The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture

Description

The Model as Performance investigates the history and development of the scale model from the Renaissance to the present. Employing a scenographic perspective and a performative paradigm, it explores what the model can do and how it is used in theatre and architecture. The volume provides a comprehensive historical context and theoretical framework for theatre scholars, scenographers, artists and architects interested in the model's reality-producing capacity and its recent emergence in contemporary art practice and exhibition. Introducing a typology of the scale model beyond the iterative and the representative model, the authors identify the autonomous model as a provocative construction between past and present, idea and reality, that challenges and redefines the relationship between object, viewer and environment. The Model as Performance was shortlisted for the best Performance Design & Scenography Publication Award at the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) 2019.

Thea Brejzek is Professor for Spatial Theory at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and an internationally recognised expert in scenography. In 2011, she was the founding Curator for Theory at the Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space (PQ). Recently, she has been a Visiting Professor at Bartlett School of Architecture, UK, and has been appointed to the international scientific advisory board of the Bauhaus, Dessau. Lawrence Wallen is Professor and Head of School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. From 2001-12 he was Professor of Scenography at the Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland. A trained visual artist and architect, his research and practice is concerned with representation of space, spatial narative and postcolonial readings of landscape.

The achievement of The Model as Performance is to shift thinking on the spatial model from representational concerns (the resemblance of the model to what it copies or projects) to interactional concerns (how models and our performative relations with them actively participate in what Thea and Lawrence call the 'co-construction' of reality)...But this is not just an academic book. Its nuanced, rigorous widening of the category of the model will no doubt be explored in studio pedagogy and studio practice. * U-Mag *