The role of models in architecture practice has changed drastically over the last few decades. Development in computation and virtual reality (VR) technology began to optimize work processes using both physical and virtual forms of models. Models still stimulate architects’ design thinking as they have done for thousands of years, but the new technologies have radically improved speed, cost efficiency, affordance, and intuitiveness. An increased number of tests via digital models (both abstract and detailed) results in more iterations being available. Current AI technology can rapidly calculate optimized massing and circulation that abide by the local zoning rules and codes, based on the given FAR and program. These digitally and virtually generated models also enable easy assessment of the performance of future buildings, such as lighting, ventilation, energy efficiency, traffic management, and structural viability, in the form of digital twins.

Mario Carpo, in his lectures and writings, stated the difference between the way machines and humans work. Machines work in a way that humans think impractically. Traditional designs, including architectural, require a solid thinking process and several rough iterations. Humans choose the best option, considering the qualifications, and then develop it into a blueprint. However, machines, thanks to their unbelievable calculation speed, just run enormous amounts of trials and assess errors for each iteration. Models are a key tool for communicating with machines. Architects produce drawings, not buildings. They use drawings as a main communication tool to speak with the client, builders, and the public. Machines read through digital models. They can read in 3D and generate quick responses in 3D as well.

The application of AI and VR technology in architectural model-making should bring a much more significant impact than BIM brought to the profession many years ago. BIM changed how architects think and perform, and cherished design thinking in objects rather than the composition of 2D drawings. In some aspect, it knocked down the notion of a master builder, as it enabled the design process to be intuitive and accessible to many people, including entry-level designers. Nonetheless, BIM modeling is not fully artificial as human labor should be involved in commanding every single detail under the current BIM workflows. How should architects use these new and highly efficient tools wisely? How can we not lose our original ideas in the name of efficiency and automation? While AI and VR technologies will continuously revolutionize the practice of architecture by enhancing performance, speed, and accessibility, we, as architects, must actively reinterpret their role to preserve creativity and critical thinking within this new design paradigm.

The sand table model has a long and multifaceted history, with applications spanning military strategy, urban planning, architectural design, education, and psychotherapy. While digital and virtual simulations increasingly replace physical sand tables, their core function remains unchanged: to shrink, visualize, abstract, and render space intelligible and controllable. The sand table is not a neutral representational tool—it is a material manifestation of spatial power, one that reveals who commands space, who constructs its narrative, and who decides what can be seen and by whom.

A sand table presents a world in miniature—a scaled-down environment that turns complex, lived space into something graspable and manipulable. It reverses the historic relationship between people and their environment, where once the built or natural world overwhelmed perception and decision-making, the sand table compresses that world into a surface for observation and action. It offers a panoptic view. The sand table’s bird’s-eye perspective enacts a kind of spatial surveillance: the model is observed from above, interpreted by experts, and acted upon as if its reality were already fixed and knowable.

In military applications, the sand table allows commanders to “step outside the battlefield,” simulating troop movements and logistics as if from a detached, all-knowing vantage point. In urban planning, it provides a visual structure for comprehending relationships at metropolitan scales, offering designers, developers, and officials a shared visual platform through which to propose interventions. In both cases, the sand table is not merely a record of what exists, but a projection of what should exist—a tool that edits and overwrites reality rather than reflecting it.

The sand table is a freeze-frame of space. It denies process, contingency, and temporality. Museum dioramas may re-stage a historical moment, while planning models previsualize an idealized, speculative future. But whether anchored in the past or future, the sand table erases the dynamism of lived environments. It displays space not as lived, but as disciplined—immobile, silent, and subject to design. The model-maker thus occupies a position of authorship and authority, projecting subjective judgments, ideological values, and political priorities into the static model.

The sand table is also an abstraction of reality—a product of selective vision. Elements irrelevant to the central design narrative—informal economies, marginalized populations, architectural entropy—are filtered out. Every model performs a form of visual discipline, organizing what is allowed to be seen and what must remain invisible. Here, we see Foucault’s insight that power operates through regimes of visibility: that which is visible can be managed, ordered, and controlled, while that which remains unseen falls outside the realm of knowledge and action.

Thus, the sand table functions not only as a design or pedagogical tool but as a diagram of governance. It transforms complex spatial realities into legible surfaces, suited for intervention and investment. In doing so, it reinforces specific spatial hierarchies, excludes alternative narratives, and encodes a spatial logic of authority. The sand table does not simply depict the world—it disciplines it.

The architectural model alone can embody and communicate ideas of the architect of a new or altered future; however, when documented in photography or in exhibitions, the model can take on a new role of establishing the presence of the architect in society. The inquiry reveals that the presentation of the model has concerned the architect since Leon Battista Alberti, who advocated for “plain and simple” models to focus the attention of the public on the concept and ideas of the architect as opposed to the model maker’s ability to replicate details in miniature.

Through the modern movement, the image or photograph of models has been strategically orchestrated to present a view of the architect that is both heightened and homogenous, while celebrating the architect’s ability to make simple the complexity of the building, the city, and life. Despite the contemporary trend towards the digital, a generation of rising architects have returned to the model and specifically the crafting of the image of the model to establish a space within the discipline of architecture.

The model thus is not simply operating as a tool for investigating and communicating ideas but takes on a performative role. The investigation will similarly examine how communities of Black design professionals have begun to use the model in exhibition settings to project not only their presence within the discipline but also new roles and relationships of the architect as an agent in society and the cultural realm. With hopeful architecture students emerging out of school into a profession that does not easily accept the new and unestablished, finding a means to project a presence in the discipline, the profession, and society can become a means of attaining agency.

How do full scale mock-ups participate in a temporal framework that informs the architectural design process? Our research focuses on the employment of full-scale models in the production of architecture throughout history. Mock-ups have been discussed in terms of templates, proof-of-concept, and performance simulations, implying a temporal use before, during, or after the construction of the building. In the traditional employment of mock-ups, specific properties of the total built work can be isolated, tested and recreated, and applied back to the building. Increasingly, however, the digital twin now begins to take over not just as a full-scale 1:1 virtual replica, which beyond instructions for building construction can produce scientific measurements, views and other output that take the place of the material mock-up. More importantly, as it pertains to our research inquiry into temporal frameworks, digital twins act as “simulators for real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring and controlling” a physical asset, suggesting a new temporality of “real-time” that is constant throughout the entire lifespan of a building.

Digital twins can be understood as a modern counterpart to the full-scale mock-up by marking an inflection point between design and construction as two distinct modes in the building process. The digital twin model, like the BIM model before it, promotes the blurring or fusion of these two seemingly distinct modes, which has implications for how architects define their role in the built environment. If the constructed building can continue to “talk back” through sensory feedback, who has the authority to attend to the building’s future needs, whether they be structural, mechanical, or aesthetic? Because the digital twin concept is still a relatively new development, there are multiple models for answering this question. By 2050, digital twin systems will have become an industry standard for AEC, moving beyond descriptive or informative digital replicas and into increasingly sophisticated predictive or even autonomous models that incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning. Among the principal drivers of this acceleration are the members of the Digital Twin Consortium, representing over 200 organizations across technology, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, infrastructure, defense, government, and academia; firms with a specific AEC focus make up roughly a third of these organizations, including Autodesk and ESRI. The overwhelming majority of these firms define the value of digital twins in terms of reducing cost of design and construction, minimizing risk, and increasing value for clients and owners. What other value systems are pushed aside or left out in this trajectory? Where, how, and on behalf of whom can architects assert agency in the digital twin ecosystem?

In many ways, BIM represents a foundational shift in many long-held givens of the AEC environment. BIM radically alters longstanding linear workflow norms and torpedoes contractual standards. BIM’s most basic functionality further solidifies a product-oriented approach to Architecture and hails the death the architectural drawing. Yet all this is not without cause; undoubtably BIM provides great leaps in design and construction efficiency, environmental performance, operating efficiency and numerous other sectors.

Architects have resisted and continue to resist BIM’s incursion. Ostensibly this is because the additional burden of BIM’s implementation and coordination is financially untenable under old fee structures, but it also eliminates the long cherished ideal of the master builder and unilateral creative freedom. Additionally, BIM’s assembly-of-component nature undercuts long held modernist values of abstract formalism (bordering on material homogeneity and ambivalence). Yet as Peggy Deamer notes, if embraced by and incorporated into the academy, BIM could provide new opportunities for creative expression (and when necessary, subversion). Without a doubt, BIM is here to stay.While at the moment its gains are only absolutely necessitated at one extreme of Indaba’s “Bigness,” BIM is trickling down to smaller and smaller projects. Following this research, architects’ and especially architecture students’ aversion BIM seem to me like aversions to gravity.

During my time in grad school, I have worked part time as an MEP Coordinator and Assistant Superintendent for a General Contractor in Boston. This experience in combination with my M.Arch program provided me two poles to understand and critique aspects of the increasingly BIMmed AEC world. For, as tight as buildings are becoming, I am familiar with navigating and dimensioning BIM models and finding altogether different built realities. This work provided me a conceptual underpinning for those issues and the work more generally. Like construction itself, the BIM workflow seems mostly circling around until the requisite tolerance is met.

Yet, from an architecture student’s perspective, I can’t help but lament, at least a little, the reign of BIM. As practiced, BIM does seem to channel work into existing ruts. The path of least resistance is the available mullion or the furniture layout block you used on the last project, all in the name of efficiency.

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