From Doll’s House to Dream House

Abstract

During the 1930s, Australian architects began to construct miniature scale models employing an increasing variety of materials to simulate in detail the spatial, visual, and material characteristics of proposed buildings. This replacement of a long dominant use of plain and simple models occurred during the years immediately surrounding the Second World War and coincided with a post-war housing boom. Many of Australian’s earliest encounters with such ultra-realistic models of architecture in miniature occurred through children’s doll houses and building sets that were intended to cultivate ideas about order and taste but also a spatial awareness, and creativity. Using models and home advertisements from years surrounding the Second World War, this paper seeks to explore the affective transition of scale architectural models in design practices from a description of form and mass to an object of consumption.

Keywords:

• Architecture
• architectural model
• housing
• doll house
• toys

Introduction

On the cover of the December 1945 issue of the Australian domestic lifestyle magazine Australian Home Beautiful is a colour rendering of Santa Claus holding a miniature scale house model while a Christmas tree in the background is decorated with domestic consumer products hanging from its branches (fig. 1).¹ The portrayal of the house model as a Christmas present during this time coincided with an increasing use of ultra-realistic scale architectural models as advertising tools for selling house designs to post-Second-World-War families in Australia. In these instances, architectural model makers employed a variety of materials to simulate working doors, wood floors, glass windows, lights, cabinets, vegetation, and furniture that were until this time typically relegated to another type of house model found underneath the Christmas tree, a children’s toy in the form of a doll’s house or building set.

Figure 1. Cover of the December 1945 issue of Australian Home Beautiful.

Long held by architects as a tool for describing a planned structure to a builder or client, a centuries-old practice of using simple, mono-material wood, cardboard or plaster models was replaced by another, favouring more detailed descriptions of proposed designs. This new type of model and the new role it suggests was promoted during the 1920s by only a handful of architects in the United States and England as presentation tools to supplement orthogonal drawings. The key to unlocking the image of Santa Claus holding the model as a consumer object on the cover of Australian Home Beautiful is understanding the traffic of modelling practices between the United States and Australia in particular. With the rise of a new profession of architectural model maker during the economic depression of the 1930s in the United States, the scale model was promoted an ideal means for captivating the imagination of a client not accustomed to the simplified abstraction of an architect’s plans.²

Before the miniature scale architectural model dream houses of the 1940s and 1950s, such approaches to the use of modelling materials, furniture, and details to create realistic building environments were typically relegated to technical models, toy building sets and above all, child doll houses. The migration of these methods to house advertising models during the 1940s had the intention to affect a client with a sense of leisure and domestic bliss that owning such a structure could impart. Although often equated with emotions, the concept of affect in these models is much more encompassing; it pertains to an affection that modifies both the body and the mind through the idea of desire and potential. Building upon the concept of affectus developed by Baruch Spinoza, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe works such as these as a “compound of percepts and affects.”³ Using scale architectural models, doll houses and home advertisements from the years following the Second World War as examples, this paper seeks to explore the transition which occurred in the use of architectural models during the 1940s and 1950s from a didactic tool to an affective description of a dream house that can be consumed.

The Scale Model as a Descriptive Tool

A survey of architectural journals and handbooks in United States and Australia from the first three decades of the twentieth century reveals that the use of diverse modelling materials to create highly realistic architectural models was not a norm of architectural practice, which preferred to use clay, plaster, cardboard or even soap to develop single material models.⁴ An early example of this preference can be found in a 1909 article from Art and Architecture: The Journal of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales, which advocated for the use of small-scale plaster, cardboard or clay models in architectural practice, observing how in the United States it had become a necessary means of refining a proposed building at an early stage of design.⁵ This fondness for models in American practice resulted from a perceived inability amongst young architects to think in three dimensions that publications argued was due to a reliance on orthogonal drawings and perspectives which limited their ability to visualize designs from many angles.⁶ One educator placed the blame for this on the failure of “the French school” to teach “students to build good buildings rather than to make beautiful drawings.”⁷ To remedy this situation, architects were encouraged to create models to test or work out their ideas in three-dimensional form.⁸ Some authors found the use of plaster and wood as modelling materials difficult, expensive, and untidy in the drafting room, promoting card and folded paper as ideal substitutes in constructing simple and quick models that show the mass of the building with its setbacks or other characteristics of formation.⁹ Whatever the medium, as exemplified by the plaster model made around 1926 by Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin for the façade design of the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne, Harvey Wiley Corbet’s cardboard model of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower in New York City from 1929, or even Bruce Dellit’s 1930 plaster model of the Sydney ANZAC Memorial, a presentation model before 1930 tended to be constructed out of a single material such as cast plaster, wood, or cut and folded card masses in which additional layers of paper of card were added to obtain a relief effect (figs 2 and 3).

Figure 2. Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin, plaster model of the façade of the Capitol Theatre, Swanston Street, Melbourne, ca. 1926.

Figure 3. Bruce Dellit, Plaster model of Sydney Anzac Memorial, 1930.

There are a few exceptions to single-material models promoted in architectural journals during the early 1920s. These include Corbett’s 1922 painted cardboard model of the Bushnell Memorial Hall that is surrounded by miniature trees, people, cars, and paper grass, as depicted in the August 1922 issue of Pencil Points Magazine; while Grumbine included a handful of similarly detailed models in three issues of The American Architect and the Architectural Review between 1921 and 1924 to argue for their use in convincing an uncertain client.¹⁰

Before the 1930s, realistic scale architectural models that fall outside the normative use of a single material to represent a proposed or existing design in Australia as a plain and simple mass were didactic tools in the form of children’s building sets, technical models, and doll houses. Of these are included a number of nineteenth-century building block sets, including the kindergarten educational exercises called “gifts,” invented by the father of Kindergarten, Friedrich Fröbel, and the Anchor Stone Building Block sets.¹¹ By 1915, one could also purchase in Australia the “Dometo” toy wood building block set to create simple house forms, or the metal strips, plates, girders, wheels, gears, nuts and bolts of a Meccano set created in 1898 by Frank Hornby in Liverpool (known as Erector in the United States and Stabil in Germany).¹² Not dissimilar are interlocking modular toy building sets like the painted folded metal Wenebrik set that was featured at the Melbourne 1928 British Trade Exhibition or the moulded set of interlocking rubber bricks known as Minibrix from 1936 that encouraged boys to “Build Mum and Dad a fine new house this Christmas with Minibrix!”¹³ (fig. 4). These sets could create identifiable houses, factories or schools, and are contrasted by the more detailed child’s dolls houses, such as the 1905 Powell family doll house at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) in Sydney; or those featured in such store catalogues as those from the 1930s and 1940s from Walther & Stevenson’s of Sydney, which could either be purchased in their complete form or provided as a set of plans the parent could create by hand (fig. 5).¹⁴ Children’s toys that included carpet, wallpaper, wood flooring, ceramic bath furniture and even working windows and doors, and sometimes running water, rivalled technical models used as miniature exemplars to be studied and copied by professionals such as the wood and metal models of a hydraulic powered passenger lift from 1889 or self-supporting stair from 1903 found in the MAAS collection (fig. 6).

Figure 4. Wenebrik construction set box lid, ca. 1915.

Figure 5. The Powell family doll house, Sydney, New South Wales, 1905. Powerhouse collection. Gift of Leanne Robson, 2015. Photograph by Michael Myers.

Figure 6. Norman Selfe, Model of a hydraulic powered passenger lift, New South Wales, Australia, 1889. Powerhouse collection. Gift of Norman Selfe. Photograph by Ryan Hernandez.

Immediately after the First World War, architects in Europe, the Americas and the British world began to employ more diverse materials in presentation models to simulate the kinaesthetic experience of proposed designs, including plaster, a variety of woods, Plasticine clay, celluloid, cardboard, aluminium, and paper. In Germany, this shift in architectural modelling practices owes a debt to the Expressionist, Dadaist, and above all Russian Constructivist emphasis upon their materials as a medium for making art, and is witnessed in the architectural models by individuals surrounding the German Bauhaus School including Kurt Schwitters’ Haus Merz from 1920 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Hochhäuser from 1922.¹⁵ By the end of that decade, one can witness an increasing use of more diverse modelling materials combined with cardboard, paint, wood, paper and plaster such as metal, celluloid, and glass in presentation models such as German architect Walter Gropius’ 1927 model of a Total Theater for Erwin Piscator, Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld’s Core House from 1928, or the 1932 exhibition International Style, which included scale models by at least thirty-seven different architects from fifteen countries.¹⁶ In Australia this can be observed in Budden and Mackey’s unpainted wood, metal and thin clear plastic model of the Sydney’s Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board Building from the late 1930s (fig. 7).

Figure 7. Model, Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board building, plywood/metal, possibly made by Budden and Mackey, Australia, 1937. Powerhouse collection. Presented by Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board, 1937. Photograph by Sotha Bourn.

Simultaneous to these events, the world found itself in the Great Depression and many architects in these territories became unemployed, seeking work as professional architectural model makers by preparing models for exhibitions, fairs, and architectural practices. To meet this new demand, several architecture schools in the United States installed model workshops during the mid-1930s; this was also a required course of study at the Sydney Technical College.¹⁷ Architects like Theodore Conrad, who had made models during his architectural studies Pratt Institute in Brooklyn between 1928 and 1931, and later as an employee in Corbett’s office, recognized the growing market for their use and started a model-making business at the age of 21.¹⁸ Initially working in wood and cardboard, Conrad, who came to be known as the “dean” of architectural model makers, was one of the first model makers to extensively employ aluminium and especially clear acrylic plastic, a material that came to market in the 1930s and known commonly today as Perspex.¹⁹ It was not, however, until the end of the 1940s that the profession of architectural model maker emerged in Australia, when the scale house model had established itself as an important and necessary tool for the architect and builder to employ in almost photo-realistic terms the appearance of the proposed design (fig. 8).

Figure 8. Finecraft Scale Models first appeared in the Sydney telephone directory in 1947. This advert is taken from the Sydney telephone directory, 1949.

The Scale House Model Takes Centre Stage

The increased use of ultrarealistic scale architectural models emerged during the years immediately following the end of the Second World War amidst a new housing boom—in the United States as much as in Australia. The provision of housing during and between the two world wars had been marred by a materials shortage and an economic depression. At the end of the Second World War, millions of men and women in uniform were scheduled to return home to military-focused economies that were “geared around producing tanks and planes, not clapboard houses and refrigerators.”²⁰ Consumers in allied countries like Australia were eager to spend their money, on everything from big-ticket items like homes, cars and furniture to appliances, clothing, shoes, and everything else in between.²¹ Residential construction companies in the United States and Australia mobilized to capitalize on this surge in housing demand, publishing photos of scale model houses or even renderings made to look like models in women’s magazines, targeting those who were allegedly most affected by the housing shortage: wives and mothers.

The transition of the architect’s scale model from descriptive to advertising tool is certainly due to its convenience, but also to its relative scale. Unlike a domestic appliance, there is no showroom for selling a house or the variety of materials and hands used to construct them. This was likely the aim of one builder in Sydney who, already in 1925, provided scale architectural models of house designs in a “great diversity of in style, material and cost” to help their clients visualize their future home “with regard to lay-out, design, color, etc” in an unspecified location.²² By the mid-1940s, the highly detailed small-scale house model became a convenient tool for enticing the imagination of domestic consumers. One such venue for displaying these house models was an exhibition of the Timber and Asbestos-Cement Industries of Australia Small Homes Competition in which photographs of the winners’ scale models were displayed, and later featured in the April, May, and June 1945 issues of Australian Home Beautiful. The exhibition, held in Sydney (1945) and Melbourne (1946), was sponsored by local timber, asbestos-cement, and terra cotta tile manufacturers and featured eighteen ultra-realistic scale house models, one hundred different house plans and a full-sized section of an asbestos-cement house.²³ Miniature scale house models included in the brochure had clapboard or masonry siding, glass for windows, window frames and mullions, curtains, trees, plants, grass, clay or asphalt roof tiles, brick or stone patterning on walls, and concrete or asphalt driveways. Visitors to the exhibition were given a free sales brochure including twenty-two plans—among which were nine winning designs with photographs of models from the competition. An additional sales brochure was produced the following year by James Hardie & Co. with thirteen house designs—three of which were winning designs from the competition—accompanied by a plan and photo of its scale models (fig. 9).

Figure 9. James Hardie & Co. Sales Brochure, 1947.

Over the next three years, photographs and drawings of scale house models found their way into the material and visual culture of domestic lifestyle and builder magazines as a descriptive tool for the client and a medium for describing new house designs. This is demonstrated by the April 1946 cover of Australian Home Beautiful in which a woman is depicted studying the furniture and distribution of rooms in a house model with its roof removed 1 metre (approximately 3 feet) above the ground level—the same height as an orthogonal scale plan drawing (fig. 10).²⁴ That same year, the model of an architect’s design for a flat-roofed “Immediate Post-War Home” in a Melbourne suburb was featured along with a plan and aerial perspective of the design in the same magazine.²⁵ The model constructed of cardboard, paper, Perspex, sandpaper, balsa wood and a twig for a tree depicts the entire property and surrounds, including the house proper but also a garage, driveway, grass, shrubs, and stone patio. This is contrasted by photographs of a scale model house which was designed by a reader and published in the December 1946 issue of Australian Home Beautiful.²⁶ Unlike the Immediate Post-War Home model, the property on which the model of the reader’s house sits lacks vegetation, a patio, or any indication of the property size—presumably because blueprints of the house could be purchased for £3 and built on any similarly flat site. Two additional depictions of models are worth mentioning from this period: the two-page colour photo of a model showing a small cottage designed by the Victoria architect P. Mockridge in 1947; and a quarter-scale model of R.C. Coxhead’s winning design for the Sydney Morning Herald’s house competition during the same year (fig. 11). Mockridge’s model was featured in the November 1947 issue of Australian Home Beautiful and was constructed using green paper for grass, a twig for a tree, metal stair handrails, balsa, cardboard, a metal car, Perspex glass and (most likely) foam for the sandstone fireplace and structural walls.²⁷ Coxhead’s model was published in the June 1947 issue of Architecture magazine and included similar garden detailing and rendering of the windows and siding, but also curtains behind the windows to give it an added sense of realism.

Figure 10. Australian Home Beautiful, April 1946 cover featuring Sherman house designed by Kurt Popper.

Figure 11. P. Mockridge, House in Lilydale, Vic., 1947.

A significant indication of the importance which scale house models came to play in domestic architectural production during this time was its use in an advertising poster for the 1948 blockbuster film Mr. Blanding Builds his Dream House, shown worldwide, including in Australia (fig. 12). Starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Melvyn Douglas, this adaptation of Eric Hodgins’s popular 1946 novel of the same name follows the Blandings’ comedic renovation of a leaning, dilapidated, nearly 200-year-old Connecticut farmhouse. Although the poster depicts the Blandings sitting behind a model, contemplating the domestic bliss such a structure afforded, no such scene or model appears in the movie. Rather, during visits with the architect and the construction site, Mr. and Mrs. Blanding struggle to understand the logic of the architect’s plans or find their way around the house. Kellogg’s cereal offered its patrons in the United States the opportunity to purchase sketch plans and a model kit of Mr. Blanding’s dream house so they too could participate in the reverie of owning such a house as the characters of the movie. As a promotion for the film, the studio built seventy-three “dream houses” in various locations in the United States, selling some of them by raffle.²⁸

Figure 12. Film advertisement for Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, 1948.

Following closely on the heels of the Blanding’s comical efforts at reading an architect’s plans were scale models promoted as a tool to help the client visualize proposed designs in three-dimensions. In June 1949, Australian Home Beautiful ran an article describing how the British Council of Industrial Design was promoting the use of furniture models on a simplified rendering of architect’s plans to not only plan rooms, but to work with manufacturers to design and make pieces of furniture to fit contemporary needs.²⁹ The image is not dissimilar to a Budweiser Beer Advertisement from 1950 that portrayed a couple using the architect’s model of their home with grass, glass windows, and doors to plan the layout of furniture in their home. Perhaps inspired by such imagery, in 1952 Life magazine published an article about a retired engineer in Denver who developed a cardboard house model kit for clients who have difficulty reading the architect’s blueprints. The kit came with cardboard walls and clips to hold them together, furniture cut-outs, stairs, paper shutters, fireplaces, windows, doors, roofing, and siding—all to make it easy for the new homeowner “to experiment before the house goes up.”³⁰

In Australia, the scale house model continued to be employed as a tool for architects and builders to advertise proposed designs. These include one from Australia’s oldest residential developers, Sir Albert Victor Jennings 1948 Model Home; and another from 1949 created by architects Kevin Pethebridge and Frank Bell, entitled the “Pay-Your-Way House,” which was featured in Australian Home Beautiful for several months.³¹ Jennings’s model was created to promote the mass-produced and mass-marketed house and land “packages” he offered during the post-war era in government-funded estates of Victoria, Tasmania and Canberra.³² Like Jennings, Pethebridge and Bell’s design was a hypothetical scheme meant to appeal to lower income families who in this instance could erect the home themselves. To this end the walls of both models are constructed of a thin cardboard modelling material embellished with clapboard siding and present spacious open plans, large contemporary windows using Perspex, and faux shrubs to show ample garden space—all to suggest ambition, prosperity, and status. It was during this time (1949–51) that modernist emigrant Harry Seidler began to publish a series of house designs in which scale models were used in lieu of perspective drawings to illustrate the structure in three-dimensions. Simultaneous to these events, professional model making practices such as Finecraft Scale Models or individuals like Edwin B. Ryan had begun to specialize in the production of miniature scale buildings.³³ So essential was this medium to architectural practice that students from the Melbourne University School of Architecture exhibited their designs in ultra-realistic scale models during 1952 with Perspex, trees, grass, rotating doors and furniture.³⁴ As a 1954 advertisement for Finecraft Scale Models suggests, the scale ultra-realistic model had now become identified as the medium of choice with which the architect, town planner and client could “eliminate all doubts both technical, functional and aesthetic.”³⁵

Affect and World

Whether the miniature architectural model is an exact replica or only has a vague resemblance to an existing or proposed building, it is the locus of contemplative reverie because it simultaneously represents the real and fictitious. The fact that the model must be built for it to exist emphasizes the model’s role as an important tool for the imagination of architecture. As a physical construction, the model is real. Yet, because modelling materials are not building materials the client must interpret their spatial, structural, or material affects as a faithful depiction of a real building. When the modelling materials and methods of construction simulate those in the actual house in highly realistic detail, it becomes a surrogate for the house. This was the intention of the doll’s house and building sets from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that re-presented the interior of a home and many of its familiar contents in great proportional detail.

For many young Australian men and women during the 1940s and 1950s, ultra-realistic house models were already familiar as a dolls house or toy building sets. Dolls’ houses have their beginnings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as teaching tools for developing a sense of order and taste in young women who would one day keep and furnish their own houses.³⁶ These models were meant to re-present the interior of a house and many of its familiar contents in great proportional detail. The play of a child with these models, however, was different from that with building sets like Meccano or Wenebrik, which could be used to create any number of different architectural structures. Rather, the walls, windows and roof of a dolls house were static. The furniture and accessories of a family’s doll house were meant to reflect the child’s own home. In the same way a young woman could manipulate the objects within the doll’s house to “act out” different events of everyday life within a particular house, architects and builders constructed ultra-realistic models to have an affect upon the playful contemplation or “reverie” of their clients about the series of events which their houses would provide. Deleuze and Guattari describe this experience not as imitation but a state of becoming.

For Deleuze and Guattari, “becoming” is a way of being another that occurs not by imitation or analogy but as a function of influences rather than resemblances. In “becoming” one element of a heterogeneous collection or assemblage belonging to the user of a model—daily activities, family members, personal belongings—is imaginatively drawn into the territory of another element: the material and spatial realities represented by the model.³⁷ The model user does not imitate the occupant of the house, but will identify with them and imaginatively experience the percepts and affects which the model house depicts. The aim of these advertising tools is that the materials, forms, and spaces will affect the client’s reverie about domestic bliss afforded by such a structure and entice them to purchase the to-be-constructed object.³⁸

This affect which an architectural model can impart depends on stimuli which arrive at our various sensory organs from the external environment and cause change in our mental and physical states so that we feel a sensation which has affected both the mind and the body. Although often equated with the emotions, it is much more encompassing, pertaining to an affection that modifies both the body and the mind through the idea of desire and potential. It is at once perception of the mind and sensation of the body. In Spinoza’s words, affects are “affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections.”³⁹ By means of their modelling materials, the aim of the architect is similar to that of a painter or sculptor, namely, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, “to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another” and to affect the potential client.⁴⁰ Specifically, to trigger the imagination of the client to dream about the efficacy of the world described by the model to contribute meaningfully to their own.

To Conclude

Today the ultra-realistic physical architectural model of the 1940s and 1950s is experiencing a veritable renaissance in contemporary education and practice. Thanks to the domestication of industrial laser cutting and three-dimensional printing technologies over the past twenty years it is now a familiar sight to encounter in architectural schools and offices, students, architects, and builders assembling affordable, quick, highly detailed miniature scale models of buildings. Architects use these models for a variety of reasons, not least as a catalyst for the imagination of its user. In his seminar book Opera aperta (1962, The Open Work), Umberto Eco identifies this kind of creative work as “closed” since the structure’s materials, forms, spaces, and relationship to its surroundings are clearly defined and its uses are not open to multiple interpretations.⁴¹ The use of modelling materials to create ultrarealistic scale house models during the 1940s and 1950s as advertising tools are similarly closed works. They are miniature representations of proposed constructions that can be held in the hands of their users like a new appliance or tool.

For Jean Baudrillard, exchanges such as those imagined by contemplating the architect’s scale house model for a Christmas present at the beginning of this paper are indicative of their transition to signs in the consumer world of objects. As Baudrillard reasons, consumer objects “are all in perpetual flight from technical structure towards their secondary meanings, from the technological system towards a cultural system.”⁴² Using the mirror as an example, Baudrillard argues that it is an important fixture of well-to-do bourgeois interiors: an opulent, expensive object, which “permitted the self-indulgent bourgeois individual to exercise his privilege—to reproduce his own image and revel in his possessions.”⁴³ The scale house model held in the hands of Santa Claus was a sign of the “Australian Dream” that flowered in the late 1940s and 1950s, founded on the idea that home ownership can lead to a better life and is an expression of success and security.⁴⁴ Scale house models of to-be-constructed homes were probably not given as presents under Christmas trees in Australia during the 1940s, but their inclusion in house advertisements with other domestic consumer objects reinforced the significance of home ownership as indicative of prosperity, self-reliance and the prospect of a comfortable retirement.⁴⁵

In practice, however, architects during the early twentieth century would preference the use of plain and simple models as open works in design and during early discussions with clients, since any number of unforeseen financial, material, or constructive issues can arise that will change the overall appearance of the proposed design. In an article from 1942, Price Nunn similarly observed how “[i]n modern processes the necessity for the model arises at an early stage in design. The initial idea may be formulated on paper, but immediately the model directs mass relationships of parts and their proportions, shows the necessities of light, shade and colour and the deference of building to environment.”⁴⁶ This was clearly the aim of the plain and simple models Mies van der Rohe used to explain his design for a housing project with the Chicago developer, Herbert Greenwald (fig. 13). Indeed, highly detailed presentation models like that for the Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Lever House in 1950, or the model of the J Tuck House Harry Seidler held in his hands in 1951 (fig. 14), were reserved for affecting the imagination of an uncertain client or motivating a community behind a design when it had reached a level of resolution to begin construction.⁴⁷

Figure 13. Mies van der Rohe and realtor Herbert Greenwald discussing a model, 1956. © Frank Scherschel, The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.

Figure 14. Harry Seidler with model of the Meller House, Castelcrag, October 1950. Photographed for People magazine. Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

Whatever the cause for the shift of the model from medium of contemplation to object of consumption—from doll house to dream house—its role as a locus of the imagination remains the same. Above all, the selection and crafting of modelling materials into representations of proposed designs in these instances demonstrates the transformative power of modelling materials over the user, potentializing their perceptions, contemplations, and the opening of possibilities for action within the spheres of production and consumption.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Mindrup

Matthew Mindrup is a Sydney-based architect and architectural-historian whose research explores the role of materials, and especially physical models for the conception and construction of architecture. He lectures broadly and publicly on this subject and those of his books including The Material Imagination (Routledge, 2015), his co-translation of Bruno Taut’s 1919 anthology The City Crown (Routledge, 2015) and the first comprehensive history of the architectural model and its uses entitled The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse (MIT Press, 2019).

Notes

1 See the cover of the Australian Home Beautiful: A Journal for the Home Builder 24, no. 12 (December 1945).

2 “Building Houses from Small Scale Models: A New Method to Assist the Inexperienced,” Australian Home Builder 19 (1925): 62.

3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; orig. 1991), 164.

4 Maurice Gauthier, “Studying in Three Dimensions,” Pencil Points 7 (1926): 410–11; Royal Rook, “Model Making in the Drafting Room,” American Architect 117, no. 2227 (1918): 250; Margaret J. Postgate, “Architectural Models from Bar Soap,” Pencil Points 10 (1929): 392–96.

5 “The Small Scale Model in Architecture: a Word in Season,” Art and Architecture: The Journal of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales 6, no. 4 (1909): 100–103.

6 Berthold Audsley, “Miniatures and Their Value in Architectural Practice,” Brickbuilder 23 (1914): 213; Edwin S. Parker, “The Model for Architectural Representation,” Architectural Forum 30 (1919): 119; William Boring, “Use of Models in the Study of Architecture,” Architecture 45 (1922): 200; and a shorter article with the same title in Architect and Engineer 60 (1920): 100; William Harvey, Models of Buildings: How to Make and Use Them (London: Architectural Press, 1927), 1; Philip McDonnell, “Models and Their Making,” American Architect 107, no. 2054 (1915): 277. See also Henry Rutgers Marshall, “The Architect’s Tools,” Architectural Review 4 (1897): 55.

7 Boring, “Use of Models in the Study of Architecture,” 200–202.

8 For the value of using models to study and develop ideas in the United States, see Parker, “The Model for Architectural Representation,” 119–20; Boring, “Use of Models in the Study of Architecture,” 100; Audsley, “Miniatures and Their Value in Architectural Practice,” 213; McDonnell, “Models and Their Making,” 277; Harvey, Models of Buildings, 2–4; Eugene Clute, “Models, Their Making and Their Use” in Drafting Room Practice (New York: Pencil Points Press, 1928), 57. For arguments that preliminary study models should be plain and simple, see Harvey, Models of Buildings, 26, 31; Parker, “The Model for Architectural Representation,” 121; Audsley, “Miniatures and Their Value in Architectural Practice,” 213–14; For an early call to use models in Australia see “The Small Scale Model in Architecture,” Art and Architecture, 100–103.

9 The architect is advised to draw the model on a sheet of paper, cut it, fold it, and then add on additional layers, including columns, cornices, and mouldings. Clute, “Models, Their Making and Their Use,” 50–59, 63; McDonnell, “Models and Their Making,” 278–79; Harvey, Models of Buildings, 26–40; Parker, “The Model for Architectural Representation,” 121; Percival Marshall, Wonderful Models (New York: Spon & Chamberlain, 1928), 177. See also Royal Rook, “Model Making in the Drafting Room,” 247; Gauthier, “Studying in Three Dimensions,” 416; J. Price Nunn, “Models and Their Making,” Builder 162 (1942): 553.

10 Harvey Wiley Corbett, “Architectural Models of Cardboard Part IV,” Pencil Points 3 (1922): 14–18; Leroy Grumbine, “Cardboard Models—I,” American Architect and the Architectural Review 122, no. 2399 (1922): 111–14; Leroy Grumbine, “Cardboard Models—II,” American Architect and the Architectural Review 122, no. 2400 (1922): 135–39; Leroy Grumbine, “Cardboard Models—III,” American Architect and the Architectural Review 122, no. 2401 (1922): 177–79.

11 Richters Kunst-Anstalt, Anchor Designs for Architectural Models, No. 4 (Rudolstadt, Thüringen: Dr. Richter’s Publishing House, 1890). The instruction booklet was reprinted circa 1996. On the Kindergarten, see Friedrich Fröbel, Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, trans. Josephine Jarvis (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), 118, cited by Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 50.

12 For Meccano, see Brenda Vale and Robert Vale, Architecture on the Carpet: the Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013) and the numerous objects in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney (MAAS), https://collection.maas.museum/search?q=meccano; for Dometo, see the MAAS collection, https://collection.maas.museum/object/127133.

13 Vale and Vale, Architecture on the Carpet. For Wenebrik, see the leaflet “Indoor Pastimes for Boys & Girls,” British Trade Exhibition, Melbourne, 1928 (Museums Victoria Collections, https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/252232). For Minibrix, see the set in the MAAS collection, https://collection.maas.museum/object/108980. See also Basil Harley, Constructional Toys (Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications Ltd, 1990).

14 See, for example, the Playthings catalogues of the Sydney-based toy store Walther and Stevenson, who had a saddlery on Hunter Street in 1900 and expanded their business to toys as a sideline. By the 1930s their catalogue Playthings, billed as a “toyshop in a book,” boasted to contain every toy that any boy or girl could want.

15 Matthew Mindrup, “The Merz Mill and the Cathedral of the Future,” Interstices 14 (2013): 49–58, after Kurt Schwitters, “Merz,” Der Ararat 2, no. 1 (1921): 3–9; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “Hochhäuser,” Frühlicht 1, no. 4 (1922): 122–24.

16 Ida van Zijl, Gerrit Rietveld (London: Phaidon, 2010), 131, 191; Terence Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 15 and The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 81.

17 “Model Making by Architects: An Interesting Communication from a Reader Who Strongly Approves the Work Begun at Columbia University,” American Architect 118 (1920): 749–50; Boring, “Use of Models in the Study of Architecture,” 202. The examination results from the Diploma of Architecture course at the Sydney Technical College were published in February 1932. See: “Sydney Technical College Department of Architecture Examination Results 1931,” Architecture: An Australasian Review of Architecture and the Allied Arts and Sciences 21, no. 2 (1932): 51.

18 Jane Jacobs, “The Miniature Boom,” Architectural Forum 108 (1958): 106–11, specifically 109. See also Teresa Fankhänel, “Introducing Theodore Conrad or Why We Should Look at the Architectural Model Maker?” in Les maquettes d'architecture. Fonction et évolution d'un instrument de conception et de réalisation, ed. Sabine Frommel and Raphaël Tassin (Paris: Picard; Roma: Campisano Editore, 2015), 259–68, specifically, 259–60.

19 Jacobs, “The Miniature Boom,” 109–10; see also Arthur E. Herman, “Models of Plastics and Aluminum,” Progressive Architecture 40 (1959): 9–11.

20 Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012), 71.

21 Stuart Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2016).

22 “Building Houses from Scale Models: A New Method to Assist the Inexperienced,” Australian Home Builder 19 (1925): 62.

23 See the asbestos-cement homes exhibition advertisement in The Australian Home Beautiful 25, no. 1 (1946): 33.

24 See the cover of the Australian Home Beautiful 25 no. 4 (1946).

25 “An Immediate Post-war Home,” Australian Home Beautiful 25, no. 3 (1946): 18–19.

26 “Considering Readers Plans,” Australian Home Beautiful 25, no. 12 (1946): 9, 24–25.

27 “Little Home with Long Legs,” Australian Home Beautiful 26, no. 11 (1947): 28–29.

28 “General Electric has Made Your Dream House Come True!” advertisement in Life 24, no. 25 (1948): 78.

29 “This Will Be Our Home,” Australian Home Beautiful 28, no. 6 (1949): 24–25.

30 “Model Before You Build,” Life 33, no. 13 (1952): 57–58.

31 The first issue was “The Home Beautiful Pay-Your-Way House,” Australian Home Beautiful 29, no. 9 (1950): 35. Subsequent issues detailed how the homeowner would construct the house from foundations to details.

32 Suburbanism (Parkville, Vic.: George Paton Gallery, 1988).

33 As a business, Finecraft Scale Models first appeared in the Sydney telephone directory in 1947 and ran advertisements in Architecture: An Australasian Review of Architecture and the Allied Arts and Sciences in 1949. See Architecture 37, no. 4 (1949): vi and Sydney Telephone Directory (1947), http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1127625902. Edwin B. Ryan first appears in the Sydney Telephone Directory in 1949: http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1181390225.

34 “Student’s Designs,” Architecture 40, no. 1 (1952): 42–47.

35 Advertisement of Finecraft Scale Models in Architecture 42, no. 2 (1954): 110.

36 Flora Gill Jacobs, A History of Dolls’ Houses (New York: Scribner, 1965). See also Nicola Lisle, Life in Miniature: A History of Dolls’ Houses (Barnsley: Pen and Sword History, 2020).

37 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; orig. 1980), 284–87.

38 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: The Harvester Press, 1978).

39 Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics, III, D3 in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

40 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 167.

41 Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–24.

42 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1968), 8.

43 Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 22.

44 Jim Kemeny, The Great Australian Nightmare: A Critique of the Home-ownership Ideology (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1983); Chris Paris, Andrew Beer and Will Sanders, Housing Australia (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1993).

45 Jim Kemeny, “A Political Sociology of Home Ownership in Australia,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 13, no. 1 (1977): 47–52; Alastair Greig and Nicholas Brown, Home Magazines and Modernist Dreams: Designing the 1950s House (Canberra: Urban Research Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1995).

46 Nunn, “Models and Their Making,” 553.

47 The earliest reference to Theodore Conrad as the “dean of models” is probably Carter E Hornsley, “Modelmakers’ Work Gaining New Recognition,” New York Times, July 28, 1974, 283; Teresa Fankhänel, “Introducing Theodore Conrad”, 259–68.