Model Behavior was on view at the Cooper Union from October 4 to November 18.
For his recent HBO series, The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder, the comedian who adopts the persona of an absurdist life and business coach, constructed a life-sized model of the Williamsburg dive bar The Alligator Lounge in a local warehouse. Fielder’s Alligator Lounge, reproduced meticulously with torn vinyl seats and identical drinking glasses, was a stage set for Fielder’s counselee, a trivia-buff named Kor, to rehearse a difficult conversation that he planned to have at the real Alligator Lounge. Rationalizing his time-consuming and costly commitment to replicating the bar, Fielder explained, “Any aspect of this space could radically transform his big moment … and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.”
I was thinking of Fielder’s theory of architecture as I walked through Model Behavior, a disarmingly ambitious exhibition curated by the Anyone Corporation. Model Behavior, as the title suggests, is as much about behavior as it is about models. And like Fielder, the exhibition suggests that the two are very much entwined. Architecture, as is the case with other disciplines (science, math, and fashion are all represented in the show), relies on models to conceptualize, iterate, and realize its aims.
What then is the model’s role “in projecting, eliciting, or even reinforcing social behavior,” curator Cynthia Davidson asks. Log, the journal published by Anyone Corporation, dedicated an issue (also titled “Model Behavior”) to this same, worthwhile question in 2020. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Davidson and assistant curator Patrick Templeton would have developed the theme in greater depth, perhaps venturing something of a behavior modification for the discipline and then drawing out any hypothetical social ramifications resulting from this change. But despite (or perhaps, because of) their previous engagement with the topic, they don’t land on any clear answers.
Instead, Model Behavior takes a casual, big-tent approach to its subject matter, opting for volume over specificity. Packed into The Cooper Union’s colonnade are a retail mannequin, an old-timey anatomical model, a Swiss railway clock (“a model of the relationship between the Sun and the Earth,” according to historian of science D. Graham Burnett), a Barbie dream house, a chunk of the Death Star from Star Wars, along with film and sound. The displays dispense with wall text, so I clumsily flipped through the exhibition booklet, trying to make sense of these objects, and more, huddled together in the compact and crowded corridor.
Digital technologies make a recurring appearance. Wa.k studio’s hybrid contribution partly consists of a model of single-family home encased in a glass dome. An iPhone placed next to the maquette activates an augmented-reality element, allowing the viewer to control conditions like the time of day and season as the model home, as glimpsed on the phone screen, shifts in response. Miriam Hillawi Abraham’s Abyssian Cyber Vernaculus: Virtual Terrain, depicting a VR journey through Ethiopia’s rock-hewn medieval churches, is a wry commentary on the conquest video game genre and what the curators identify as “the active exclusion of Black and Brown formalisms and artifacts from the architectural canon.” Ruy Klein’s Red Mountain (Apophenia, Model #2) contends with GIS mapping, transposing layers of data onto a sculptural topographic model. Nearby, an unceremoniously presented computer screen displays an interactive BIM axonometric model by INFORM Studio.
But conceptually compelling as these are, it’s the physical models that offer the greatest visual delight. Office Kovacs’s Supertall Superobject: Proposal for Collective Living IV aims to replace the drab, skinny, peopleless luxury towers that have sprouted up in Midtown with a neonhued pastiche dripping with polymorphous charm. Besler and Son’s Barn Raising turns a timber-frame grange into a diminutive construction site, albeit one with full-size tools (a measuring tape, a pair of scissors) scattered about. The playful scalar contrast slowly reveals itself as a contradiction in form: it’s never clear if we are looking at a scale model of a house being built or a fullsize model of a model being built.
The exhibition veers toward the political at multiple points, presenting interesting projects that nonetheless get lost in the jumble. An excerpt from a film by Forensic Architecture is, as its work always is, an exciting use of spatial modeling put toward activist ends. In the clip, the group analyzes how the flow of toxic air through Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” a region stretching from Baton Rouge to New Orleans replete with chemical factories, maps neatly onto what is historically known as “plantation country,” linking environmental toxicity directly to the legacy of slavery. Höweler + Yoon’s Models and Mis-Behaviors, a heavily researched installation surveying the architectural typologies of democracies, could easily be an exhibition of its own. The display includes 3D-printed models of the interiors of political assembly buildings in London; Washington, DC; Maseru, Lesotho; Cape Town, South Africa; and Moscow. Presented alongside the Economist’s Democracy Index scale, a ranking from Full Democracy to Authoritarian Regime, the models function somewhere between a proposition for connecting spatial organization and political decision-making, and as a synecdoche for the behavior that each serves as a stage for. The text of the accompanying handout begins with a quote from British statistician George Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
The same could be applied to Model Behavior as a whole. While it offers many intriguing and insightful tangents on the function of models in architecture and beyond, the exhibition feels at once oversaturated and underdeveloped. In Fielder’s social experiment, the model Alligator Lounge stands in for a degree of control that one can never fully achieve; “the rehearsal” never plays out on the stage set exactly as it does in real life. Later in the season, Fielder ships his model bar cross-country to an Oregon warehouse and opens it to the public. The doppelgänger dive becomes a destination of its own, with unpredictable social dynamics playing out within it. Similarly, Model Behavior offers an enticing, if ultimately limited, proposition: models impact social behavior. But perhaps models themselves are ill-equipped to describe exactly how that is done. It’s only when real life enters the picture that we are fully able to grasp their impact.