The AA's Head of Teaching and Learning, Mark Morris, has guest co-edited a Special Issue of Architectural Design, titled 'World Modelling: Architectural Models in the 21st Century', alongside Mike Aling from the University of Greenwich. The edition explores the changing role of the architectural model in education and practice, with articles on a range of topics including bio-hybrid design and model villages. Mark Morris' own article in this issue is titled 'Paracosmic Project: The Architectural Long Game', exploring the way that writers and designers often work within personal, modelled imaginary worlds, sometimes constructed over decades, enabling them to give birth to their narrative scenarios and spaces.
An excerpt from the editors' introduction:
'The meaning of "model" can range from the loftiest notions of paragons and ideals through to the practical operations of gluing cardboard into a 3D form, through to the most complex of digital constructions. The spectrum of what might constitute an architectural model continues to stretch and to be redefined. It is increasingly difficult to pigeonhole the architectural model as a singular object or method in the 21st century. With the ubiquity of building information modelling (BIM) in the profession, the processes of modelling and the construction of models are now arguably the dominant mode of production. We are reaching a point where every building is born a digital model, concretised in the phenomenal world over time like the slow setting of a cast. The advancement and availability of 3D-modelling software has also allowed designers to be ever more ambitious with their models, to the point where entire imagined and digitally constructed worlds can thrive. This issue of AD does not attempt to clarify what an architectural model might be today; it aims to discuss a new shift that involves how the model sits in a world of its own making – as a "worldmodel."'
The edition includes an article from Mark Cousins, titled 'Worlds without End', which explores the gaps between making architecture, abstracting it in model form, talking about it and writing about it. AA staff Kathy Battista, Kate Davies, Ryan Dillon and Theodore Spyropoulos also contributed articles to this edition of AD. Kathy Battista examined the speculative – if not impossible – model spaces created at the intersection of art and architectural practices in her article ‘The White Cube in Virtual Reality’. Kate Davies wrote a piece titled 'Polyphonic Dreams: Storytelling in Synthetic Reality', introducing us to architecture that is a synthesis of the real and virtual worlds that are starting to seamlessly permeate our environment. Ryan Dillon wrote on 'Zero Zero Ze(r)ro(r): How the Cartographic Thirst to Project the Real Reveals Spaces for the Creation of New Worlds', revealing lines, variances, elisions, paradoxes and lies in a world that cannot be totally known or described through a cartographic dérive of Greenwich. Theodore Spyropoulos wrote an article titled 'Everything You See is Yours: Step Towards the Certainty of Uncertainty', a discussion of the necessity to construct artificially intelligent environments that explore our technological sphere so that we may better understand and actively participate in emerging complexities.
Read this Special Issue of AD
