On models

The idea for a special issue of Theatre and Performance Design, ‘On Models’, arose from our previous scholarly work on models in theatre and architecture and our practice backgrounds in both disciplines, and we would like to thank the journal editors, Jane Collins and Arnold Aronson, for taking up our suggestion and making this double issue possible. Our most recent research on models, published as The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2018), showed that the set design or scenographic model had only been dealt with marginally in the disciplinary discourses of theatre and performance studies. This seemed to be in distinct contradiction to a trend we observed during the last decade that increasingly sees models as scenographic elements on the stage as well as models becoming a fixture in scenographic exhibitions. Additionally, to us, these models represented a new, different kind of model and our curiosity was stirred. In The Model as Performance, we call this new kind of model the ‘autonomous model’ and define it as an artefact from which no further artefact is produced and as one that has been conceptualised and designed as its own reality, and as its own world. A close look at the history of both theatre and architecture models revealed that the autonomous model could be traced back to the Italian Renaissance, and we followed its appearances from Scamozzi’s Teatro all’Antica at Sabbioneta to recent scenographic installations at the Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space (PQ) and the Venice Architectural Biennale. Our call for papers for ‘On Models’ thus asked for contributions that would give specific insights into contemporary and historical modelling practices, and that would address both physical and digital models as objects of research, objects of experimentation and, last but not least, as objects of desire for maker and viewer. The responses were swift, and it was evident from the contributors’ comments that we had tapped into a rich yet under-researched field of practice that both designers and scholars were eager to address. As a result, ‘On Models’ is a curated collection of scholarly articles, personal reflections and visual essays that speaks from practice and about practice in an international context and from a range of disciplines – from scenography to architecture and lighting design, and from the perspectives of designer, archivist, historian and theorist. Our article, ‘Cosmopoiesis, or: making worlds. Notes on the radical model worlds of Anna Viebrock’, opens this issue and unfolds the complex terrain of the model as one of the designer’s central media of ideation, communication and representation but also with its definition of the model as possessing the capacity for cosmopoiesis, or worldmaking. This notion is exemplified by the next contribution from raumlaborberlin, titled ‘experimental arrangements’, in which the large-scale structure functions as a self-referential model that can operate as a catalyst for sociospatial change. The Berlin-based