Page 19 - Are-You-a-Model?

9:35 Ecaterina Stefanescu University of Central Lancashire
Rooms: Modelling migrancy in the context of Berlin
Within research, design and architecture, scale models can create worlds of proposition, specu- lation and fiction. This paper, however, situates the model as a tool for observation, documentation and engagement; a slow, durational method that mani- fests a deep participation in the lives of place and people marginalised by wider society.
“Rooms” was an artistic and research project undertaken as part of the Urban Nation artistic residency in Berlin which looked at the Romanian immigrant community inhabiting the city, the spaces they occupy and appropriate, and the objects that they surround themselves with. These instances were drawn, surveyed, documented and then pains- takingly recreated through 1:20 paper models, which were presented as part of a group exhibition.
For border-crossers in particular, the nostalgic association with native objects and artefacts can represent an inner, self-created intangible border, expressing the liminal identity associated with mi- grancy. This connection with objects found at the domestic scale is also to be found at the urban scale, where the Romanian Shop acts not only as the main hub for the Romanian diaspora in the city, but it is also the repository for the containment and con- sumption of memory.
Built to an extreme level of detail this model of an everyday space visualises, offers new insight, and gives a sense of value and recognition to the lived realities of individuals and communities ig- nored or disdained. A situated mode of research, the dedication to this form of representation transforms the seemingly mundane into an object of beauty and atmosphere, encouraging access and participation from the participant, maker and the viewer.
9:55 Tamar Zinguer University of Oklahoma
Worlds in a box: Modeling (inner and outter) landscapes
Tactile model landscapes—mountains, even con- tinents—were manipulated during the nineteenth century at schools for the blind, where the teaching of geography thrived. Zonia Baber, the first woman professor of Geography, embraced this practice at the University of Chicago in 1895, and her patented
“sand desk” enabled all students to expand their geographical imagination by shaping, as if in play, land formations in sand.
Wargaming also thrived in sand-tables, ever since Leopold von Reisswitz conceived of Kriegs- spiel in 1812, to entertain noblemen. These land- scape models have remained strategic tools for the military over a century later, to better envision and navigate World War II plans.
As with the world war model, inner and outer worlds collided in similar trays full of sand set by Margaret Lowenfeld in 1927 in front of children, who then created a landscape and picked from a col- lection of miniatures to create a ‘World.’ Employed worldwide by therapists to this day, the World
Technique has enabled the unraveling of the inner wars of the psyche. These worlds in boxes embody ‘intermediate spaces of experience’ as described by Donald Winnicott in Playing and Reality (1971); places of ‘in-between’, “to which inner reality and
external life both contribute.”
In this presentation, where the haptic and
optic collide, I will examine how the intimate mod- els touched by hand are tied to vast landscapes of social change; and how by manipulating model landscapes, the quest for inner resources and the conquest of external territories overlap.
Ecaterina Stefanescu is an architectural designer, lecturer and artist based in the UK where she teaches architecture at the University of Central Lancashire. Her practice Estudio ESSE, co-founded in 2015, creates site installations and be- spoke design work. Ecaterina uses live-build, model-making and drawing in her artistic and research work to respond to place and material cultures of people.
Tamar Zinguer is an architect and architectural historian who examines the pedagogy of design through history and across scales. Her book—Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modern- ism in Architectural Toys (2015) explored how ludic models reflected their surroundings; while her present manuscript, Sandbox: An Architectural History, follows haptic material experiments in a ubiquitous playful space. She lives in a Bruce Goff House and teaches at the University of Oklahoma.
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