Reduced-Scale Architecture

About

Small buildings have served many purposes besides planning. Han dynasty tombs in China held pottery watchtowers, granaries and farmhouses for the afterlife, and Middle Kingdom Egyptian burials included model houses and workshops. Medieval metalworkers shaped reliquaries as tiny churches, complete with roofs, arcades and domes.

Architectural models gained new importance in the Renaissance, when Filippo Brunelleschi and later Michelangelo used wooden models to explain domes to patrons and builders. Wealthy Dutch households of the late 17th century commissioned cabinet doll's houses furnished in exact miniature. Contemporary artists use shrunken architecture to unsettle scale. Takahiro Iwasaki builds temples, pylons and cranes from threads of towels and toothbrush bristles, and Projeto Morrinho, begun by young people in Rio de Janeiro in 1997, has grown into a sprawling model favela of bricks and paint. What a model leaves out is as telling as what it includes.