IMA Model Studies: Kōtō-ku | Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand is known for large-scale photographic and film works in which, using documentary photographs and footage as clues, he reconstructs the sites of historical and social events as models and then photographs them, as if peering into the scene of an incident. Model Studies, presented in 2011, was Demand's first work photographing models made by others, with its axis of thought placed on the "model", which for him is as important as the image.
Model Studies (Kōtō-ku), the second in the series, photographs the models of the architectural unit SANAA. From 2013 Demand visited SANAA's office in Koto-ku, Tokyo, several times and photographed numerous architectural models that give form to the various ideas born there.
SANAA's models are scattered around the office as living seeds of ideas that may sprout at any time and place and grow into great trees, and in an architectural office where staff of many nationalities work, they also function as a medium of communication.
Demand's models and the architects' models have much in common — methods of making, materials used, abstracted details and their provisional state — but in the end Demand's models are reduced to images, while the architects' models are transformed into buildings hundreds of times their size. By regarding architectural models as sculptures that give concrete form to an idea and photographing them, Demand sheds light on the fleeting beauty of ideas, which arise through every kind of approach and are discarded again and again. This is Demand's latest photobook, exploring the rich possibilities of the concept of the model.

Publisher: Seigensha
Publication year: 2015
Pages: 80
Dimensions: 324 × 277 mm

IMA Model Studies / IMA Model Studies / Architectural Models / Architecture