Gideon Schwartzman
About
A Few Thin Things

Many Mini Model Homes

    Architectural ideas have historically circulated through a literary format. Since the rediscovery of Vitruvius’s De Architectura in the fifteenth century, the architectural book has fore fronted itself as a critical tool in the deliverance of disciplinary knowledge. Producing a book became a milestone for many architects in cementing themselves as authoritative figures within the architectural profession. Acting as broadcasting devices, these books were utilized as instruments of exchange between the architects who authored the books and the readers who constructed their designs.

    Many Mini Model Homes fits directly within the literary lineage of architectural design methodology and recrafts a relationship between architectural author and reader. As history has clearly expressed, the book has been utilized as a simultaneous pedagogical device of far stretching instruction and as an independent forum for individual design exploration.
Operating as representational projects, architectural pattern books begged to be copied so that the designs within them could be realized. Many Mini Model Homes renews this conversation of representational methodology through the production of both a book which contains the designs of fifteen “model” homes and the drawings needed to replicate them in model scale. Hence the title of Many Mini Model Homes.

    Many Mini Model Homes comes paired with an instructional video of how to construct each of the fifteen houses designed within the book! Akin to the eight-minute belly blitz, this video guides viewers into the quick fix six pack abs of architecture. Highly graphic, purely superficial, and designs that you just can’t look away from – these homes blast away your winter gloom into a summer ready architectural body of work.