Off The Rails
The following was written way back in 2020 and doesn’t seem likely to be published elsewhere soon, so I am sharing it with you now.
1.
Creating a realistic architectural model in an academic setting is one potential route among many; in the space of a student design project, we grant a wide latitude in how much the product, be it museum board or PLA filament, is understood to closely resemble a building that would or could appear in the world. Creating a precise landscape model, on the other hand, is under most every context an absurdity, and is certain to appear in the critic’s eye as a fuzzy, super-saturated ensemble of stuff. Among the many other little rites of passage in a design education occurs the warning, when first making a physical presentation model, against making a “train model.” As a teacher making this warning, you cannot get into the weeds; you steer the student toward some better reference points, and solemnly warn them away from the hobby shop.
But why not a train model, anyway? No one is exactly put out to find themselves in the presence of a real train model, and will gamely enough follow the winding of the train and squint at the artifice exerted to make it. If anything, perhaps we worry that we will be buttonholed by the person sufficiently enthralled to make such a thing.
The anthropologist Alfred Gell wrote of his experience of being taken to Salisbury Cathedral as a boy. Although the cathedral itself doesn’t do much for him, he is overwhelmed by a scale model of it made of matchsticks placed in a side chapel; he duly places his money in a donation box placed in front of it. Looking backward, Gell explained his reaction though what he called the enchantment of technology – that a piece of art derives much of its effect from a beholder being able to understand at once how it is made, but unable to understand the spirit of dedication, precision, or ingenuity that has caused it to be made to a high standard. If Ruskin was able to thrill to the same cathedral, the actual one, it was because he was vividly able to see it in terms of the artisans making it by hand – and to exalt the work of those artisans as liberated.
The model railroader’s work is, on the other hand, so bound up in childishness that it is a kind of shock to consider it as an adult activity. In his 1986 documentary Routine Pleasures, Jean-Pierre Gorin embeds himself in a model railroad club in Del Mar, California. On paper, their club’s guiding goal is to present an annual rail display at the San Diego County Fair, where their clubhouse was stationed. But for the members of the club, all white men and mostly middle-aged to elderly, the activity of testing, refining, and maintaining their hefty model is a consuming passion. They file in every Tuesday night to run tests, repaint, dust the hills, and share information about the trains that preoccupy them.
Throughout the film, Gorin draws a parallel between the model railroaders and the work of his colleague at UC San Diego, the critic and painter Manny Farber. In his best-known piece, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” Farber condemns the tendency in films and paintings toward the “yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition,” a making of white elephants that attempt to overload the accepted critical standards of art. In its place, he holds up an ideal of termite art, an “endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything […] it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and…leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” The model railroaders appear to Gorin to exemplify this termite spirit, devoted to a precise rendering above and beyond any likely recognition for their efforts.
2.
The practice of model-making was redefined in architectural practice in the West between 1915 and 1925. If architectural models had long been associated with competitions and expositions, and created by highly skilled artisans, during this period a relative democratization of design services and availability of mass-market materials led to the spread of low-cost presentation models in cardboard or balsa. Accordingly, a wave of articles in the architectural journals of the day evangelized for the use of the model in professional practice and education, as something that designers themselves can do with little specialized training. On one hand, this was seen as being as a straightforward matter of client service; we are assured in every article in this genre that the client is unable to read any sort of architectural drawing and will only really understand what you propose to do in three dimensions. But as in Gell’s example, the model is also understood as a means of enchantment – to get the coin into the box. The architect Alwyn T. Covell sniffs at “certain real estate firms” who have hit on this expedient:
These models…appeal to the average lay mind because they do not make imagination necessary, and for the same reason they are not works of art. Being perfectly literal, they fail to be inspiring, no matter how much they may stimulate a desire to own a little place in the country. Their success in this particular lies in the fact…that the home-building proposition has been brought just that much nearer to a prospective property-buyer. It has been taken off paper and put bodily in your thoughts. Incidentally, this stimulus of desire effected by house-models is not to be entirely overlooked by the architect, who may be supposed to be no less interested in the promotion of building projects, from a purely business point of view, than the real-estate man.
As a final benefit, the making of models was extended into the young architectural academy as a means of getting closer to the actual business of making a building, counteracting the genteel Beaux-Arts fiction of architecture as being the drawing of elaborate elevations. William Boring, the director of the School of Architecture at Columbia, made it a point of pride in 1922 that his students, through testing their initial drawn designs in cardboard and clay, “are trained to see buildings and to think in terms of buildings rather than in terms of drawings.”
The considerable effort poured into detailing these model buildings – often executing the florid Beaux-Arts drawing on Whatman paper facades – suddenly foundered when it reached the plinth of landscape meant to surround the county courthouse, or semi-palatial house. The architect Edwin Parker warned in 1919 that the time spent modeling a landscape is “entirely out of proportion to the value of the result…when an elaborate garden is started there is no room to stop,” and recommends that the architect “lay a piece of green plush over the board to which the model is to be screwed, and let it go at that; or perhaps paint the garden on a piece of detail paper to put under the model.” The professional model-maker LeRoy Grumbine’s 1925 account of the model-making process at this time indicates that then, as now, the landscape context of the architecture was usually an afterthought, and that it was not uncommon for architects to suggest that he put parsley around the cardboard pig just as he pleased.
Understandably, the young profession of landscape architecture was avid to get in on the act and establish its own legitimate relationship to the practice of model-making. If we can find a scattered history of modeling landscape, largely for military purposes, before the twentieth century, professional models of designed landscapes lack much in the way of a lineage before this point. The Cleveland landscape architect A.D. Taylor, an early official of the American Society of Landscape Architects, was among the first to try to establish one. Taylor, keenly concerned with establishing new standards and practices for the still-fledgling landscape profession, published regularly on an encyclopedic range of subjects ranging from residential design to construction details. In 1916, he published a series of articles called “Models for Architectural and Landscape Work” in American Architect, effectively tying together his various interests in a miniature format. To Taylor, the question of client relations was absolutely primary in model-making; the model needed to mock up all possible aspects of the design, down to the flowers in the flowerbeds, with the greatest possible attention to texture, form, and color. This had the effect of powerfully constraining the scale and material he is able to use. Taylor advocates for residential models at 1”=1’-0”, constructed mostly from cardboard, artist’s papers, and modeling clay. But to complete his vision, he surveys “various stores handling artificial flowers,” saves his own sawdust, and gathers bits of moss, juniper, and sumac in the field. Where Boring’s students are able to transfer their drawing abilities onto relatively prone materials, with a sharp contour line giving way to the cut of a utility knife, Taylor must range further to amass materials that suggest appropriately fine textures and subtle colors. Some of those desired materials, though, steadfastly refuse rendering, and model-making history must wait for the invention of static grass to give any reasonable approximation of a lawn.
As the founder of the landscape architecture program at The Ohio State University, Taylor was part of a group of evangelists spreading the landscape profession from the east coast westward through the country’s land grant institutions. At this point, the landscape profession was seen by a substantial wing as tied up in agriculture specifically, and by extension in extension work; landscape architecture was in this sense a didactic medium, to be brought to the lay public in clear and comprehensible terms. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Taylor’s protégés similarly used lifelike models to propagandize the glories of landscape architecture. In 1918, his students at Ohio State went to the Real Estate Dealers and Builders’ Associations Show at the state fairgrounds, a mile away, to present their “proposed Ohio State botanical garden in miniature” at flower shows in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. And nine years after that, in 1934, Alvin L. Curtiss would gamely describe the model he built for his senior thesis to the Ohio State paper: “Building a model like this is a good way to show a client how the development will look. Flat plans fail to do this.”
The headline of the resulting article – “Sponge Tree Shading Cardboard House Turns Out To Be Part Of Senior Thesis” – perhaps give one clue as to why landscape architects have turned aside from the path of the exact model. A model railroader has a hobby, typically on the side of a professional career lucrative enough to feed his rather expensive interest; they can afford to laugh at themselves. A landscape architect, already vulnerable to the charge that they simply scatter pleasant natural things about instead of actually designing anything, is doubly vulnerable if they simply place an unworked yarrow stalk or chunk of sea sponge on the model. Likewise, patiently scouring flower beds and dollar stores for your materials is not only time-consuming, but fails to demonstrate mastery in the way that say, bending cardboard into an elegant shape can.
The products of the designers of this era can seem hopelessly servile to contemporary taste, perennially looking for a blue ribbon at the state fair, pleasing instead of demonstrating their own authority. Carol Fulkerson, then a landscape student at the GSD, writes in 1924 about his own winning entry to the Garden Club of America’s competition at the New York Flower Show, just like his compatriots in Columbus. But he adds a crucial wrinkle to Taylor’s vision, cribbed from architectural practice – the distinction between the way of modeling exactly and what he calls “the impressionistic or sketchy way, in which there is no attempt to secure accuracy of detail but the general effect only is sought,” where “the interest is centered upon the mass-form. A wide range of color may be used, even color other than that found in nature…This is the cheapest and quickest method.” James Rose, writing fifteen years later from the same institution, expands on this in the process of consciously importing modernism into landscape architecture. Echoing Boring, he emphasizes the ability of the model to faithfully address three dimensions; where he parts way is in scorning the “exact reproduction of nature…the same laborious futility which possessed the early Dutch masters to paint with a single-hair brush every leaf on a tree.” Without “hope to reproduce the subtleties of nature or the seasonal variations of the actual landscape,” the model must be strictly a tool for study; client relations are not mentioned. To him, in fact, this is a sort of smokescreen for the hack designer’s real motivation, the desire to “spend many pleasurable hours in an artistic dreamland putting a rich mosaic over the absence of an idea…many schools are following the ‘fad of modelism’ presenting the same ‘charming vista which simply cries out for a bird bath’ in rubber sponge and cardboard instead of brown and yellow washes or Chinese ink.” The profound unfamiliarity Rose’s stereotype of the 1930s aesthete speaks to the general victory of his own way of working, which is simplified and abstract as a matter of course. And indeed, from the 1940s into the 1960s, the presentation models documented in the archives of Ohio State gradually shed their ornament, losing their flocking, bunches of colored paper, and exact trellises, until they appear as neat, enigmatic stacks of cardboard, unlikely to stand out at any flower show.
3.
One of the many mysteries of rail modeling to the non-initiate is quite why it should involve modeling so much scenery – something that is not entailed with model planes or cars. If simulating rail performance turns in part on negotiating obstacles, this could as easily be carried out in wholly abstract surroundings, or in the sort of delicate compromise between abstraction and realism that persists in most landscape presentation models.
The closest interpretation at hand for this phenomenon is inevitably that making rail models is a common pastime for those seeking control, and that rail modelers share a passion for recreating a system that extended control directly over the land and people that surrounded it. Without ruling that out, we can also admit modeling rail as being a fundamentally overdetermined activity. Its adherents are able to build social relationships and common knowledge through choosing one arbitrary yardstick – the recreation of a railroad corridor in miniature – and collaborating around it. Consider that rail modeling tends to focus on the late 1940s and 1950s as a reference point, not only out of nostalgia for white male hegemony but also simply because it is an era that allows you to depict the greatest diversity of rail activity, and thus accommodate the greatest range of interest — diesel and steam trains, passenger and freight service, established and new routes. Accuracy reduces the possible points of tension and barriers to collaboration, but is perhaps not an absolute value unto itself. For example, while the San Diego club aimed for a rough time and place, it did not model any one particular place in the world, or particular historical schedule. As one member explains to Gorin, the seemingly inflexible schedule drawn up and tested by the members in the annual run-up to the exhibition is in fact a springboard for play and improvisation. As Gorin interviews the members of the Del Mar club, it becomes clear that each one has his own distinct means of investing in the common project. If one is primarily concerned with recreating the look of the train itself, another thrills to testing the switching mechanism. The youngest member, one of only two visibly shy of middle age, has been appointed as the “scenery superintendent.” He works at a store dedicated to model railroading, and eagerly tips off the other members on new arrivals – records of trains, train sound synthesizers, and model train manuals, including one devoted to his specialty.
In that it evolves out of childhood play, then, the activity of model railroading is a means toward reconciling individual fancy with a cohesive social circle. This becomes plain in how the teaching of the hobby is done. A few years ago at an antique mall in St. Louis I picked up a copy of Bill McClanahan’s Scenery for Model Railroads, the book the scenery superintendent mentions, which went through fifteen printings between 1958 and 1990. It was published throughout that time by Kalmbach Books, a virtual hub of the hobby community that continues to issue guidebooks and web content from its longtime headquarters of Milwaukee. For those of us used to the mystical and many-splendored rhetoric of the design studio, McClanahan is disarmingly straightforward in teaching the aspirant how, why, and where to model rail, through a multitude of clear photographs, attractive one-color diagrams, and folksy wisdom. Paradoxically, the model railroader’s intense concern with visual accuracy is carried out through an investigation into how and why things appear the way they do. McClanahan grounds its enumeration of plaster technique and yarrow preparation in a thorough “Short Course in Railroad Geology.” Today, on the website of Kalmbach’s flagship publication, Model Railroader, a sample first-hand narrative by Dan Lewis describes that lengths he has gone to over the course of more than forty years to build a tribute to the North Montana Line of the Milwaukee Road rail corridor, exploring historic structures, searching out photographic evidence, and meeting with “engineers, conductors, and other railroad men” who worked the line in the 1950s.
If model railroading appears in this light as a distinct variety of research, it commits three cardinal sins in handling it. First, it makes pastiche; more often than faithfully rendering any one location, it is invested in a personal exploration of an era and area. Lewis, for instance, emphasizes that “I’m trying to capture the feel of Montana, rather than create a museum piece.” Second, it puts the cart before the horse – it works from the facts forward to the appearance, instead of discerning the facts behind the appearance. Third, and most importantly, that knowledge becomes bound up in the body of the model and the bodies of the men operating it, without communicating its findings, or the exact pedigree of the findings, to a wider audience – it lacks footnotes, bibliography, or even text. The model railroader, then, is an avatar of Bourdieu’s petit bourgeois, “always liable to know too much or too little, like the heroes of TV quiz games whose misplaced erudition makes them ridiculous in ‘cultivated’ eyes, […] condemned endlessly to amass disparate, often devalued information which is to legitimate knowledge as his stamp collection is to an art collection, a miniature culture.” If the model railroad is research, it is research that evades the process of legitimation the research of an academic historian or an architectural preservationist is subject to – peer review, vetting statements of significance, and high-profile exhibitions.
4.
When the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies solicited models for its 1972 exhibition “Idea as Model,” it specified that “We do not seek to assemble models of buildings as propaganda for persuading clients, but rather as studies of a hypothesis, a problem, or an idea of architecture.” In so doing, of course, it was in part moving the problem of persuasion to another arena, reintroducing the architect as an authorial artist by placing autonomous models in gallery space. Taking, as ever, a belated cue from architecture, by the 1980s a wing of landscape architecture invested itself in artistic bona fides – the Plastilina landforms used by Kathryn Gustafson or George Hargreaves were of the lineage of Noguchi or Heizer, and nothing whatsoever to do with the world of painted sponge and braided picture wire.
If that remains the ideal, the everyday world of practice puts some demand on showing tree species, paths, and retaining walls – necessitating some compromise in communicating with the troublesome client. To see the current received idea of the model in landscape architecture, consult Tim Waterman’s The Fundamentals of Landscape Architecture:
Presentation models, in landscape architecture in particular, are tricky to produce. Where a model of a building might seek to provide a scrupulously exact image of the finished product, a landscape presentation model finished in such a way runs the risk of looking like the setting for a miniature model train. In can be particularly challenging to choose materials to represent landscape that is sleek, sexy, and contemporary.
Putting aside why a landscape needs to be sleek, contemporary, and even sexy, is the problem here that train modeling has simply gotten there first, in the minds of the public? Certainly, without the common yardstick of fidelity, this compromise model becomes surpassingly difficult to teach in any defensible way. Reindeer moss is OK here, but not here; only one bold color, except when there is two. While prestige in the field today accrues to laser-cut plexiglass and CNC-milled foam, the elevation of elegant landform control as the central business of the landscape model continues. This despite the fact that a designed landscape is a farrago of electrical systems, buried pipes, blinking sculptures, sculptural benches – it is a series of expensive purchases dredged into a heap of existing conditions. The designed landscape, in real life, resembles nothing so much as a train model.
5.
Could designers learn anything at this late date from the declining practice of model railroading? For one, it seems eminently counterproductive to discourage investment of the public in a model. This has long been a matter of intense suspicion, especially directed toward the diverse things that grace the landscape, which have roughly the same conceptual position in the world of physical models as the human being in the architectural photograph. Architectural model-makers form a united front against these motley things sitting on the surface, which open them up to the same problem as the landscape architect: not having done enough work, or sufficiently serious work, work that attracts attention to itself. Ray Pfaendler inveighs against “the false viewpoint and irrelevant pleasure that comes from miniature replicas.” The same inherent invitation to play that made the model a potent tool of creation for the designer is inadvertently extended to the public; as the model-maker John Cleaver reminds us, “Always attach every component part of a model firmly. The natural tendency is for people to ‘see if the little cars are stuck down.’” To LeRoy Grumbine, “People, automobiles, street-cars, and other accessories are not essential to a model. They often distract from the main idea, rather than aid it.” The railroad model, explicitly, does nothing but distract, and indeed constructs an entire landscape only to distract the viewer from it with a moving, lit-up, whistling and choo-chooing train. Why not pay attention to what people are distracted by? What do they want to see moving?
Farber’s piece begins by indicting the arts of his time for a “feckless, listless quality” he attributes to “its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.” If the landscape models of landscape architecture stay inside stiff frames – the better to be shipped on to Venice –the model railway is perennially bursting out of the limits given to it. As Lewis confesses, “When I cut a hole in the living room wall in order to expand my N scale railroad into the hallway beyond, I thought that was as large a model railroad as I would ever own. I was just happy that my wife agreed to my bizarre suggestion.” As we figure out how to make landscapes that are intertwined with community, that are just green enough, that are rooted, our models may as well grow roots too.
Over the past few years, a few of us at Ohio State have gotten our students together to see what happens when landscape systems combine, fall together, fail, stack, lapse. We do so through a little universe of objects – twigs, dried oregano, aquarium gravel, weedwhacker string – and let our models sprawl and combine. Our methods circle back to Taylor’s, though in a different key. The making of an exact model is also a million little acts of random entropy – from snipping the ends off someone else’s arbor vitae to melting styrofoam with hairspray. Or, to quote Gomez Addams, when asked if he meant to blow up his model train: “Why else would a grown man play with trains?”