Stagecraft: Models and Photos

Ewing’s photographs invite a reexamination of the ways architectural creativity and thinking unfold through the picturing of objects and the crafting of images. Using the gallery as a photography studio for several weeks, Ewing experimented with a range of lighting, framing, and staging techniques that drew upon his research on the history of model photography. He studied the archive of model photographer Louis Checkman, located at the Avery Drawings & Archives Collection at Columbia University, took inspiration from the work of Balthazar Korab and Ezra Stoller, and exchanged ideas with Jock Pottle, a prolific model photographer active during the 1990s and early 2000s.

As photographic subjects, the models—displayed alongside Ewing’s photographs—are a unique provocation. Rather than simulate whole buildings or strive for realism, the models illuminate moments of structural ingenuity and architectural craftsmanship. Representing projects by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gerrit Rietveld, Jørn Utzon, Norman Foster, and Peter Zumthor, the models were produced by students during the 1990s and early 2000s as part of historian and Columbia professor Kenneth Frampton’s pedagogical exploration of the history of architectural tectonics. The models are testimony to the students’ tactile intelligence and historical engagement with the “poetics of construction”—a term coined by Frampton. In dialogue with these objects, Ewing’s photographic illustrations offer a meditation on how the cross-fertilization of material and visual modes of representation can prompt new ways of seeing, making, and understanding architecture.