Page 23 - Are-You-a-Model?

14:30 Lisa Beißwanger Technical University of Darmstadt
Introduction:
On models as actors and stages
This session approaches models through tropes of the theater, such as stage/staging, plot/narrative, or actress/performance. Taking the performative potential of models literally, it asks for the realities models produce and the ways these
realities are enacted by architects, clients, and the general public. Understood as stages or stage sets,
models create both actual and potential realities. Asking for the plots or stories models tell to pursue, convince, or to question, the same applies to models in any scale or
material form.
14:45 Christian Janecke
University of Arts & Design in Offenbach/Main
Modeling scenic attitudes:
On funnels, conical stairs and caveae in postmodern architecture
In connection to rotundas, as an eye catcher of a foyer, as the focal point of a plaza, or to accent a courtyard in the 1980s one would sometimes come across funnel-shaped pits, stone benches arranged in a way reminiscent of the cavea of an amphitheatre, or a combination of the two opening onto conical staircases approaching a round podi- um – which in turn could constitute the tip of a fur- ther, now massive cone shape opening downwards. Such combined conical and invers conical stairs in the shape of an hourglass have existed since the Renaissance. In Baroque theatres, they connected the stage and audience area, in gardens they cre- ated a link between different terraces.
An indecision, and a multiple one at that, is characteristic of the Postmodern use of such ele- ments: To begin with, they seem to make no clear choice between being tribune (stone steps) and stage (podium), which in turn leaves us in the dark as to whether we are to attend someone else’s per- formance here or make our own grand entrance; finally it is unclear whether we are being presented with a 1:1 situation in its own right or the evocation of a much bigger, possibly even ancient theatre venue.
This paper argues that the half-heartedness of an allusion to theatre in de-theatricalized times, as well as the gap between existing small form and imagined large form here reveal the role of the im- plicitly modelled: Namely that it does not precede the built form but is inherent to it!
Christian Janecke, Dr. phil. habil., has been Professor of Art History at the University of Arts and Design in Offenbach/ Main since 2006. Having published a number of essays on the stage and the stage-like, Janecke is currently working on a book outlining such approaches towards the theatrical beyond theatre in visual culture.
14:30 – 16:10
5 What is my act?
Lisa Beißwanger is an art historian focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries. She currently researches and teaches at the Departments of Architecture Theory and Science and His- tory of Art and Architecture at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Previously, she worked as a curator of contempo- rary art, and received her PhD from Justus Liebig University Giessen in 2020.
ARE YOU A MODEL? THURSDAY, 3.11.22 23