West World

The thing about architectural models is that they are both the thing and not the thing—a point reiterated across the 150 accumulated texts that make up M³: modeled works [archive] 1972–2022, the recent monographic release from Thom Mayne and Morphosis Architects. M for Morphosis, M for Mayne, M for model, one presumes. About the size and shape of a doorstop, with a large, M-shaped hole carved out of the chipboard cover (yes, the same stuff models are made from), M³ offers endless ruminations on the architectural maquette. Models are the world in miniature; models are between the real and the abstract; models are, in the words of twin philosophers Zoolander and Dank Lloyd Wright, “a center for ants.”

But if models are a myriad of things and also not those things, but maybe, definitely something else entirely, what is a hefty volume full of discourse-heavy texts and chockablock with photographs of models?

Mayne and the book’s editors, Hallie Black and Dora Epstein Jones, posit that the collection is an archive. “Unstacking, uncrating, and unearthing,” writes Black in the forward, explaining how Morphosis’s physical archive was exhumed and documented. “Over the span of months, hundreds of models were photographed, and for those that could not be—either homed in museum collections or destroyed in the 1994 earthquake—we scanned lecture slides nestled into image binders.”

A diagrammatic table of contents itemizes each of Morphosis’s projects (built and unbuilt) by year, counting backward for five decades. The studio has evolved over that time, maturing from “LA School” upstart to global player, as tracked via the models, which themselves have changed from materially expressive to digitally precise. Yet this catalogue raisonné of sorts doesn’t offer the same pleasure as an archive, like the ritual of donning white cotton gloves or the chance to lose oneself in some weird detail on a spackled surface. The trim size doesn’t do credit to the models, unfortunately, and visceral qualities—the smell of resin off gassing, the dust on Strathmore, the velvety feel of 3D printed plastic—vanish in the translation to the page.

And while the Morphosis team dutifully documented each project, the images are just that, representations (of representations). This liminal condition between states has always been one of the firm’s hallmarks. “My first impression of Morphosis was through publications of models and drawings so interconnected that the boundaries between mediums were ambiguously blurred,” writes Marion Weiss, cofounder of Weiss/Manfredi, about her early encounters with the work while a student at Yale. (In those preinternet days, magazines and monographs were cultural capital—passed around design studios and stacked on drafting boards.)

Ironically, it is a vintage image, one of the few reproduced from slides, that best illustrates this point. Kate Mantilini (1986), the star-studded Beverly Hills restaurant shuttered in 2014 yet lives forever on the cover of the firm’s earliest monograph. The model is also gone, destroyed in the Northridge earthquake. It was comprised of layers of painted glass held in suspension to form illusionary spaces. The photograph flattens the spatial effect into a ghostly haze.

If not an archive, then just what is M³? If you look at the texts and ignore the images, you’ll find that it is a celestial sphere where various persons of influence orbit around Morphosis. It is a Pritzker Prize–winning universe: a model of Mayne’s milieu.

Contributors fall into overlapping categories: architects, theorists, critics, academics, employees, former interns, LA friends, East Coast intelligentsia, and regulars at Mayne’s semisecret salons at Stray Dog Cafe, his personal art and research space at the firm’s Culver City HQ. (There are one or two notable absences, a by-product of the recent turmoil at SCI-Arc, the independent architecture school Mayne helped to found and where he taught until recently.) There are no chapters, project descriptions, or individual essays in the book or even an index to find the page number of each author’s treatise. Instead, following the acknowledgments and a brief foreword, there is one meta text composed of a series of short fragments that run in fifty-word chunks of sans serif across the top of each page, with rare occurrences of continuity with the accompanying photographs. Bold type calls out occasional phrases—“it has no gender,” “tiny as Alice large as Gulliver,” “resolutely asexual,” “undo beginnings and evade endings”—that make a scan of the pages akin to a taco truck LED sign broadcasting Jenny Holzer. (Dos al pastor, por favor. And a Diet Coke.)

Contributors appear to have been briefed, but however idiosyncratic they are as individuals, they mostly fall into three camps. Some seem to be blurbing; a few talk about the influence of Morphosis and the models on their own practice; most others stake out some discursive corner or another with whimsical provocations. All are friendly, praising, like a wedding toast or a eulogy.

This continues for over nearly 1,000 pages. It’s relentless, an I-Ching of disciplinary thought that’s generally unreadable.

I say all that with respect for my colleagues, mentors, and professors who are included. Individual bits are anodyne, but the overall impression is masculine and self-reinforcing—typical of monography and a representation of a hermetic field, which, one hopes, is itself becoming archived as more inclusive and expansive discussions find purchase. And yet, in digging through the book and scanning through the pages of contributor bios, one gets a sense of generational legacy particular to Los Angeles.

The M³ milieu maps an LA where big names dominate. Frank and Thom cast long shadows over other talents in this town. Generations of practitioners who passed through Gehry Partners or Morphosis on their way to setting up their own studios rarely (if ever) get the same kind of recognition as their OMA counterparts. There are many great firms, but none reaching the heights of acclaim as Jeanne or Bjarke. They hit a titanium and chain-link ceiling. (What local scenesters once called “dead tech.”)

This may be a surprise for folks outside this palm-strewn basin. The mythology of Los Angeles claims that this is the place where architects can just come and build in the sprawl. But a calcification has taken hold since the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design published the scene-defining Experimental Architecture in Los Angeles (1992) by Aaron Betsky, John Chase, and Leon Whiteson. In his contribution to M³, Betsky, the last surviving member of that critical trio, echoes his earlier analysis. “The beauty of Morphosis’ work was to ennoble, if that is not too old-fashioned a term, the vernacular of stucco homes, messy boulevards, extended spatiality, and car-driven order that surrounded them,” he writes. “The model Morphosis, Studio Works, Hodgetts + Fung, Eric Owen Moss, and others created then and there all had the sense of being experimental propositions for Southern California.” For young architects working here today, such patois is a siren song. Creative and professional success modeled on these earlier practices is difficult to achieve through will alone, though more possible with some combination of an academic position, trust fund, or partner’s second income.

The rent is too damn high. Plan check approvals are slow coming. And even in Pritzker-scented stratospheres, there’s still the one-upmanship described in Todd Gannon and Ewan Branda’s A Confederacy of Heretics (2013). Their exhibition and catalog documented the few months in 1979 when Mayne, freshly back on the West Coast after completing his M. Arch at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, opened The Architecture Gallery in Venice and then mounted a lecture series accompanied by one-week-long shows by eleven practitioners, including Morphosis. “The sense I had that L.A. was experiencing a unique phase of creativity, with time, concretized,” writes Mayne in the afterword of that publication. More than a decade later, that concrete holds fast certain foundational narratives, just as the pavement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre immortalizes hand- and footprints of bygone stars.

Hands do play a role in this book of models, in the tradition of Le Corbusier, Koolhaas, etc. They point and grasp, are sometimes gloved or bejeweled. I’m guessing it’s Mayne’s own hand, wrist heavy with drip, beaded bracelets, and an Apple Watch, that appears first, on page sixteen. But these revealing moments meant to highlight the model’s forever slippery verisimilitude grow mundane. More interesting is when bodies enter the picture: A woman leans in from off page to dust a study for Emerson College; a pair of staffers carefully adjust the towering Hanking Center (2012) as the mock skyscraper rises into the rafters. These images remind us that making models is craft and labor. How many hours did junior designers sweat in the model shop so that we could ruminate on the flickering abstraction of a discursive object?

M³’s cutest moments are when the palaver is put aside and we get glimpses behind the wizard’s curtain. Eric Meyer, Morphosis’s director of design fabrication, shares a fragment of scripted code for 3D printing and Edmund Ming Yip Kwong, project architect at the firm, offers up the “Morphosis Rust Recipe,” the secret to the studio’s famous finish, applied liberally. Thesis students take note: “Apply the iron powder slurry to the 3D printed model. Spray the combined rust activator and blue patina lightly on the painted model to generate the rust patina effect.” Oxidation on demand.

Graham Ferrier, an architect at Morphosis in the 2000s, recalls building, packing, and couriering crates by hand for client presentations across the globe. “[J]ammed in the overhead bin or below cabin (never checked), and towed across the Frankfurt tarmac and onto the next plane,” he writes. “We ran through the next airport hoping the resin would cure in time.” Strip away the breathless, Jason Bourne tension and his text speaks to a prosaic truth shared by models and monographs: necessary for business development.