A new exhibition from Piercy&Company celebrates the art of model making, bringing architecture and ideas alive through movement, sound, scent and film.
Supermodels is a creative body of work which represents the distillation of 20 years of Piercy&Company’s design thinking around the importance of the haptic, sensory and experiential in architecture. Employing mechanical automata, projection, sound, light and scent, the exhibition experiments in how far the architectural model can be pushed as a tool for engaging audiences and communicating ideas around buildings and the built environment.
The free exhibition is open to the public at Regent Quarter, King’s Cross London N1, and runs until Sunday 11 December 2022. It takes place in an atmospheric meanwhile space, in the Jahn Court building, a short walk from King’s Cross station.
Each model is based on a building or building concept by Piercy&Company, abstracted in order to capture the quintessential idea behind the scheme. The models were made by the studio’s architecture team to explore and test experiential aspects of architecture, including the spatial, the tectonic and the tactile. Collectively they represent Piercy&Company’s work across typologies from large commercial developments to churches, memorials and one-off family homes.
The first of the Supermodels made bythe studio was Steel House. Steel House is based on an experimental modular steel house that was fabricated off-site and craned into a constrained urban site in Kew, London. The model separates out into parts to describe the off-site fabrication process, but then overlays the technical story with all the stuff of ‘home’-the rhythms, rituals, warmth and eccentricities of family life. The sounds of alarm clocks and childrens’ voices, the scent of cinnamon and the puff of chimney smoke from the model evokes the sensory architecture of ‘home’. The interweaving of the technical with the human in the Steel House model set the agenda for the rest of the Supermodel series.
Other models in the exhibition include a Georgian villa that opens to reveal laughter, conversation and music; a contemporary church tracing the church’s daily rituals through sound, scent and changing light; and a film-based model posing the question of ‘what if our work spaces could feel like civic buildings with a sense of theatre, openness and generosity?’. The exhibition culminates with Flythrough, a critique of the predominance of the image over the haptic experience of buildings. Here, visitors are invited to view the work via a live camera feed projected onto the adjacent wall.The camera lens travels through the physical model, where surfaces outside of the camera’s field of view have been removed, leaving only an abstract assemblage.
Materials used in the exhibition range from plaster, black valchromat, birch ply, aluminium, photo etched copper, white laser cut Perspex and walnut veneers, to elements more unusual to model making, such as speakers, atomisers, LED strips, motors, and film.
Piercy&Co’s Founding Director, Stuart Piercy, said: “The ‘coming alive’ of the models through film,sound and movement plays into the mysterious allure of objects with a miniature life of their own –the doll’s house, the cuckoo clock, the model railway. Supermodelsseeks to reconnect digital and physical worlds to evoke a universal and childlike sense of wonder.”
Fiona Neil, Piercy&Co’s Studio Director (Interiors), added: “The choice of a raw space -currently at the often unseen stage between strip out and refurbishment -forms the perfect counterpoint to the models in Supermodels. To heighten this creative tension, our exhibition concept explored the language of construction works. We used an exposed timber framework system for all the freestanding elements and exhibition furniture, in a celebration of the utilitarian economy of the building site.”
The exhibition lighting design was by 18 Degrees, with lighting equipment courtesy of Reggiani.
Paul Beale, Director of 18 Degrees, said: “We have seen first-handsome of the amazing models that have been produced by Piercy&Co over the years, soto have the opportunity to light them in this important exhibition was too good to miss. It has been a privilege to be involved and we are grateful to lighting manufacturer Reggiani who supported this exhibition through the provision of top-qualitylighting.”
The graphic identity for the exhibition was designed by Wolfe Hall. Built around a bespoke typeface that takes cues from the modular construction method of the artwork to produce characterful geometric letterforms in a slim, ‘CAD routed’ weight, it was then overlaid with intricate shapes found in the original model drawings to create bold and textured compositions.
Supermodels runs until Sunday 11 December.
