Visionary Architecture - Tool of Scaling

Tool of Scaling

Architects are able to imagine, see and define a distant object that is in fact a building through the process of fabricating models, scaling them up and down, ascending from the abstract to the concrete. Instead of physically creating the design of a building into its complete scale and form, multiple up and down transitions in scale size of models allow the building design that is on paper to emerge, become visible, representing the material as being real, bringing the building into existence. The visionary nature of the eighteenth-century movement did not reside so much in this radical formalism as in the bizarre conceptions in which the architects indulged, and their delight in projects of vast size. These scaled models were considered to be utopian and fantastic in design, where the sense of fantasy is enhanced by symbolic meanings that are achieved by making the whole form of the building speak.