like models, they belong neither entirely to ideality of drawing nor entirely to the material world of the building but occupy a very uncertain place somewhere in between. The well nigh hysterical superpositions of various handrail types for example in Mayne’s Cooper Union building or even in his own house cause one to mentally reconstruct the projections and axonometrics that created them to make them comprehensible. “Yes that railing must have been really boss in the drawing.” Or even more perplexing a lighting fixture in Steven Holl’s building for the Columbia University football team, clearly designed in axonometric. These artifacts are theatricalizations of drawing. I speculate that this kind of projection derives from architectural set design — arguably a distinct practice and medium for architects. That is why they are often incomprehensible to the public. Typically architect-designed sets are incongruous and don’t provide the expected context or mise-en-scene for the production. But for our purposes these kinds of intermediate realities between drawing and building deliver an uncanny punch. Moreover they are right at home when viewed from a distance on stage or through a frame; that is why they flatten and normalize so convincingly in reproduction. I have recently come to realize that multiple ontologies can be organized in very subtle ways. We have been designing furniture and like good modernists wanted our chaise to “float” above the floor. After many failed attempts to integrate the legs into the corrugated shell of the piece, the modernist trope of the chromed leg came to our rescue. It was a readymade device that convincingly produced the paradoxical effect of invisibility in plain sight. Yes, chromed legs are supposed to “go away” because of the mirror-like polish, the location in shadow — well away from the edge, etc., but of course they are always visible. They are nevertheless effectively invisible by consensus. Interestingly the spell is broken if the same leg is attached at an angle; it must always be vertical to the ground to be ‘invisible.’ At the opposite end of the scale, normative construction in grids renders most built space invisible; invisible because grids are the accepted norm for space in general and thus reality. The world carved out of reality by the chaise is an entirely different one from the legs upon which it sits. The legs affiliate more to the floor than the furniture. So we used conventional invisibility to produce the effect we needed.
TW: The primacy of the drawing in the architectural imagination is huge and long-lived, no doubt. As you say, it has the ability to remove the author from the world of measurements and materials and the other rote stuff of buildings, substituting other sensibilities. You can’t have James Stirling without the worm’s eye axonometric, just as you can’t have Palladio without the elevation. I guess at this juncture I’d really be interested in finding some fresh air. The drawing just doesn’t resonate for me as much, or to be precise, the orthographic sequence project seems like it may have reached a kind of completion. I recently heard from a colleague that we live in an image culture, which makes the image the most relevant new source of architectural production. That didn’t sit right with me for a lot of reasons. I realized that what bothered me most wasn’t the idea of giving agency to images over drawings, but rather the idea that we were still thinking in terms of the picture plane at all. One of the defining features of our posthuman age is the explosion of the picture plane, which is far too preoccupied by the location of human observers and the particulars of its distancing to objects. So I want to elevate the model from its status as weak representation of architecture to the source of artistic production. I’m not talking about a sentimental return to craft where the making of the model leaves traces of the author’s hand, but rather how “modeling space” can exist beyond the computer model and the physical model and move into a speculative realm.
Over the past 25 years, digital modeling in the computer has itself become a form of picture-plane fetish, where we spin and pan and zoom in, but never break the plane of the screen. Objects projected onto the screen seem concrete but are still massively distorted by focal length and other image settings that we all tweak to capture a project just so. Plus objects are distanced from our ability to manipulate them in raw or inelegant ways, due to toolboxes which seem to allow total freedom, yet lock us into very particular ways of putting things together. There is something so fascinating about the chunky, colorful parts of models that we have been making around the office for so long on our armada of Makerbots; I realized one day that they were in fact all model “kits” because the size of our printer beds was so small they forced my designers to break models up into strange, bespoke components. Sometimes those components become expressed components of buildings we design, but more often, components bridge between several architectural elements, picking up parts of envelope, circulation, and interior. Now, we intuitively build in that chunkiness into our projects, and we have realized that not everything should trickle down from the computer. For example, the way parts go together — loosely, sometimes badly — is always much more interesting in the physical models, so we learn from that and edit the 3D file to match. We’ve also started building in snap-fit connections, tabs, sleeves, channels, and other ways for parts to ‘anticipate’ their assembly, as well as embedding different materials inside one another, similar to overmolding from the injection-molding industry. Sometimes strange joints appear as architectural features at full scale, independent from any true construction joint, although I like to create doubt on that front. In any case, our way of working in the office now doesn’t involve pulling points, fusing things together, or other techniques of digital deformation; it is now solely focused on the manipulation and assembly of chunky parts, including only the most rudimentary transformations such as rotation, differential scaling, copying, and throwing away. Projects often have spare parts in the end!
One of the funny outcomes of all of this model-making is that we’ve also ended up producing what I’m provisionally calling “drawings that want to be models.” The drawing does not drive the model; in fact the drawing appears to be a drawing of a model. As we started building model kit boxes in earnest, with all of their accoutrements including decals, mini-kits, and posters, we realized that the assembly manual was of particular interest. Some of the best ones I’ve seen are in Japanese Aoshima Co. models, which interestingly was founded in 1929 as an airplane research institute. They conflate what appears to be a set of instructions for the kit and what might be a set of construction documents for the thing at full scale. That led us to technical aerospace “illustrations” of aircraft, cars, and submarines, which are even more convincing as construction documents, although they are drawn by artists without knowledge of the actual engineering or access to orthographic plans. So they are fiction, really, and they refer back to the world of the model.
JR: God I’m relieved and happy and a little surprised that our sensibilities so align! I find observations like “we live in an image culture” as justification for an architectural project stupid. Just as I hate all representational allegorization: architecture as representation of the state of the world e.g. continuous surfaces for neoliberal capitalism, bubbles for the reassertion of borders, and objects for god knows what! Nanako and I are particularly disturbed by the picture plane computer screen phenomenon. Maybe because we practiced for over a decade pre-computationally; or maybe because Hejduk virtually outlawed perspective at Cooper. Basically we don’t trust anything in the perspective window because it’s always distorted. All judgements are 2D and measurable (measurable after the fact never before — that comes from my mother). That’s where physical model-making comes in. Formal judgments on even complex form arise from thousands of 2D assessments from every aspect. I judge model kits that way as well. Lately model kits are, like everything else modeled on the computer, with the bad kits, like the bad architecture, you see the default expression of the modeling program in evidence; typically a slight puffiness like in many cars today. Or even dare I say it, national tendencies in modeling mistakes. There are hysterically funny formal abortions in kits: the fucked up canopy of the Hasegawa Avro Lancaster is legendary. The mold-makers, doubtless educated in a polytechnic, attempted to rationalize the complex and somewhat irrational form of British coachwork sensibility into projections of pure arcs and straight lines. Once the first mistake in cross-sectional geometry was made, its errors got multiplied in projection. The je ne sais quois of the Lancaster canopy geometry was completely lost. I go to another Japanese website to understand the corrections! That man has the obsessive nature and unbiased sensibility to work through such problems. He gets the life back in things. It’s interesting that Nanako and I share an animist tendency when it comes to judgements on form, hers from Japan, mine more along the lines of Kafka’s Odradek in the “Cares of a Family Man.” Unfortunately architectural design is in the midst of being subsumed by a five-hundred-year-old technique now weaponized by computation. Even architects believe that spinning things in perspective and virtual fly-throughs really are natural and spatial. We of course use both techniques as propaganda — it’s virtually a requirement in competitions — but we NEVER design that way!
Funny our involvement, let us say, in critically considering the role of models in our practice came up at the moment when we first had to confront the question of ideological and technical purity in our work. Our late 80’s collage work was championed at the time by Bob Somol. (In the same way that digital purity emerged as an ethos ten years later.) We were in a collage battle of sorts with Ben Nicholson at the time, we with the Ero/ Machia/Hypnia House and he with the Appliance House. We quickly came to realize that it was impossible to design the complete project solely through collage. Ben’s technique was pure in the sense that he started with collage and then went through a process of interpretation to convert the collage into 3D drawings. The problem was that the graphical information from the collage was never adequate to project into 3D because, in his technique, collage was always already associated with the drawing conventions of plan, section, and elevation. The different views often contradicted themselves or tiny features, say in plan, got way overstated in elevation. We abandoned collage as a primary driver of building form and went to physical models (in wax) instead, though the physical models themselves were collaged, they were not graphically based. Image-based collage could then be employed to dress the form — a kind of rendering — and to a certain extent to elaborate building elements and details locally in 3D. In relation to model kits the big revelation was how collage could act in an analogous way to decals. Signs, signage, discursive content produce a vivid reality beyond blank form. This is the magic of the decal stage in kit models. To make a long story short, my confession of our impure use of collage represented for Bob a lack of ideological rigor. For him it was almost a betrayal!
TW: I saw you lecture three times at SCI-Arc more or less over 20 years — the first time was when you were doing fineness; the next was when you came to apologize to the world for thinking structure was a good source of architectural differentiation (a truly great moment!); and the last time was when you came and shared the arc of evolution you are talking about here. For me it was like getting to know you in reverse order — start with very little things operating in unison, contend with the limits of the concept, and end with some very rough, figural collages from your early work. I was thinking how different my experience was of you versus so many of my colleagues (most of them, really) who worked with you in your and Nanako’s small NY apartment back in the 90s. I was sitting there in your lecture making mental linkages between the two worlds, which seem almost impossible to bridge, and then of course Zago leaned over and reminded me of the Gumby-esque figure sitting on your Kaohsiung Port Terminal (from Kipnis or Somol I presume?). And that was it! Gumby was the bridge, and it allowed you to put fineness and collage and wax models into mass moves — a breakthrough.
The other thing that hit me was how you and I share an affinity for parts, but non-obvious parts. Parting out a thing into a diagram is one thing, maybe something better left to the Dutch at this point, but the way you part things out is not like that. It is more like Hejduk did it — in what I call “menageries” — collections of things next to each other that are incomplete, figural, and not organized by function or hierarchy but by familial resonances. Your Kansai Library menagerie from your book has pieces of plans, envelope, structures, and figures, all laid out on a flat plane; they don’t seem to form a complete set, but they capture a hyper-edited world of lively things. Hedjuk did his “Victims” menagerie as a litany of animated figures, less identifiable as architectural elements, but sometimes allowing a structure or a stair to dance past. I know you were a student of his and I wonder when you began to move things slowly nearer to one another and start to overlap them into collage — something Hejduk probably would never have done.
My own menagerie is a kind of cornucopia of stuff: parts of projects, free-roaming interior figures, shells, circulations, tattoos, and other friendlies. The air space gets evacuated and the thing becomes a kind of 3D pile, using my “throw it down” approach. I think all three of these menageries constitute a mode of expression of architecture as a collection of lively and complete things on a flat plane — so different than typological categories or process ephemera or other boring representations of sets of things we see around today. Ian Bogost might say these figures exist “equally but differently,” which speaks to that flatness. I’m down with decals as additional figures among such figures for sure — in fact I’d argue that the best collections represent all forms of being — masses, surfaces, ornaments, skies, grounds, vehicles, inhabitants, maybe organized by scale or color or allure but not function, like any good cabinet of curiosities!
JR: Tom you’re right on target. First Hejduk. After graduation I worked for him assisting on the “Devil’s Bridge” and the “Victims” project so I got to know him and his working methods intimately. There was a clear move from the menagerie of isolated objects in the masque projects to what he called tangential touch in “Victims.” He even theorized it by invoking Kandinsky: “point in plan, line in elevation, plane on ground.” The next step which we took in the Ero/Machia/Hypnia House was interpenetration. It was in the air at that time. Gehry did it too in the ___________ guest house invoking San Gimignano, which pissed me off! Hejduk went into interpenetration after that in the most literal way, he published a small book called Architecture in Love where the menagerie copulates! I have been working on a confection diagram that charts among other things this process across many architects starting with the extraction of figural elements from gridded Corbusian space ultimately to space created by the conjunction of bodies only. I was too late to get it into Volume 1 but it will be in Volume 2. I will have to revise it now to include yours!
The reconciliation of irreconcilable approaches which you identify in the “Gumby” model has, to a certain extent, always been with us. Hernán to my surprise picked up on it (In retrospect I shouldn’t have been surprised: he’s sharp as a tack, and a student of Miralles). He said we were among the first in our generation interested in contaminated models of design. We embedded collage “inclusions” into our digital work as in the Kansai Library proposal. They were indigestible chunks of other architecture within otherwise supple or smooth space. Greg, like Somol, was a purist ideologically. He objected to our ways of cobbling things and ideas together both technically, e.g. digital and physical models and in apparently irreconcilable concepts from our predecessors
(Peter brought up exactly the same issue at our NY book launch). I remember a statement by Venturi that the test of the robustness of an architecture is whether or not it could sustain the invasion of stuff from the outside: coke machines in Crown Hall. But for me, because I was trained to see before I could think, I never made (or make) decisions based solely upon concepts. I try stuff out: either it works or it doesn’t. In retrospect the
“Gumby” was just the thing that the surface project needed. Now when I see FOA’s Yokohama Port Terminal (which I admire immensely) it looks like it is missing something.