Architects always have interesting stories about tendering a project and, quite often, their tales of success or failure feature an unlikely protagonist - the scale model. Presenting a project with a well-assembled and represented model, can indeed help convincing the client and securing a tender.
The recently published manual Model Making - Conceive, Create and Convince (Frame Publishers) comes to the rescue of professionals and architecture, urban design, public space and interior design students working on their scale models.
The main aim of the authors is highlighting the importance of a scale model as a process and prototyping tool, but also as a communication or presentation resource. Industrial designer and lecturer Arjan Karssen and traffic engineer and interior designer Bernard Otte divide the book in 6 practical chapters that help readers to choose the appropriate type of model to best present and represent their projects.
For its structure and well-organised contents, the volume could therefore be considered as a step-by-step guide explaining readers the process from draft to presentation scale model, passing through the design scale model.
Though the focus remains on architecture, the wide range of materials – wood, paper, foam, felt, leather, wax, metal, clay and plastic just to mention a few ones – and of tools and techniques, including laser cutting and 3D printing, plus its accessible work instructions, suggest the manual could be employed by students of other disciplines as well (it wouldn't be a bad idea for example for fashion students to get a copy and learn to play around with different materials).
Readers are also given extensive tips and suggestions to photograph their models, but the best thing about the manual remains the focus on real-life scenarios from architecture and design offices around the world.
Model Making is indeed packed with illustrations of exciting projects and plans by international architectural firms and you can bet that ingenious solutions for the models for Ateliers Jean Nouvel's Philarmonie de Paris, BIG's Danish National Maritime Museum, mOrphosis' Perot Museum of Nature and Science and OMA's Taipei Performing Arts Centre will provide interesting architectural inspirations for real structures and model making necessities.
"Model Making - Conceive, Create and Convince", compiled by Arjan Karssen and written by Bernard Otte, is out now on Frame Publishers.
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