Folio4
ADS4
Royal College of Art
INTRODUCTION
Super Models
School of Architecture
84
2016
mathematical models, theoretical models, business models... From early computer simulations performed as part of the Manhattan Project6 to the significance of climate modeling for political processes, we are basing our decisions on a series of numerical models. As such, the world itself can be considered a sort of super model. This is a condition created by humans, but only partly controlled by them. As the real and the virtual, the seen and the unseen, begin to merge, we must take a candid look at the technologies that are transforming the concrete reality of social civilisation into abstractions—figures, algorithms, financial speculations—leading to the accumulation of nothing. Only through striving to understand and adapt the model can we be more than merely supporting actors playing out simulations of real life.7 It was on this premise that ADS4 started the year with the idea of the ‘model’: the conceptual bridge between the virtual and the real. We investigated what models mean for architecture and urbanism, their present use and future consequence. We also formed our own definition of the model to help distinguish between prescriptive models and descriptive ones. From scale models and representational ones, to the social models that form the context for our lives, we explored the possibility that we might one day fabricate—for better or worse— a new model for reality. “To make a model”, wrote O.M. Ungers in 1982, “means to find coherence in a given relationship of certain combinations and fixed dispositions. This is usually done with two types of model: visual models and thinking models”.8 For Ungers, by means of these two model types we can formulate an objective structure that turns facts into something more certain and therefore more real. The model is an intellectual structure setting targets for our creative activities—in a similar way to how the design of model-buildings, model-cities, modelcommunities, and other model conditions are supposedly setting directions for subsequent actions. The pursuit of new and alternative models seemed particularly pertinent this year: Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles; Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content; and Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Social media and the sharing economy are transforming models of business, open-source platforms and the nascent ‘maker movement’ are challenging modes of production, and the referendum on Europe is already disrupting our model of politics. Through our investigations we set out to identify our own individual models of thought, theory and practice. From Model to Reality Around 1989, television images “started walking through screens, right into reality”, suggests filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl.9 Data, sounds, images and now BIM models are routinely transitioning beyond the screen into a different state of matter. Theorist Benjamin Bratton discerns that, “contemporary [digital] platforms are now displacing, if not also replacing, traditional core functions of states, and demonstrating, for both good and ill, new spatial and temporal models of politics and publics”.10 Within architecture, models have become unplugged and unhinged, and have started occupying off-screen space. But by becoming real, most models are subsequently altered, compromised or ‘value engineered’. SketchUp models masquerade as real cities;