City models are one of the most powerful (and challenging) tools at the disposal of curators of the built environment. I have now had the pleasure of working with two, first at the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) and now at the Boston Society of Architects (BSA), and I’m astounded at their potential for breathing life into grand narratives of urban development that might be too abstract otherwise in an exhibition context.
Though city models have a long history in territorial management, dating back at least to Renaissance era plans-relief used for military strategy, the founding of city planning as a profession gave them a new importance in the twentieth century. In fact, the image of a suit-clad man surveying a city model has become a pop-culture shorthand for the perceived detachment of mid-century city planners.
After World War II, however, some exhibitions began using city models to engage and educate the public in city-building, like the Better Philadelphia exhibition in 1947, or the Panorama of the City of New York at the 1964 World’s Fair. Although both were designed by powerful urban renewal regimes (the former by Ed Bacon, Louis Kahn, and others, and the latter by Robert Moses), they pioneered the techniques now used by architecture centers like CAF, BSA, the Philadelphia Center for Architecture, and New London Architecture, to share the ongoing stories of their cities with the public.
As educational devices, city models bring the complexity of the built environment down to a more manageable scale, without losing the wonder of its immensity. The city takes on a textural quality. Visitors can see the evolving urban fabric, in the truest sense of the term—the tartan of Boston’s Back Bay or the patchwork of the North End, punctuated by pockets of parks and the seams between neighborhoods. Although nothing can replace firsthand observation on the sidewalk in understanding the intricate ballet of the sidewalk, city models can dramatize the broad strokes of urban development. Their spectacular, evocative, and social qualities have the capacity to connect personal experience to the arcane world of city planners, politicians, urban designers, developers, and architects.
The Chicago Architecture Foundation
On my first day as an intern at CAF, the curatorial team threw me into a project to revitalize their city model of Chicago. They instructed me to observe how visitors used the model, and to take notes on what worked and what did not. Watching people interact with the miniaturized city, I saw an amazing array of reactions and interactions. A tourist stood awestruck at its sheer enormity; another stooped down to ‘street level,’ furiously clicking their camera; a couple recalled an intimate street-corner memory together; a father and daughter competed in feats of urban knowledge. I quickly learned that city models act as social objects—compelling artifacts that inspire social behavior between companions and strangers alike.
Alongside this social engagement, however, I noticed some large interpretive challenges. Although the exhibit had been designed in the round, the original designers had aligned the introductory content to the less used entrance of the space. Even more daunting, visitors often had difficulty connecting labels to specific places on the model. How can an exhibition designer point out a single building in such a complex urban fabric?
For the remainder of my time, I worked with CAF’s curators and cultural communications firm Faust to mitigate these difficulties and bolster the engaging qualities of the model. First and foremost, we reoriented the model surround to face the most commonly used entrance, using Grant Park (often called Chicago’s “front yard”) and a “you are here” label as anchors for the introduction.
Second, by refining the label hierarchy, we visually simplified the surround and attempted to reflect how people already used the model. We reduced the hierarchy’s original six levels to only three based on visitor behavior: “Points” referred to distinct objects on the model to which visitors could point; “Areas” referred to larger sections, such as parks, to which visitors could gesture more broadly; and “Specials” were reserved for non-geographic labels. We bolstered these new categories by referencing specific visible features of the model in the label text, encouraging the visitor’s eye to ‘bounce’ between text and object to find correspondence.
Finally, we rethought how to align labels with their objects on the model. The old surround axially aligned labels to their referents, matching Chicago’s street grid. This made places in the center of the model difficult to label, and caused feasts of information in some areas and famines in others. Instead, we decided to create a series of “roadside vistas”—clusters of labels at convenient vantage points, with arrows and illustrations to direct visitor attention.
Although I left before the installation of the new surround, I look forward to reporting back about how the visitor experience has transformed since.
The Boston Society of Architects
In my latest project, my work has expanded from updating a city model exhibit to developing one from the ground up. The Boston Society of Architects recently inherited a city model that once belonged to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and has been in the care of CBT Architects for several years. In the near future, BSA plans to develop an architectural exhibition around this model for their gallery, BSA Space.
Like any new project, this model presented new challenges and new opportunities. On one hand, Boston’s sections of unplanned, low-lying urban fabric make identifying individual buildings more challenging than Chicago’s gridiron expanse of skyscrapers. Furthermore, the smaller scale of BSA’s model falls in a more god’s-eye-view range than CAF’s 1:600 scale, which gave the buildings a striking architectural quality. On the other hand, as I conducted historical research about Boston, I was reminded of a potentially powerful new tool for interpreting city models: Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City. In particular, his elements of city image—Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes, and Landmarks—which describe how people mentally navigate a city, may offer a useful framework for interpreting a city model, especially one of Lynch’s native Boston.
