A thematic project by Ian Kiaer (February-May 2010)

It’s in the nature of a model to slip between more clearly defined disciplines, lending itself to varied practices that include architecture, fashion, design, theatre, and film. As soon as one attempts to define its use, material quality, or attitude it quickly presents exceptions, contradicting claims with alternative qualities and gestures. The model remains restless and difficult to pin down, and yet there is something distinct about its idea that affords particular opportunities in the thinking and making of a work. Can one think about a ‘model form’, similar to the way Theodor Adorno wrote about the essay, identifying in it qualities of resistance to more determined approaches to making? Is it possible to formulate a critique of the model that would bring it close to a theory of the fragment? What relationship might it have to the ruin, the prototype, and the prop?

In posing these questions, I would like to revisit some of the concerns first introduced by the Jena Romantics and later developed by Walter Benjamin, such as the speculative content of an art work, the fragment, allegory and criticism that can provide a theoretical basis for understanding different modes of the model. At the same time I would like to introduce and explore models through making/writing, allowing enough time for our personal practices to be questioned/disrupted/played with. I would also like to present an early modernist text, a treatise on glass architecture, by Paul Scheerbart, to introduce thinking about the model in a more polemical way.

With public lectures and tutorials by Roger Cook, Robert Harbison, Elizabeth Price, and Andrew Renton.

HfG Ulm architetcs in discussion c.1959.