Exhibition to celebrate RTA Studio in miniature

“Whether we’re talking about puppies or paper models, little things are charming,” says Andrew Barrie, Professor of Design at the School of Architecture and Planning.

He is talking about the little things that make up In Context: RTA Studio, an exhibition opening on 10 August at Objectspace. It showcases 20 years of architecture by RTA Studio, the multi award-winning architectural firm founded by alumnus Richard Naish.

Andrew is not only curating the exhibition, but making it, with a team of around 40 students. It features 30 tiny buildings, constructed from thick paper and laid out on sheets of corrugated cardboard, depicting the various locations in New Zealand in which RTA Studio have built.

Architecture exhibitions can be phenomenally expensive.

“But using paper means the models cost just a dollar each in materials,” Andrew says. 

And while exhibitions can also “generate a lot of junk” once this show’s over, it can be thrown in the recycling bin.

Andrew and his team have spent much of the past six months working out how to make the models, deciding how to lay them out in the gallery, and choosing the right weight and colour of the paper. If he totals his and the student hours involved in building the models, he estimates it would have taken “a year of person-time”. 

Architectural modelling is a crucial way to explore, understand and refine how a building works. Andrew should know – he’s both professor and practising designer.

“It’s a way to understand the implications of your idea, but it’s also a communication tool – it means your design can sit in people’s imaginations the right way.”  

The paper model-making technique used in his own professional life and for In Context is one he has used for national and international exhibitions. That includes Familial Clouds, an installation that he and Simon Twose (School of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington) created for the 13th La Biennale Architettura. It included, among other buildings, the Victoria Clock Tower, Christchurch (1860), Mitchell & Stout’s Waiheke Island House (2005), and Andrew’s Home for All in Tohoku, Japan (2011).

In the 5th Auckland Triennial, at Auckland City Art Gallery in 2013, Andrew and a team of students created Model Home using the technique he uses for miniature models, but blowing it up to construct a life-size house.

“We printed out huge architectural drawings and stitched them together to make the walls.”

It was displayed on the ground floor of the gallery, and the interior fitted out with familiar domestic items also made of paper – the left-overs of a meal, a pile of washing and so on.

“It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done,” he says.

Andrew’s modelling draws on okoshi-ezu, an ancient Japanese model-making technique that uses folded drawings. He discovered it while studying and working in Japan.

“These models are a development of that old technique, but mostly it’s a cheap, fast way to make models.”

There is something idiosyncratically illustrative and playful about Andrew’s paper modelling, in the models of the buildings, but also the people, the cars, boats, traffic signals, sheep, trees and so on.

“I suppose it is a bit of an Andrew special, something I cooked up. It sounds a bit silly, but this is what I’m a doctor of – paper models!”

The 30 RTA Studio buildings that will make up In Context are located around the country, and the 10-metre display forms an imaginary, spliced-together map of New Zealand, each building captured in situ, “to produce an imaginary New Zealand – as if RTA had designed it”.

“One of the most distinctive things about RTA Studio is the range of work they do,” Andrew says.

“From little houses to shops, schools, industrial buildings, offices, apartment blocks, and so on. They’ve even done work here at the University, including the recent refurbishment of the commerce buildings and the restoration of Waikohanga House, our 1940s apartment block in Symonds Street.

"So while some of New Zealand’s best architecture is accessible only to a few, their fantastic work contributes to the lives of many.”

– Margo White