In a conference room at Radii, a specialized fabrication studio located in Hoboken, New Jersey, shelves are packed with incredibly detailed architectural models that tell the story of contemporary design. "You'll probably recognize some of these," says Ed Wood, Radii's director and founding partner, pointing to the miniature structures. "This is 11 Hoyt for Jeanne Gang. This one is 130 William for David Adjaye. This one is Lantern House for Thomas Heatherwick." The level of detail in these models is extraordinary - from millimeter-wide chalky gray bricks on Lantern House to bronze latticework on the National Museum of African American History and Culture's facade that resembles delicate filigree jewelry at small scale.
Despite the proliferation of digital tools like 3D renderings, virtual reality fly-throughs, and AI illustrations, there's widespread agreement among top-tier architects and developers that nothing can replace the tangible, physical architectural model. Studios like Radii, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, continue to push the boundaries of architectural model making into exciting new territory.
Today's architectural models are far from simple representations. They're theatrical pieces featuring iPad-controlled lighting systems, kinetic elements that reveal themselves at the push of a button, and the ability to become impressively large. Radii created a 16-foot-tall model for SHoP Architects' Steinway tower, which required cutting a hole in the sales office walls for display. When delivering a model to One World Trade Center, Radii had to transport it on top of the elevator cab to accommodate its height. The budgets for these projects can exceed $1 million - a figure that reflects just how significant the business of miniature architecture has become, even though it remains a relatively unknown part of the architecture world.
Physical model making has been part of architecture since ancient times, but as digital tools like AutoCAD, Grasshopper, and Midjourney have emerged, the role of models has evolved. While some firms like Richard Meier's atelier continue to create mini monuments to their projects, and designers like interior designer Giancarlo Valle treat their clay, loofah, and wood models like sculpture, most architects today work entirely on screens once they enter the professional world.
However, some architecture firms are now reinvesting heavily in physical models. BIG recently quadrupled the size of its model shop in Brooklyn to 3,500 square feet due to increased demand. The firm has equipped the space with the same tools as specialty shops: filament and resin 3D printing with large format capabilities, laser cutting, 3-axis CNC milling, and traditional shop tools. There's also a separate woodworking space and dedicated area for resin, plaster, and concrete casting. SHoP, whose in-house models are highly regarded, calls its version a "Fabrication Lab," reflecting the evolving nomenclature in the field.
According to model makers, this investment is strategically smart. "The good architects build models for themselves to iterate, to figure out what they're designing, to catch problems early on," explains Jenny Tommos, an industrial designer turned model maker who has run model shops at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Beyer Blinder Belle, and FXCollaborative, and currently manages the shop at WXY. "There's a learning step translated into a model. The big, good architecture firms understand this. You can sort of tell when buildings are realized and you see stuff that actually wasn't intentional."
At Rockwell Group, model making is frequently for internal use. "Clients rarely ask us for models, but we create them proactively because they tend to reveal things that renderings can't and bring the project to life," says Brad Zuger, a Rockwell Group partner and studio leader. The firm also has a specialty practice creating diorama-like models for theatrical productions, which directors, choreographers, and actors reference throughout rehearsal. The Victoria & Albert Museum acquired several of these models last year.
Firms with dedicated model shops often use them for design and conceptual models while enlisting specialized studios for high-stakes projects like competition entries and donor gifts. Snøhetta, which has long centered models in its practice, commissions Radii when it needs models made "in a more Sunday attire manner," according to Donesh Ferdowsi, an architectural designer in the firm's New York office who works closely with model shop manager Mario Mohan. One recent collaboration involved creating a gift for a competition review panel - a kit of parts that snapped together based on a conceptual model for the project.
Vincent Appel, founder of architecture firm Of Possible, which focuses on single-family residential projects, makes models for internal use and recently enlisted Carlos Castillo, founder of the two-year-old model shop Castillo Fab, to create display models of past projects. "You've got to figure out a way to punch through that sort of homogenizing effect of our image culture," Appel explains. "That's what the effort is here with Carlos."
Much of what's driving today's model making - and fueling one-upmanship in details - is the booming luxury real estate market. Developers commission elaborate models for their sales suites to attract prospective buyers. "In the last 15 years, 80 percent of our work is just high-end residential towers around New York or Miami," says Michael Kennedy, founder of Kennedy Fabrications, a scaled constructions shop in Midtown Manhattan. The remaining 20 percent includes installations for set designer Es Devlin and a railway station model that appeared as a prop in HBO's "The Gilded Age." "But it gives us an opportunity to make really museum-quality pieces, which I like," Kennedy adds.
These high-end projects include a 9-foot-tall model for the Residences at the Waldorf Astoria, which took nine months to build and cost nearly $1 million. The six-figure price tag covered gold leaf detailing, a mechanized roof that opens to reveal the amenity floors' pool and winter garden, and over 4,000 programmable lights that can illuminate individual condos. The model rests on a glowing alabaster plinth. For One Wall Street, a luxury apartment building, Kennedy's firm created thousands of tiny vegetables for the basement grocery store, each so realistic they look edible. "That's just obsession, honestly," Kennedy admits. "No one asked us to do those vegetables."
While methodical megadevelopment models pay the bills, many model makers prefer less glamorous formats. Tommos primarily works on sketch models using "down and dirty materials: foam core and paper versus acrylic." She finds these "a lot more fun." Richard Tenguerian, a master model maker based in Noho who opened his shop in 1985, thrives on the fast-paced nature of architecture competitions. "The design is still cooking; it's not complete," explains Tenguerian, who studied architecture at Pratt. "I have my record - all the competitions that I build models for, they win. And we have never missed a deadline."
For Tenguerian, model making has enabled him to work with numerous great projects instead of spending years on the same building in an architecture firm. In his office, he displays a wall of busts of his clients, including Robert A.M. Stern, Thom Mayne, and Philip Johnson, all covered in plastic bags to protect them from shop dust. Of all the models he's built, including a 3-story-tall model of the Empire State Building in its lobby, Tenguerian is most proud of one for a Seattle tower by KPF "where every single line is straight and true." The model is likely more perfectly aligned than the actual building, precision he credits to his training in traditional handmade techniques.
While the city's top shops are run by people with architectural training, it isn't required to make good models. Decades ago, Rafael Viñoly's office hired Japanese cabinetmakers to craft its models. At Radii, a tattoo artist heads the painting division, responsible for intricate color-matched bricks and creating naturalistic foliage on trees using a secret recipe involving painted furniture foam, coffee grinder blending, and repeated processing until it resembles dried herbs.
Formal model-making training is rare since there are no degree programs in the U.S. for this specialty. Adrian Davies, head of the model shop in NBBJ's New York office, is unusual in that he graduated from the University of Sunderland in northern England, one of three UK colleges offering model-making degrees at the time. Originally interested in visual effects for films, the shift to computer-generated imagery led him to architecture. "I always liked building things, but building buildings - that seemed good," he explains.
Castillo was self-directed in his path, studying architecture at Southern Polytechnic University and focusing all his energy on physical models while neglecting renderings and floor plans. "I might not show up with anything else, but there's going to be a badass model," Castillo recalls. "I got away with that for a while, but not always."
The training gap poses challenges for the field, as it's difficult for studios to find people with both shop and hand skills plus design knowledge. This has affected what models look like, notes Jonathan Zack, a model maker and shop manager for Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, who has observed that as 3D printing becomes more common, models are increasingly sized to printer beds. "We don't use laser cutters and such machinery in our models but rely almost exclusively on hand cutting and hand assembling what are often very large-scale pieces," Zack explains. A model for Brooklyn Bridge Park was 65 feet long.
Some model makers are pushing to get architects comfortable working with their hands alongside digital tools. "What we're trying to do at NBBJ is break them out of the computer and get them back into thinking by making," Davies says. "Project managers like 3D printers because they don't fill in timesheets. But if you need that thing quickly, you need the immediacy of hand tools."
Davies has noticed more architecture students with strong digital and physical model-making work in their portfolios and graduate exhibitions. "They want to do something a bit more real and are actually pushing back now from screens," he observes. "I used to think until fairly recently the biggest danger for model making was not the lack of work, but the lack of people to do it. But we are actually seeing that there are people who want to do this."
However, Ferdowsi has had the opposite experience with students he teaches at Parsons. "What I witness at the moment is an extreme poverty of embodiment," he says. "It's like they're clumsy with their hands in a way that's strange. I've had a class where I just brought in a bag of sticks that I collected in the park, passed out knives, and said, 'Over the next hour, we're going to listen to classical music and carve sticks.' And it's because they had zero control over tools. I was like, 'Guys, you are going to be making the physical world and you have no way to participate in it.'"
Wood echoes this concern, noting that because of liability and insurance issues, schools are reluctant to have power tools and table saws in their studios. "Shop space is usually limited to digital and 3D printing because it's safe. And I think the same thing is true for architects' offices." Radii has developed a robust internship program to train architectural model makers, who usually stay with the studio long-term. John Shimkus, the project director at Radii, joined right out of Cooper Union and has been there for over 20 years, partly because the shop maintains a nine-to-five schedule for work-life balance.
Radii now employs 12 full-time master model makers and typically has three to four large-scale projects in production simultaneously, while maintaining flexibility for quick turnaround projects like competition models. The studio has expanded to 8,000 square feet, with areas dedicated to painting, traditional power tools, laser cutters and 3D printers, electronics, and an in-house photo studio. Having everything under one roof allows precise quality and schedule control. "Whenever we rely on an outside source, it usually bites us in the butt," Wood explains.
While architectural drawings might suffice for real-world construction, they don't translate directly to model-making. Much of Wood's team's work involves redrawing received plans to figure out how to create something that looks realistic, won't fall apart, and can be serviced for models with electronics and lights. As the built world has changed with digital tools, so has model-making evolved. Traditional techniques alone can't produce the complex forms modern architects favor.
"The blob shape can be built in the real world, whereas 20 years ago, flat-plane towers were the norm," Wood explains. "We no longer could just rely on flat laser-cut sheets of material. We had to evolve as architecture evolved. You can't say, 'Sorry, we can't make that shape; call us when you've got a flat-sided tower.'"
The engineering and thinking required for these models might rival actual buildings. "It's a very similar challenge design-wise," Wood says. "What's the narrative? What story are we telling? What does the building look like? Is it transparent? Is it reflective? Is it bony? Is it smooth? It's all the things on the creative end of making architecture and then making architecture small."
For the KieranTimberlake-designed U.S. embassy in London with its undulating, translucent ETFE scrim facade, creating a miniature version involved laser-cutting the back face, creating a Corian mold for Vac-U-Forming acrylic to the scrim's shape, etching metal to mimic the armature, and applying extremely thin glue layers while maintaining exact proportions. "We're thinking down to the 5,000th of an inch," Wood explains.
For 130 William Street, Adjaye's 66-story residential tower clad in tinted concrete, Radii built the model from walnut rather than painted acrylic to evoke the facade's richness. "It's like a grandfather clock," Wood says. "It'll be an heirloom that will last forever."
The effort proves worthwhile because models get results. Zack recalls assembling a multiblock cityscape as a client observed. "She reached into the model, picked up a miniature city bus, and pretended to drive it around the streets," he explains. "She said, 'This is the dollhouse my father never let me have' and approved the entire project. I'm not so sure that would have happened with a few renderings hanging off the wall."
Davies remembered a similar experience when Massachusetts General Hospital decision-makers couldn't grasp design proposals presented in renderings and video fly-throughs. After the team made a model and presented it in person, "We get there, we put the model down on the conference room table, the client takes one look and said, 'Yes, that's it.' Everyone thinks models are a magical thing, but I think actually it's the clarity that they give that makes them special."
Models are more legible for everyone than two-dimensional images, especially critical for long-term, multiphase projects. "They're the best way to communicate a substantial and often years-long vision, helping our community see the components of a project and how it all knits together," says Dave Lombino, managing director of external affairs at Two Trees, the developer behind transforming the Williamsburg waterfront around the former Domino Sugar Refinery into a mixed-use neighborhood. Two Trees hired Radii to make the model, which sits in the lobby of the Refinery at Domino.
Ferdowsi notes that models also help with internal decision-making at Snøhetta. "Models are a really important social tool," he says. "Because we're a very collaborative design studio where ideas come from every level, the challenge is actually to develop a coherent collective voice."
Tommos has noticed more architecture firms opening their model shops to entire staffs, which she fully endorses. "Sometimes people ask me, 'Oh, but if architects build their models, won't you be unemployed?' And I cackle, because I won't be. I teach people, more than anything. I build, too, but the bigger role is to help inform and strategize around models. Right now, there's more work than there are people capable of doing it, especially for freelancers."
To increase visibility of architectural model makers in New York and attract more people to the field, Tommos launched the Model Makers Guild of New York, the city's first such organization. The group maintains an email list and forum helping makers build community, trade technical notes, and find work, while organizing visits to model shops across the city.
Despite working on high-profile projects, Radii sometimes faces recognition challenges. "We have to continue to reintroduce ourselves and be discovered again," Wood says. Additionally, big firms have been commissioning models from overseas shops when clients won't pay for high-quality work. "There's a large, government-sponsored model-making factory in China that can make a fast food model for about a third of the cost of what can be done the right way in New York," Wood explains. "Our reward is when we get a call three months later: 'The model has arrived in pieces. Can you make it look good?' Or: 'The model arrived, and we can't use it.'"
Regardless of industry changes, Wood maintains focus on quality. "We just maintain the highest level of quality and service and never miss a deadline. We're riding on that reputation."
Fans of model making are eager to share their enthusiasm. "When you encounter a model, there's a sense of delight, of love, of attraction, magnetism," Ferdowsi says. "And I think the world is becoming increasingly thirsty for some semblance of realness. The tricky thing is you can't be hungry for something you've never tasted."
