Are You A Model?: On an Architectural Medium of Spatial Exploration

Dieses Buch nähert sich Architekturmodellen nicht als starre Objekte, sondern als Anstoß für die Frage: Was genau ist eigentlich ein Modell? Wann im Entwurfsprozess entfaltet ein Modell seine Kräfte oder erfüllt seine Aufgaben? 30 Essays geben Antworten auf neun gezielte Fragen, verflechten disziplinäre, geografische und wissenschaftliche Perspektiven und fördern dabei überraschende Gemeinsamkeiten zu Tage. Gerahmt werden die Beobachtungen von einem einführenden Essay sowie einem Gespräch zwischen der Historikerin Annabel Wharton und dem Künstler Thomas Demand. Are You a Model? erkundet das Modell als Phänomen und Werkzeug der Architektur, ohne nach abschließenden Antworten zu suchen. Es vereint Stimmen aus Architektur-, Wissenschafts- und Kunstgeschichte, Softwareingenieurswesen, Architektur und kuratorischer Praxis. Dabei werden Modelle nicht etwa als Objekte nach Entstehungszeit, Genre und Material klassifiziert, sondern vielmehr als epistemologisch vielfältige Praxis verstanden.

Mit Beiträgen von Giulia Amoresano, Yana Boeva, Giulia Boller, Stefanie Brünenberg, Alberto Calderoni, Daniel Cardoso Llach, Wonseok Chae, Diana Cristobal Olave, Carlotta Darò, Cansu Degirmencioglu, Kai Drewes, Ruth Ezra, Jia Yi Gu, Erik Herrmann, Carolin Höfler, Deniz Avci Hosanli, Christian Janecke, Sebastian Loosen, John McMorrough, Christina Moushoul, Ana Carolina Pellegrini, Eliza Pertigkiozoglou, Andreas Pilot, Stéphanie Quantin-Biancalani, Salome Schepers, Ecaterina Stefanescu, Simona Valeriani, Mara Trübenbach, Annabel Wharton, Matthew Wells, Baris Wenzel, Holger Zaunstöck, Maxime Zaugg und Tamar Zinguer

Anna-Maria Meister is an architect, historian, and professor of architecture theory at KIT Karlsruhe, as well as co-director of the saai archive and leader of the Lise Meitner Research Group at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI) - Max Planck Institute. Meister works at the intersection of the histories of architecture, science, and technology, focusing on the interdependencies of processes of design with the design of processes with an emphasis on their political, social, and aesthetic consequences. She is co-curator of the international research project "Radical Pedagogies" and co-editor of the book of the same name (2022).

Christina Clausen studied art history and German literature in Marburg, Padua, and Berlin. From 2014 to 2020, she was a research assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Hildesheim. She has been working on her PhD thesis at the Technical University of Darmstadt in the research cluster "Architectures of Order" since 2020.

Lisa Beißwanger is a historian of art and architecture focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her main topics of research include the history of performance art and its interfaces with architecture, as well as the educational architecture of the long 1960s. She is currently assistant professor at the University of Koblenz. Previously, she was a research assistant at the Department of Architecture at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

Teresa Fankhänel is an associate curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and editor-in-chief of the Architectural Exhibition Review. She was a curatorial assistant for the exhibition "The Architectural Model" (DAM, 2012) and has published two books on models (The Architectural Models of Theodore Conrad (2021) and An Alphabet of Architectural Models (2021)).

Chris Dähne researches the history and theory of architecture, media, and technology. She is a postdoctoral researcher in the LOEWE-Cluster Architectures of Order. Practices and Discourses between Design and Knowledge at Goethe University in Frankfurt and in the DFG project BAUdigital at TU Darmstadt. She recently published the book Utopia Computer. The "New" in Architecture? with Nathalie Bredella and Frederike Lausch.

Christiane Fülscher is professor for Architecture History, Theory, and Preservation at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Trained as an architect and art historian, her research focuses on the cultural as well as socio-political objectives of architecture as well as the history of architectural education at the beginning of the twentieth century. She is author of the monograph Deutsche Botschaften. Zwischen Anpassung und Abgrenzung (2021).

Anna Luise Schubert is an architectural researcher and cultural worker. As a board member of the Centre for Documentary Architecture, she co-conceived its online archive project documentary-architecture.org, organized the exhibition series "The Matter of Data", and contributed to internationally presented films such as the eight-screen video installation "Deep White" (35 min, 2019). She currently coordinates the Lise Meitner Research Group at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max Planck Institute.