Since 2008, the Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre (KÉK) has been organising the International Architectural Model Festival. This year, for the 7th time, it is co-organised by the Hungarian Museum of Architecture and Monument Protection Documentation Centre at the site of its future home.
The motto of this year's festival is "learning by doing." In pedagogical terms, experiential learning refers to the process of learning through experience, one's own practice. Building on this understanding, the 7th International Architectural Model Festival explores how models help us to capture, express, and communicate architectural thought. Or, in other words, why do we make models?
There are many different or even contradictory answers to this question. Accordingly, we will mostly not be showing representative works of art, but rather work-in-progress situations, tools for decision-making, lessons learned, missteps and mistakes, well-tailored experiments and attempts that have been left in the dust.
The architectural model is a tool for communication and learning, a channel for the transmission of ideas. Whether it is a dialogue between architect and client, the expression of a student's intentions to an instructor, a child's desire or an amateur model maker's passion for architectural beauty, the creation and reception of a model is never one-way.
A model is not an art object for its own sake, but part of a process. It can help us to understand the workings of an architectural idea, its situation, scale, context and relationships, but it also reveals at least as much about the person who observes it and forms an opinion. A model is never objective: it represents the reality that its maker perceives and its designer wishes to make you perceive.
The 7th International Architectural Model Festival in 2024 is an admittedly subjective selection of a subjective genre – with interesting, spectacular and instructive objects from Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Slovakia, Slovenia and, of course, Hungary.
Opening hours: Wed-Sun 10:00–18:00 from 27 September to 27 October 2024 Photo: ’Anton’ urban beehive, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Created by Nika Jeromel and Erika Slovša, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Architecture (2022/2023).