Entangled Dependencies: The Architect, the Model, and the Professional Modelmaker in Britain, 1969–90

Through a case study of the professionally made architectural model in Britain between the late 1960s and the early1990s, this article draws from archaeologist Ian Hodder’s concept of entanglement and argues that the relationship between the architect, the architectural model, and the modelmaker exists as an entangled web of shifting distributions of power governed by asymmetric tensions and mutual dependencies. In tracing the changing relationship dynamics that led to a dramatic broadening of the model’s visual styles to incorporate both realism and creative abstraction during this period, this article describes the professionally made architectural model as the locus of an intricate web of interconnected dependencies in which the model, the modelmaker, and the architect reap both the positive and negative consequences of their increasingly fraught entrapment. Demonstrating how a study of their entanglement reveals the complexities that exist within the human-object interactions that surround them, this article highlights the mutual dependencies that bind the model, the maker, and the architect together.