Abstract

Situated within the Edge Conditions strand of the conference, this paper argues for the use of ethnographic modelmaking as an epistemic methodology for architectural participation and for its translation into a pedagogical framework for students of architecture.

Within architecture and architectural education, scale models create worlds of proposition, speculation, and fiction. As an ethnographic method, however, modelmaking can be utilised as a durational tool for observation, documentation, and spatial research into communities and material conditions that are often overlooked or marginalised.

Drawing on what Momoyo Kaijima terms architectural ethnography (2018), ethnographic modelmaking utilises physical, spatial models to study existing places and communities, combining ethnographic immersion with the tactile act of making, as a mechanism through which both communities and researchers can acquire, learn, and disseminate
knowledge.

This method has been tested through three projects that utilise 1:20 paper models and spatial fragments to demonstrate the connections between people, place, identity, and material culture in marginalised communities: Rooms (Berlin, 2021-22), Modelling Migrancy and Community (Blackpool, 2023), and Facing a Crisis (Wandsworth Prison, London, 2025).

This methodology has been translated into a formal educational context in the Year 3 Humanities module at the Grenfell-Baines Institute of Architecture. Using Fleetwood as a case study, students utilize model making to observe, survey, analyze, and recreate everyday typologies of collective life in the coastal town. They then translate this fieldwork into
a critical essay as a way to connect their design studio work with real lived experiences.

Spaces hold knowledge. The relevance of physical models stems from how they remind us of the material and embodied nature of the world we inhabit, and the tacit knowledge held within it. Ethnographic model making seeks this deep understanding of people and place. The paper ask how models can function not only as repositories of tacit knowledge,
but as active, situated pedagogical tools (Perez-Martinez, 2025) that can reveal embedded social, cultural, and material insights through the act of ethnographic making.