Page 27 - Are-You-a-Model?

17:55 Simona Valeriani Victoria and Albert Museum and
Royal College of Art
Studying, copying, making, sharing. Multiple approaches to an historical model.
In 2018 the fragment of a 19th century model of the Royal Albert Hall was found in the back of a cup- board. Observation of the surviving parts and a study of archival sources enabled a basic undertesting of its history and function: it played an important part in the design process, as a tool for building consensus between the designer and the Committee of Advice, and it was a ‘place’ of experimentation. Many ques- tions remained open, though.
The process of building a physical ‘copy’ of the model, including an informed guess of what the missing parts might have looked like, was a precious opportunity to intimately understand the historical artefact. Simultaneously, a digital twin was produced. Enriched with annotations, it presents information on the physical qualities of the ‘original’ and the clues it contains to its history, and to how it fits within a ‘family of models’ of the Hall.
What is the potential of physical and digital rep- lica models as instruments for historical enquiry? What can we learn in the process? These are some of the questions at the core of two research pro- jects conducted as a collaboration between the V&A, Manchester University’s B15 model making work- shop and the CNRF’s MAP laboratory (Marseille).
The paper will explore the epistemic qualities of these different models and reflect on the design and research journeys which produced them – in the 19th century and today. A discussion of the Albert Hall’s historical model, which bears traces of the different stages it forwent and doesn’t completely reflect the Hall as built, will contribute to problematising the idea of an ‘original’.
Dr Simona Valeriani is senior tutor at the V&A/RCA History of Design postgraduate program. Among her recent projects are the International Research Network ‘Architectural Models in Context’ and the resulting follow on project culminating in the exhibition ‘Shaping Space-Architectural Models revealed’, both funded by the AHRC. She has co-edited An Alphabet of Architectural Models (Merrell, 2021) and is completing a monograph on the history of building the Royal Albert Hall (Brepols, 2023).
19:30 – 21:00
○· Evening talk
A conversation between Anna-Maria Meister and Annabel Jane Wharton with artist
Thomas Demand [online] on the model as technique, material, and form—and its role in societal and artistic processes. They will discuss the material resistance of models during their making as well as their representation, the scalar limits of multiplication, seriality and size of models, and questions of joinery,
precision and semblance.
Thomas Cyrillus Demand was born in 1964 in Munich, Ger- many. From 1987 to 1992, he attended both the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the Düsseldorf Art Academy be- fore receiving a master’s degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths’ College in 1994 in London. He initially focused on sculpture, using photography to document his paper and cardboard reconstructions. In 1990, however, photography and sculpture traded places in his artistic process; the photograph became the artwork. Since 2011, Demand has been working as a pro- fessor at HFBK, the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. The artist lives and works in Berlin.
ARE YOU A MODEL? THURSDAY, 3.11.22 27