Architectural Model Builder

Find various books on being an Architectural Model Builder, from fiction, to fact. SA Career Focus has assembled these titles for your convenience.

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Architectural Model Builders construct scale models of architectural designs. The models are built from scale drawings, plans, photographs and specifications that are converted into a three-dimensional form. The models give designers a view of how a project will look on completion.

Designing with Models: A Studio Guide to Making and Using Architectural Design Models

Now in its second edition, Designing with Models once again offers a unique step-by-step guide to basic and advanced process modeling. Going beyond descriptions of finished presentation models, this comprehensive text explains the process from start to finish, eliminating the need for students to learn the fundamentals from their peers, instructors, or from frustrating trial and error.
Designing with Models, Second Edition is fully updated, with entirely new sections on photographing models and on the use of computer-aided modeling. Also included are 800 high-quality photographs and in-depth case studies, helping students discover the basics of determining scale; generate new ideas; explore design alternatives; modify, edit, and integrate new forms into models; add final-stage refinements; and much more.

Review by Kalahari.net

Architectural Model as Machine: A New View of Models from Antiquity to the Present Day

This book offers an explanation of why scale models are important to the design process. Albert Smith takes the reader through the history and significance of models in architecture from the magic of the Egyptian scale model to the present day. Through this description of the relationship between architecture and the scale model, Smith demonstrates the most effective process between concept and 'machine', between the idea and the final building. The great value of this book is to reveal the nature of the scale model and to unlock the tremendous potential of this design tool as a thinking and communicative advice. His chronological analysis goes on from Egypt through Rome to the relationship between the Greek paradigm scale model and then on to Medieval and Renaissance models. It concludes with the models of the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, the Russian Constructivists, the American architect Louis Khan and finally looks at the role of scale models in the present day through the work of the Polish/American architect Daniel Libeskind and the American Frank Gehry.

Review by Kalahari.net

Architecture and Its Models in Southeast Asia

This study of the development of architecture and the impact of architectural models on this evolution, draws its early examples primarily from surviving Hindu-Buddhist monuments in Cambodia and Java. Dumarcay argues that, despite the fact that individual physical locations may merit innovation, new construction nevertheless tends to be constrained by pre-existing architectural models held within collective conscience of a given culture. This tendency may be further strengthened when an insecure regime seeks to employ architectural monuments to aggrandize its political position. A break from the models of the past - and thus true innovation - may develop only when a master builder has sufficient confidence in his own artistic vision within a context that allows him to express it.

Review by Kalahari.net

Modeling Messages: The Architect and the Model

Modeling Messages explores the way architects use models to project their ideas and shows how changes in the materials and processes of model making contribute to a model's capacity for expression. The volume focuses on models, American and international, from the second half of the twentieth century.

Models: Architecture and the Miniature

Today, the physical scale model is a centrepiece for design education, celebrated practices and architecture's public relations. The development of digital fabrication devices has made model manufacture even more pervasive. The physical model is the most accessible form of architectural communication. Clients and the general public seem to immediately respond to and understand the model, over blueprints and computer simulations. Many architects use finished models for presentations, competitions and exhibitions. Others also embrace sketch models as quick, economic and flexible generative tools. It is only with the rise of the virtual that the advantages and disadvantages of more traditional models can be fully evaluated. As attested by this book, we are now at an important watershed for the model in architecture. Practitioners and educators alike are seeking to fully understand the multiplicity of model types and how they might be strategically deployed at appropriate stages in the design process. The historic role that the model has played is outlined with attention paid to Alberti, John Soane, the Bauhaus and education reforms.;A cultural history is offered by examining models in the guise of toys, food, cinema, product design, souvenirs, narrative and art. Model theories are considered and tied to specific examples in the field. New technologies and creative combinations of traditional model-making techniques are evaluated. Kinetic, multi-media, nightscape and interdisciplinary models reveal the broad scope and exceptional versatility offered by this important tool.

Review by Kalahari.net