Based on the recent discovery of his fully-preserved private archive-models, photos, letters, business files, and drawings-this book tells the story of Theodore Conrad (1910-1994), the most prominent and prolific architectural model-maker of the 20th century. Conrad's innovative models were instrumental in the design and realization of many icons of American Modernism-from the Rockefeller Center to Lever House and the Seagram Building. He revolutionized the production of architectural models and became a model-making entrepreneur in his own right. Yet, despite his success and the well-known buildings he helped to create, until now little has been known about Conrad's work and his impact on 20th century architectural history. With exclusive access to Conrad's archive, as well as that of model photographer Louis Checkman-both of which have lain undiscovered in private storage for decades-this book examines Conrad's work and legacy, accompanied by case studies of his major commissions and full-color photographs of his works. Set against the backdrop of the surge in model-making in the 1950s and 1960s-which Jane Jacobs called “The Miniature Boom”-it explores how Conrad's models prompt broader scholarly questions about the nature of authorship in architecture, the importance of craftsmanship, and about the translation of architectural ideas between different media. The book ultimately presents an alternative history of American modern architecture, highlighting the often-overlooked influence of architectural models and their makers.

Based on the recent discovery of his fully-preserved private archive-models, photos, letters, business files, and drawings-this book tells the story of Theodore Conrad (1910-1994), the most prominent and prolific architectural model-maker of the 20th century. Conrad's innovative models were instrumental in the design and realization of many icons of American Modernism-from the Rockefeller Center to Lever House and the Seagram Building. He revolutionized the production of architectural models and became a model-making entrepreneur in his own right. Yet, despite his success and the well-known buildings he helped to create, until now little has been known about Conrad's work and his impact on 20th century architectural history. With exclusive access to Conrad's archive, as well as that of model photographer Louis Checkman-both of which have lain undiscovered in private storage for decades-this book examines Conrad's work and legacy, accompanied by case studies of his major commissions and full-color photographs of his works. Set against the backdrop of the surge in model-making in the 1950s and 1960s-which Jane Jacobs called “The Miniature Boom”-it explores how Conrad's models prompt broader scholarly questions about the nature of authorship in architecture, the importance of craftsmanship, and about the translation of architectural ideas between different media. The book ultimately presents an alternative history of American modern architecture, highlighting the often-overlooked influence of architectural models and their makers.

Based on the recent discovery of his fully-preserved private archive-models, photos, letters, business files, and drawings-this book tells the story of Theodore Conrad (1910-1994), the most prominent and prolific architectural model-maker of the 20th century. Conrad's innovative models were instrumental in the design and realization of many icons of American Modernism-from the Rockefeller Center to Lever House and the Seagram Building. He revolutionized the production of architectural models and became a model-making entrepreneur in his own right. Yet, despite his success and the well-known buildings he helped to create, until now little has been known about Conrad's work and his impact on 20th century architectural history. With exclusive access to Conrad's archive, as well as that of model photographer Louis Checkman-both of which have lain undiscovered in private storage for decades-this book examines Conrad's work and legacy, accompanied by case studies of his major commissions and full-color photographs of his works. Set against the backdrop of the surge in model-making in the 1950s and 1960s-which Jane Jacobs called “The Miniature Boom”-it explores how Conrad's models prompt broader scholarly questions about the nature of authorship in architecture, the importance of craftsmanship, and about the translation of architectural ideas between different media. The book ultimately presents an alternative history of American modern architecture, highlighting the often-overlooked influence of architectural models and their makers.

An investigation of different uses for the architectural model through history—as sign, souvenir, funerary object, didactic tool, medium for design, and architect's muse. For more than five hundred years, architects have employed three-dimensional models as tools to test, refine, and illustrate their ideas. But, as Matthew Mindrup shows, the uses of physical architectural models extend beyond mere representation. An architectural model can also simulate, instruct, inspire, and generate architectural designs. It can be, among other things, sign, souvenir, toy, funerary object, didactic tool, medium, or muse. In this book, Mindrup surveys the history of architectural models by investigating their uses, both theoretical and practical. Tracing the architectural model's development from antiquity to the present, Mindrup also offers an interpretive framework for understanding each of its applications in the context of time and place. He first examines models meant to portray extant, fantastic, or proposed structures, describing their use in ancient funerary or dedicatory practices, in which models are endowed with magical power; as a medium for architectural reverie and inspiration; and as prototypes for twentieth-century experimental designs. Mindrup then considers models that exemplify certain architectural uses, exploring the influence of Leon Battista Alberti's dictum that models be simple, lest they distract from the architect's ideas; analyzing the model as a generative tool; and investigating allegorical, analogical, and anagogical interpretations of models. Mindrup's histories show how the model can be a surrogate for the architectural structure itself, or for the experience of its formal, tactile, and sensory complexity; and beyond that, that the manipulation, play, experimentation, and dreaming enabled by models allow us to imagine architecture in new ways.

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

The metropolis of the future — as perceived by architect Hugh Ferriss in 1929 — was both generous and prophetic in vision. This illustrated essay on the modern city and its future features 59 illustrations.

Dissects the construction ecology, material geographies, and world-systems of a most modern of modern architectures: the Seagram Building.0In doing so, it aims to describe how humans and nature interact with the thin crust of the planet through architecture. In particular, the immense material, energy and labor involved in building require a fresh interpretation that better situates the ecological and social potential of design.00The enhancement of a particular building should be inextricable from the enhancement of its world-system and construction ecology. A ?beautiful? building engendered through the vulgarity of uneven exchanges and processes of underdevelopment is no longer a tenable conceit in such a framework.00Unless architects begin to describe buildings as terrestrial events and artifacts, architects will?to our collective and professional peril?continue to operate outside the key environmental dynamics and key political processes of this century.