Historians have overlooked the ways in which architects perceived and used models during the nineteenth century. Drawing on a wide range of documentary sources, as well as drawings, prints and a surviving model, this essay examines how architectural models were deployed in the competition for the Royal Exchange and its design and construction (1839–44). Many figures saw models as important arbiters in choosing designs and, after the initial competition process, C.R. Cockerell and William Tite demonstrated the use of models as poetic and rhetoric tools in architectural practice. Drawing especially on the example of Tite's model of the Royal Exchange portico, which survives at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the essay discusses how architectural models played an important role in the social activities surrounding the profession including ceremonial events, conversazioni and international exhibitions.

Architectural models made nineteenth-century London. As the city grew it became the global centre of finance, industrial capitalism, and the British Empire. New buildings, urban spaces, and networks of infrastructure were demanded, constructed, and rebuilt. Models were a crucial medium of communication that enabled architects, politicians, and the wider public to conceive the city’s expansion of buildings and spaces. Based on extensive research in archives, museums, and period publications, ’Modelling the Metropolis’ addresses not just architectural models but also an eclectic range of images and objects – from technical products to sculptures, diagrams to engravings, maps to photographs – that dramatize the politics and aesthetics of London architecture in the nineteenth century.

No abstract

No abstract