The Model Machine Reading Assignment 1: Kallie

Reflections on the text Pandora and the Modern Scale Model Machine

We have all experienced in architecture school how the role of the architectural model can both probe and communicate an organized intension.  As a model of representation is both the output and the means in which we define meaning, it is less understood that the process of our discoveries can also be used to measure or discuss new relationships, or in the text’s terms, to define a “reference standard,” that in which logic and truth is measured against.

I appreciated the text especially for its taxonomy of several different types of “model machine” examples, and it also presented a nice palette of insight into the range of agendas that scale models can execute; from the work of Antonio Gaudi and his aesthetic ideology for mathematical truth in his catenary arch studies, to Vladimir Tatlin’s more collective, utilitarian vision in his Monument of the Third International. El Lissitzky had a similar social agenda, yet with the role of a “Proun” (Project for the Affirmation of the New) to deploy new systems and collective goals for a developing Marxist society.  Louis Kahn exercises a scale model machine in his proposal for the Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs and discovers it a tool that questions his own understanding of order.  Daniel Libeskind, (considering his body of work is predominately drawings and model representations) has an unhinged archetype of model machines in a world without governance, and with that endless freedom, both opens and inhibits his own imaginative opportunities.

The text sheds light on how the architectural model can be used both as a device of invention and understanding. To understand the process of model making is to also develop a new mechanism of imagination, of possibilities that can be created through measurement, speculation, and prodding intensions.