Bespoke: the pervasiveness of the handmade at Objectspace

Architectural Models and Prototypes for Production - Catalogue essay

by Eu Jin Chua

In the years I spent training as an architect, one thing that I quickly learned was that I am painfully deficient when it comes to modelmaking. Others appeared to slap together with unfurrowed brow and perfect results the bits and pieces that make up an architectural model. Or, less anal than I, some would go for that cool, careless, deliberate aesthetic of post-apocalyptic glue-gunned mayhem. Meanwhile my droopy mediocrities were unfortunately neither here nor there.

Image: Measuring, cutting, constructing. Model of a Department of Labour Workers' Dwelling, 2006 (detail) - Courtesy of The ModelshopBespoke: the pervasiveness of the handmade at Objectspace

Architectural Models and Prototypes for Production - Catalogue essay

by Eu Jin Chua

In the years I spent training as an architect, one thing that I quickly learned was that I am painfully deficient when it comes to modelmaking. Others appeared to slap together with unfurrowed brow and perfect results the bits and pieces that make up an architectural model. Or, less anal than I, some would go for that cool, careless, deliberate aesthetic of post-apocalyptic glue-gunned mayhem. Meanwhile my droopy mediocrities were unfortunately neither here nor there.

Image: Measuring, cutting, constructing. Model of a Department of Labour Workers' Dwelling, 2006 (detail) - Courtesy of The ModelshopI'd like to think, however, that the refuge I take in making things by computer rather than by hand (a common refuge for those with fingers too clumsy for tiny tubes of glue but just right for clicking a mouse) adds something to the contest between the handmade and the industrially-produced. In one corner, the immediacy of the craftsperson and her work. In the other corner, the desktop worker or the 'Mac operator' -- the apparent apotheosis of dematerialised labour, for whom immediate artisanal experience has evaporated into the domain of the virtual. On whom do you place your bets? The craft of the computer, however, gives the lie to this simplistic face-off. As anyone who has ever spent time painstakingly making something 'virtual' should know, the incredible detail permitted by the computer can almost transform one's labour into something that feels more artisanal rather than less.
The architectural model is just one species of a genus that we might label the handmade prototype. This is an object made manually whose ultimate raison d'etre is a future production or a future completion -- a completion which will, it is assumed, turn it into a final product less inchoate and perhaps more industrial than its handmade origin. All the older species of architectural representation appear to belong to this genus - sketches, plans, drawings, elevations, sections, and so on. The variety of prototypes within the category of architectural representation alone suggests the enormously wide spectrum of types and functions of prototypes. At one end of this spectrum, we have the roughest and most rudimentary forms of the prototype - the sketch on the paper napkin, say - representing the germ of an idea externalised for the first time, still raw, still unbaked and in a state of play. Then the slightly more advanced version of this, when, for instance, dimensions and other constraints are inserted, when the demands of reality begin to shape the lumpy clay of the original idea, making design problems visible. At some point on this spectrum, the prototype begins to function as a communicative device, allowing the client or consumer to begin to grasp ideas which had previously only been paper-napkinned or plasticined. For the designer, the prototype might, at this stage, serve as a moment of advocacy or propaganda - a 'pitching' device, as in the inchoate designs submitted for architectural competitions. Then things get slicker, reality impinges even more, you start to get scale drawings of details to show how the necessary bits and pieces should be put together. Or plans and sections, images with a strange temporal logic where time is projected forward to imagine the building being sliced laterally -- the plan -- or vertically -- the section (the plan and the section are odd because they picture the building as half-destroyed even before it has even been built).

And finally, lo and behold, there the finished building, with much rejoicing in heaven and earth and the offices of the architectural firm.

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At least in this account I've just given, one thing that prototypes seem to do is to ease the passage between the idea and the finished product, given how painful this passage can be (as when the designer has the crushing realization, "that looks nothing like how I imagined it!"). Prototypes permit the necessary baby steps to be made, particularly when these prototypes are handmade, since the handmade prototype perhaps allows more of an illusion of artistic control, an illusion of the authorial hand having had some part to play in moulding the finished product.
And it probably is an illusion, especially in an industrial age. For one thing, the process I've just described of course sounds very idealist, the grand Romantic artist stamping his will on the world by means of the gradual progression of handmade prototypes, each prototype lacking some crucial quality until synthesised through hardship and labour to finished perfection (or conversely, and just as idealist, each prototype as an increasingly watered-down form of the shining design idea at its origin). In practice, this is what it feels like; in theory, it's probably more useful not to think of prototypes as existing along a developmental model, as individual evolutions along a design pathway that leads to the slick, finished, industrial object. Sometimes the object that is considered finished in one sense is larval in another. Just think of Auckland's Sky Tower as the inspiration for Macau's Sky Tower. When we consider how the commissioners of the tallest structure in Macau pointed at Auckland's Sky Tower and said, 'we want something just like that' and how the same architects then went ahead and built a close replica in Macau - when we think of this, it begins to seem like everything could function as a prototype for something else. Out of a finished product comes someone else's prototype.
It's not just that matters get muddled the more one thinks about the difference between prototypes and finished products. For another thing, I doubt very much the usual answer to the larger question of how the handmade functions in so-called post-industrial times -- which is that the handmade "keeps it real," keeps things authentic when everything else is horribly plastic. I'd prefer to turn this logic on its head by suggesting that, instead of valorising the handmade -- which, anyway, is a category that is enormously wide-ranging and even nebulous, as this exhibition shows - instead of privileging the handmade, it might just be possible to appreciate the pleasures of the handmade that exist in even the most industrial product. Even, for instance, in the dematerialised object that is the digital artefact (of which we incompetent modelmakers are so fond).

But we don't have to go so far as the digital object. I once sat and watched a friend of mine build an architectural model (and even assisted him a little bit -- as should be clear by now, when it comes to handmade models, I don't lead, I follow). He painstaking laid out nuts and bolts and screws and other plastic gewgaws, all sourced from that post-industrial trashcan known as the surplus electronics store -- and then proceeded to construct the most beautiful handmade object out of this garbage. Once again, a handmade prototype sprang forth from the ruin of someone else's finished industrial product.

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Prototypes for production

Model of a Department of Labour Workers' Dwelling 2006

Modelshop's Minka Ip says, "A presentation model is usually required when a design reaches a certain stage. When I am asked to build a model for an architect or designer, I strive to capture the origin of their concept or thoughts. Quite often it becomes a reference for them during the construction period."

Courtesy of Modelshop

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Eu Jin Chua studied at the University of Auckland School of Architecture, and is now currently resident in London as a PhD candidate at the London Consortium school for multi-disciplinary arts and humanities (Birkbeck College, University of London, jointly with the Tate Galleries, the Architectural Association, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts). He is a faculty member at large of the Unitec School of Design, Auckland.
eujinchuaemail@gmail.com

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Bespoke is curated by Anna Miles
Anna Miles
Lecturer in Visual Arts at AUT
In 2003 she established Anna Miles Gallery
www.annamilesgallery.com

Thanks to Objectspace for allowing us to republish this great series of Essays.