MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE MODELS

Modernism was the most consequential architectural revolution of the twentieth century. In the space of roughly three decades — from Walter Gropius's Fagus Factory in 1911 to Philip Johnson's Glass House in 1949 — a new way of building emerged that rejected historical ornament, embraced industrial materials, and insisted that structure and function should be visible in the finished form of a building. It changed everything that came after.

This collection traces that arc with unusual depth. The Fagus Factory and Bauhaus Dessau represent the German origins of the movement. Villa Savoye (1929) is Le Corbusier's clearest statement of his Five Points — elevated on pilotis, wrapped in ribbon windows, the roof a garden. The Moller House in Vienna (1928), by Adolf Loos, strips the façade back to almost nothing. The Isokon Building in Hampstead (1934) and Erno Goldfinger's own house at 2 Willow Road (1939) show the movement arriving in London, carried by émigrés and their English collaborators. The Lescaze House on East 48th Street brought it to Manhattan in the same era.

Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House (1951) and Philip Johnson's Glass House (1949) are the movement at its most uncompromising — pure steel-and-glass pavilions in which the boundary between inside and outside dissolves almost entirely. They are also the two most demanding pieces we make, and among the most rewarding.

Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1955), Richard Neutra's Hollywood Bowl (1929), and the Watergate Complex in Washington DC complete the collection — three buildings that expand the definition of Modernism beyond the purely rectilinear.

Each model is cast in fine plaster and finished by hand in our West Sussex studio.