Hillary Davlin's Reading Response #1

" Pandora and the Modern Scale Model Machine" discusses the changing yet prevailing role of the scale model "machine" within architecture. The scale model machine is a device that goes beyond a literal model-it is a conceptual architecture model that creates experience and defines what is believed to be invisible. Beginning in the mid 18th century, scale model machines have been used as tool in order to fuel architectural feats from the Sagrada Familia to Liveskind's drawings. Intertwining art and technology, these machines are mechanisms that define concept and societal shifts. These machines thus try to make the intangible, tangible, projecting new designs and ideas into the future.

Gaudi, the architect of the Sagrada Familia, used infamous chain models to distinguish complex geometric arches and form. By using these mathematical chain models as a sort of scale model machine, Gaudi strove to represent the purity in religion, the inexplicable, invisible things, and God as a figure.

While the intent of these machines varied as the years progressed, the scale model machine continued to propel new architecture designs into and throughout the 19th century. Tatlin, an artist by trade, created the Monument to the Third International as a small scale of utiliarian power. Shifting towards a communist, alchemist stance, this complex, twirling and dynamic model highlights that society (unlike Gaudi's days) is ran by the people, not God. Lisskitzky, much like Tatlin, tried to replicate a new and changing society through architecture model machines. Tatlin designed small, tentative models for the Five Year Plan. Through the dynamic, spatial relationships, these models not only deployed the new way of life, but they also destroyed the old, stringent ways in the process.

Architect, Louis Kahn, questioned the role of the scale model machine in society. Kahn believed that architecture is representation or model of consciousness and culture. Thus, instilling the ideology of the box of pandora, the scale model highlights the failures and uncontrollable elements within society. The model machine therefore becomes a measurement of perceived chaos and imbalance.

This chapter concludes with Libeskind and how he used the scale model machine to represent freedom from all limitations and chaos. Unlike Kahn who almost had a negative connotation with chaos, Libeskind uses his abstract drawings as a model which embraces chaos. Through a continual destructive, rebuilding and rewriting process,  Libenskind shows that the model machine is more important than the physical building of a city.