Architecture's Model Environments by Lisa Moffitt (review)

Reviewed by:

• Architecture’s Model Environments by Lisa Moffitt
• Kristine Grønning Ericson (bio)

Architecture’s Model Environments
By Lisa Moffitt. London: UCL Press, 2023. Pp. 209.

In contemporary architectural practice, common methods for representing and analyzing airflow include computer-generated simulations and static two-dimensional diagrams. These techniques have limitations, particularly for architects engaged in the early stages of the design process. As architect Lisa Moffitt writes in Architecture’s Model Environments, previously understudied physical models from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries in Europe and North America may suggest alternative approaches to visualizing and designing with airflow in the present. These approaches are especially resonant at a time of changing climates, evolving relationships to airborne disease, and persisting environmental inequities.

Moffitt’s book is the most recent addition to UCL Press’s Design Research in Architecture series. Over the past decade, “design research” has become a catchall term for diverse approaches to incorporating multidisciplinary research methods into architectural design practice. In this contribution to the series, Moffitt presents a method of design research that combines historical case study analysis with construction, experimental testing, and exhibition of physical models. Moffitt argues that building and interacting with physical models can provoke new insights about historical episodes in the visualization of air. These historical precedents, in turn, inspire speculation about built environments at multiple scales in the present.

The book has four central chapters. It begins with a chapter on Moffitt’s own construction of “environmental models,” which she defines as “instruments which create controlled environments that make the phenomena of airflow visible in relation to an architectural model” (ch. 2). The subsequent three chapters present historical case studies of environmental models, each exploring resonances with Moffitt’s own experiments (chs. 3–5).

In chapter 2, Moffitt categorizes her environmental models into three types: wind tunnels, water tables, and filling boxes. These models, created as [End Page 1068] part of Moffitt’s dissertation research at the University of Edinburgh, draw on her experiences working as an architect in North America in the 2000s. Moffitt introduces a do-it-yourself approach to building each prototype. Extensive documentation of the design and construction process for each iteration provides readers with resources to replicate the prototypes using laser cutters, 3D printers, and traditional carpentry tools. Moffitt notes that such physical models make the diffuse, complex behavior of air more tangible and intuitive for designers by visualizing flows using the actual physical materials of air and water.

The middle three chapters each center a historical case study of an environmental model and demonstrate how Moffitt’s construction, exhibition, or analysis of similar physical models open new insights about the case studies (and vice versa). The case studies include Etienne-Jules Marey’s wind tunnel experiments from 1900–1902 (ch. 3); the Olgyay architects’ incomplete thermoheliodon experiments published in 1963 (ch. 4); and David Boswell Reid’s building convection experiments published in 1844 (ch. 5). In these case study chapters, Moffitt analyzes photographs, drawings, and written documentation of the precedent models and puts them into context with other investigations of air and fluid dynamics in architecture, engineering, and the atmospheric sciences, drawing on recent literature from the history and theory of architecture on atmosphere and climate. The case studies are not organized in chronological order. Instead, the chapters move from a focus on the basic technical challenges of containing and managing fluid materials in physical containers (ch. 3) to analysis of the models as reflections of prevailing attitudes toward designed environments (chs. 4 and 5).

From a historian’s perspective, the most intriguing and provocative aspect of the book is the hybrid method of historical and hands-on research that Moffitt models for the reader. Moffitt pulls technical and spatial lessons from the case studies and presents a set of environmental design approaches gleaned from both the case studies and prototype experiments (ch. 6). There is room in the book for more explicit reflection on the combination of these forms of research, however, and to discuss the potential application of the research method beyond this project. The book may be of particular interest to historians who teach in art, design, or engineering schools or...