With more than 600 entries for the word “model” in the online Oxford English Dictionary, why would Annabel Jane Wharton, in her new book, attempt yet another definition? The answer is because models are everywhere—“from algorithms and economic pie charts to Barbie dolls and video games,” she writes—and now amplified by climate-change and pandemic models. For Wharton, an art historian, only by defining models can one begin to control them—in essence, to determine their meaning.
Architects have long held certain assumptions about models without necessarily defining their meaning outside the design process or the client presentation. Recent histories of the architectural model, such as Matthew Mindrup’s The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse (2019), generally view such models without pursuing the meaning of “the model” in other disciplines. Wharton takes up examples of architectural, medical, and computational models. All are protagonists in world-making, but the digital, she claims, “dominates science, technology, and consequently our lives.” The “promiscuity” of models concerned philosopher and art historian Nelson Goodman in 1976, in his book, Languages of Art, but for Wharton today, models aren’t promiscuous—they are “out of control.”
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