Mocking the Museum: Compelling Evidence of Premeditation; Full Scale Mockup as Design Laboratory for the Field

As the new building for the Miami Art Museum, now titled the Perez Art Museum of Miami, is nearing the final stages of construction, a separate set of buildings are being demolished on site. These smaller buildings line the western edge of the site and indeed were more costly per square foot than the museum itself. These buildings were in fact also designed by the renowned architecture firm Herzog and DeMeuron but the general public will never see them, rather they will only see evidence of them in the final building. These buildings are the full-scale mockups where the architects and contractors came together to collaborate on moving forward with construction. Much like the dress rehearsal the day before a theater opening, the mockups aren’t the final version, rather they are an anticipation of the final version, like a workshop intended to resolve idealized design with locality. Not to rethink the project conceptually, rather to anticipate contingency based on how some ideal representation will be translated into reality, a series of fine tunings, in this case based on local craft, environment, climate science, material science and economics.While the shape of the building may remain the same, these mockups are the site for significant amounts of decision-making and collaborations between architect and contractor, architect and material, and between the building and the environment itself. Ultimately these collaborations belong on site, they map the particularities of design that are difficult to represent, negotiating an idealized representation of this project within a subtropical climate, a task difficult to complete from Switzerland, where the offices for H+dM are located. Quite simply much of the design has to be built to be understood, as the built version takes on a life of its own. One might say these structures are actually alive, behaving differently in the subtropics than in Basel Switzerland.Increasingly, buildings are designed for their climates, and perhaps based on these changing conditions; a new type of drawings is demanded of architecture. These mockups are a site of collaborative drawings as craftsmen from various trades draw directly on the mockup in various forms, such as the hammered surface texturing on the Museum mockups.These mockups become a type of materialization in flux, Contingent Constructions which take on a life of there own as a place for inquiry and verification. The culture of evaluation and range occurs here. Also built just to see what will happen to them. The author makes the case that these mockups are not only a scientific empirical study of material behavior but also a cultural one specific to various regions and climates, ultimately suggesting connections between various cultures and their climates. The paper takes the form of a Journalistic study of the decisions that had to be mocked up, and decided on site as a new type of drawing demanded by changing climate, culture and practice.

Volume Editors
Anthony Abbate, Francis Lyn & Rosemary Kennedy

ISBN
978-0-935502-90-9