LIGA 36: Isidoro Michan-Guindi (Mex). Hybrid Creatures
Photography: Arturo Arrieta
Scale models are fascinating objects in their own right, especially for those unfamiliar with architecture. The needed miniaturization of everything they contain is mesmerizing: a landscape where all the features of daily life can be read and recognized, regardless of the degree of abstraction involved in representing reality on a smaller scale. It is remarkable that, in the digital era, and unlike military models, or mechanical devices such as trains, planes or ships, architectural practice still uses these prototypes as practical objects to make decisions. Not a pastime for idle people, it is puzzling that given the amount of time and precision involved in their manufacturing, scale models are still a part of productive environments.
In making models, ideas do not precede the work, but overlap with it. They encourage thinking by doing: the constant fluctuation between cycles of craftsmanship and practical thought coupled to it. Once the crafting ceases, surges the reflection on what has been produced. Perhaps for this reason, scale models still linger in architects’ workshops. When there is doubt on what to do or how to go about a question, turn to making models—say many of our colleagues.
While observing Isidoro Michan-Guindi’s large-scale models, one cannot help but wonder what each way of making scale models tells us about architecture itself, more than about the pieces per se. In the case of the column house, the four-legged tower, or the spiral building, the first thing that strikes us is the need to find a way to assess their presence. They are unusually large. They represent reality on such a scale that their size confronts the body on an equal footing with them. In their presence, one is forced to establish a relationship that cannot be merely contemplative by grasping their qualities or reading their representation of reality.
The body is stirred into motion in an odd way: creating an unusual relation and appraisal of them. Somehow, the object thus becomes a subject at the same time. “I know that the object is there, becoming transcendent within my consciousness, but at the same time I realize that it has not achieved its full existence” says Breton. A recurring thought overwhelms us when facing these models; the disturbing suspicion of accepting them under the category of subjects, becomes troublesome, upsetting and alluring. The object is therefore not totally passive. It raises a cluster of questions that, beyond their ontological status, prompt irrational responses of recognition or of dismissal and fondness. In sum, conflated and conflicting emotions. The model’s very presence, by revealing itself as a strange reality, demands an acceptance or rejection, empathy or hostility, far from the functional scrutiny to which we subject most objects in our daily lives.
The affection derives from observing and confronting these scale models as bodies. Whether due to their size, similar to that of a small animal or a pet, or to their symmetry and configuration, one seems to be in the presence of strange figures, half animals, half objects. Some would appear torsos without heads and feet, or heads without bodies, others an animal stuck to the ground, or with too many limbs, or an upright figure, or someone with an extravagant headdress. This procession of crippled and strangely beautiful creatures seems to demand attention, affection and closeness. Like with a group of outcasts, it is hard to relate to them with anything other than concern, empathy and regard, upon encountering them. The amplification of this reading confronts us when discovering that, in real size, some of the architectures these objects represent house bodies in positions that one would define as unusual: sticking their heads out of a hole, looking around, standing on a table, or lying down; figures establishing unusual dimensional relationships with space, either because they seems not to fit inside, or because they inhabit a body of an unnatural scale.
These models also suggest a strange practical uselessness. The expected functional purpose of scale models is, in this case, defeated by their own, really unusual, size. The sense of the model exceeds the representation of its architectural double, the other object it would be on a real scale. Although it still serves certain practical purposes, such as exploring the relationship of volumes with light, understanding the interactions with the outside, verifying the proportions of rooms, etc., it is at the same time too inefficient. The work necessary to carry the project out on a real scale, turns it into nonsense, meaningless and inconvenient. Used as a projection tool, to play out decision-taking scenarios, these models not only serve to physically experience the architectural space they represent on a real scale but to reveal how model spaces paradoxically attain a strange dimensionless nature, distanced from the meticulous work associated to the functional conventions of proportions, heights, lengths and distances.
Thus, their corporality is disturbing and, to a certain extent, incomprehensible. That is to say, these scale models exceed the usual relationship understood between physical objects and the body, between the subject and its exteriority, awaiting to be used, understood, contemplated. They are deeply material and are made in a way that supersedes their mere utilitarian representation of a real object. They are incomprehensible and therefore disturbing; obdurate in their resistance to being entirely understood: why so big? Why so solid? And why such a realistic approach to representation? By acquiescing to their acceptance as a utilitarian object, they prompt us to wonder: what is this for?
The object is freed from a practical purpose, ceases to be a tool, and therefore acquires a different quality, based on the irrationality and absurdity of its own existence.
Following Calvino, and nonsense, like that wonderful absurdity of drawing a map on a 1:1 scale, one might wonder if the anticipated result of Isidoro’s practice will be to create magnificent and enormous 1:1 models, in which he would abstract everything superfluous, redundant, and architecture would become pure affection establishing unusual relationships with the body. We await impatiently and joyously look forward like those expecting good news.
