The models were made by Piercy&Company’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 by the 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, unpeeling itself before your eyes like a clockwork onion, inviting you inside and overlaying the technical story with all the stuff of ‘home’. A family home, with a curl of real smoke lifting from a steel chimney with the rhythms, rituals, warmth and eccentricities of family life: a clockwork bird flaps its wings and the small sounds of children playing filter from hidden speakers.
The first of the Supermodels made by the 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, unpeeling itself before your eyes like a clockwork onion, inviting you inside and overlaying the technical story with all the stuff of ‘home’. A family home, with a curl of real smoke lifting from a steel chimney with the rhythms, rituals, warmth and eccentricities of family life: a clockwork bird flaps its wings and the small sounds of children playing filter from hidden speakers.
The interweaving of the technical with the human in the Steel House model set the agenda for the rest of the Supermodel series.
Supermodels by Piercy&Company. Photograph by Andy Stagg.
Supermodels by Piercy&Company. Photograph by Andy Stagg.
Many of the models use, as their “moving” element, light, miniature shadows of moving people are projected onto the floors of the model of a contemporary office building, while the image of a whale skeleton is lifted high into the atrium; then a ballerina dances over the floors like a ghost.
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 makings, such as speakers, atomisers, LED strips, motors, and film.
