The Model of Clayton Square

'The Model of Clayton Square' is on show at the View Two Gallery, Liverpool from Thursday 23rd October to 1st November as part of the ‘Local Heroes’ exhibition, curated by Samuel Skinner. 

The film of ‘The Model City’ will be shown along with 10 other short films by local artists at A Small Cinema, an intimate temporary cinema installation taking place in View Two Gallery, 7pm, Friday 24th October.

The Model City - Trailer

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Ken Martin on the Model City

Architect Ken Martin gives his views on The Model City, plus some interesting ideas on the future of public transport in Liverpool.

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The Sound of Amos

A special thanks to a very talented composer / sound-designer / audio scientist, the Liverpool-based Amos (aka Tom Smith). Support this man and his music and his wonderful Music For Sleeping experiments.

www.myspace.com/amosnoisefoundation

Credit where Credit's due

BBC Big Screen Liverpool presents

a Luden AudioVisual production

a film by Sam Meech

Music by Amos

Production Assistant - Neringa Plange

Bevington Street &
International Garden Festival modelshttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
filmed courtesy of National Museums Liverpool
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk

Clayton Square Entrance model
salvaged from complete destruction by Bren O’Callaghan
rebuilt by Sam Meech
now inhabited by a house spider

Liverpool One model
filmed couretesy of Grosvenor
www.liverpool-one.com

Liverpool City Centre 1:500 scale model
filmed courtesy of Liverpool Vision
and Liverpool Central Library
www.liverpoolvision.co.uk

THIS model (The Design Academy)
stolen from Liverpool School of Art and Design

thanks to

Jenny Douglas at Liverpool Vision
Mark Wareing at Liverpool Central Library
Kay Jones and National Museums Liverpool
Lorraine Dolding at Grosvenor
John Venters at Liverpool One
Mark Fleming at Studioscope
Matthew Halsall

special thanks to
Bren O’Callaghan

produced by Luden AudioVisual

Some small animals were lost
and harmed making this film

R.I.P Bob

Filming the Film Titles

I was a bit worried how I was going to approach the titles, and I realised I was avoiding dealing with it. So I begin to think about it in those spare minutes of the day - on a train, walking to work, on the toilet - but resisted writing things down at all, preffering instead to let the ideas seive through my brain and ferment in my imagination. Finally tonight I had enough to go on - the idea of a scale model real worl credits, plus enough energy to improvise the details of how to build and shoot it. And I'm really pleased with the way it has worked out. It also felt satisfying to thank people involved and bring the shooting to an end. On with the edit...

Rising From The Grave

On Friday I began the task of bring out the dead. Sifting through the wreckage of the Clayton Square models and bringing the pieces and people together to build one final model, in tribute to the models that had gone before it. I had bought some miniature gravestones especially from noch.de in Germany in order to mark the dead. I also added a camera team to mark the process I have gone through in filming this project. Its strange - I remember how absolutely gutted I was when the Clayton Square models were trashed, but its meant I've been able to spend more time thinking about what they mean to me, and it has also allowed me to build a permanent habitat for the house spider to live in. Every act of destruction is an act of creation.

Shoot - City Centre 1:500 model

This model is now temporarily housed at the back of the second floor of Liverpool Central Library. It is a vast and important model of Liverpool. The model istelf is largely white, which gives it an oddly futuristic feel.

And they let me film it with insects! Luckily we didn't lose any in it (though a cockroach had a good go at getting wedged under a building on Castle st).

My friend Neringa helped me manage and motivate the cockroaches, crickets, stick insects, snails, locusts and house spiders that we took to the shoot. And they looked great, especially the spider, who i'm now quite fond of.

Many legs make light work

R.I.P Bob Too

Of course, Im not just filming the models, but I have some actors to explore them too. We filmed the Liverpool one model with crickets, stick insects, a locust, and a tanzanian yellow legged millipede called Bob. Bob was undoubtedly the star, the Steve McQueen of our film. Unfortunately he thought he was in the Great Escape too, and promptly escaped somewhere in my office. I haven't seen him since but i'm know he's out there... I'm sure of it.

Anyway, following Bob's exodus, I quickly ordered another millipede. He arrived on Friday morning. I christened him "Bob Too", after George Costigan's famous northern rogue in Alan Clarkes sex comedy 'Rita, Sue & Bob Too'. However, on saturday morning i found him curled up. he died in my hands. I think. Well he weren't moving anyway.

This was the only footage I made of him. *sob*.

Shoot - International Garden Festival part B

This is the model of the International Garden Festival site near Otterspool as envisioned prior to its launch in 1984. It is a beautiful model - with green grass and trees punctured by the primary colours of tents and attractions, all laid out along the Mersey. It shows the scale of the development.

In reality the whole site has changed so much. How do things go to rack and ruin so quickly? I think two models should be produced whenever a project is proposed - one of the vision, and one of that vision after 20 years of neglect.

Shooting this model, sans insect, was probably my favourite moment so far, as it is simply such a beautiful failure. This was also the first time I had seen the model since 4 years ago and it looked even more breathtaking than i remember. It seemed now to mark a stage of things coming together for me.

Shoot - International Garden Festival part A

The International Garden Festival model is in two parts - a landscape and the festival hall. This festival hall has recently been demolished.

As this film project has developed, I have been more keen to show the model in the context of its display, storage, or neglect, hence I was happy to film this one in its crate. The context of display here and now raises questions about its purpose, importance and longevity.

Finally, note the strange 'beauty competition' feel of the people inside the hall. Was this envisioned as a naturist resort?

Shoot - Social Housing Model

National Museums Liverpool gave me access to their stores in order to film some of their model archive. This is one that really caught me - a haunting model of a social housing project called Bevington Street. It is gone now. It is the only model that I use in the film that has a purely social residential purpose. I feel it is great contrast to the Liverpool One model, where even the residential aspect seems to be there simply in the interests of commerce rather than community. This also has a high level of detail and hand painting.

Suffer the little people

Here are the survivors. Born in the 1980s. Cast in lead. Painted by hand. And then forgotten... Saved from the jaws of death by Bren O'Callaghan. They are the lucky ones. Many didn't make it. *sob* They will be marked by graves.

All That Remains...

Clayton Square is gone. Well not exactly. I have it in a box in my office. Hibernating. Bren from the BBC bravely rescued these pieces of architecture from the builders skip. I daren't move them as they are very brittle and the glue is old. But they will be used very soon. ANd they will once more be inhabited. But not by people...

A Small Tragedy

I received a call on Friday to say that the Clayton Square models had been thrown away. Renovation work in the management office of the centre had been going on, and despite clear instructions from the Big Screen Manager that the models were not to be touched, it seems the Centre Manager allowed builders to trash them in the skip. I felt really shocked to hear this and very sad. That the models could be around and ignored for so long and then just when someone begins to take an interest in them they are thrown away seems cruel fate.

Apparently some parts of the model were salvaged from the skip by the Big Screen Manager, so we may still have something to work with, but this event itself seems to say something about the value and importance (or lack of) these models as the city develops. I don't know the ins and outs and whys and wherefors of all of this, but I hope to open a dialogue with the manager to find out some of the reasons behind their creation and destruction.

R.I.P Clayton Square

Modulor

A fantastic shop on Geneisau Strasse in Berlin that sells model-making materials. Its not a huge shop, though the things it sells are pretty small too of course. I recoginsed the types of materials on sale from models I have seen already and realised that in some way, the supplier is a factor in shaping the look (and emotion) of a model, through the range they have on offer. This is especially the case with people, who come in white plastic, silver metal, or painted colourful plastic. Though strangely, these always depict white middle class people, and everyone is smiling. No fat people, no women in burkhas, no one made of wood, no-one crying, puking, angry, fighting or wandering despondently. I wondered whether a more reduced / abstract approach might be used ever, like with the simple trees on the Berlin Stadt Modell - maybe matchsticks, pins, skittles...

Modulor Website

Model Couple

I had heard tales that within model making circles there were certain secret things that were traditionally included in a new model, such as couples having sex, or a man carrying his own head, or even a miniature Winston Churchill. I thought it was just urban myth, like those tales about Disney animators writing 'sex' in the clouds in the Lion King. But then a model-making friend showed me this gem...

Das Berlin Stadt Modell pt 3

"

Excerpt from the Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung leaflet:

"A permanent exhibition of the Senate Department for Urban development presents four models and a host of plans on the development of Berlin's inner city district.
- The 1:1000 model depicts large projects in the inner-city urban context.
- The 1:500 model shows the impact of single buildings on their direct neighbourhood.
- The virtual 3D model simulates the planned Berlin on all scales.

...The 1:500 model focuses on Berlin's historical centre. It goes so far as to show details of facades that were designed over the past ten years or finished buildings, as well as the latest planning., for instance the Inner-City Plan. One centimetre in the model corresponds to five metres in reality."

Das Berlin Stadt Modell pt 2

Accompanying the main Berlin model is another piece, a CAD design 1:1000 plan - 'das virtuelle 3D-Modell', displayed alongside a more colorful installation, a 1989 modell of the city centre. The 1989 model has again a very particular look, and a high level of detail in certain respects - vast apartment blocks show every window, and trees are more life-like. The colours again help to define older and newer parts of the town, with some bold use of blue and red on newer blocks. The plastic materials used give this more of a toy town feeling. Once again, there are no people or transport, which makes me think this is not trying to promote a lifestyle, but capture a vision of the architecture, old alongside new. Its fairly kitsch in a way, as if the whole thing has been made using models bought from a tourist shop, or like a piece made by Jeff Koons.

Stadtentwicklung Berlin Website

Das Berlin Stadt Modell pt 1

Today I visited the fantastic Berliner Stadt Modelle, a 1:500 scale model of the city. It was especially brilliant to see this just days after seeing the Liverpool city centre model, again in 1:500 scale. This put into perspective just how big Berlin is, taking up a whole room. A separate, and perhaps even larger wall-mounted model of the city at 1:1000 scale was sadly absent, away in Cannes, though the purpose of this absence was not clear.

The model itself is predominantly white, using a similar level of detail on these parts as the Liverpool model. Again, newer additions to the city are rendered differently, though this time in wood, with a greater level of detail. Two more striking aspects of the model (apart from its enormous size) are the absence of any cars or people, and the trees, a simplified and charming design which reminds me of animations for children.

It is worth noting that the Berlin model has its own dedicated space and surrounding exhibitions of town plans throughout the last century. Staff are also on hand to answer questions for the public, and when I arrived there seemed to be a small guided tour taking place. I have started to think more about where and how these models are exhibited and how this has an impact on their purpose and who gets to see them.

Play Make Do

My friends Ruth and Sven are professional model makers. They made this model town for a bit of fun one night. Again though it has a openness of vision and a sense of fun and play that really appeals to the imagination, and reclaims things back from the realms of 'the expert' and back in the hands of those with their own vision and playfulness.

The Emotional City

Kingelez's models nailed home an important point for me about the way all models set themselves somewhere on the spectrum from cool and practical to emotionally involving and perhaps even irrational. Its achieved through scale, materials, shapes, the level of detail, naturalism, and its 'inhabitants'. They all want you to perceive them with a certain level of emotional engagement, or perhaps maybe a through an adopted lens of cool detachment, as if the reality will somehow be so emotionally un-involving. This spectrum is not such a straight line, more of a soup, and in the case of the models in Liverpool, even the most restrained, functional models have some aspect of emotional stimulation.

Most often these are utopian pleasures of space, cleanliness, freedom, technology, future lifestyles. There is a huge impact simply in the scale and display of these models, that allows us to feel god-like. Of course the reality of these large buildings is often somewhat more imposing. A lot is communicated through colour and materials. Some of these decisions are really odd and make me question whether these models are primarily functional or emotional. Why are all the people and cars silver, even on the wooden model of Liverpool One? The wood itself seems rustic, like a medieval metropolis. Has any city been built of wood since the great fire of London?

I like the 'functional' models a lot, but i find it really interesting when models are presented with an overt emotional association. I am somehow less suspicious of these. I love Kingelez's models because they are so unabashedly fun and happy. They are honestly about their subjectivity and therefore they cannot be mistaken as 'truth'.

The Playful City - Bodys Isek Kingelez

A friend showed me some photos of work by an artist called Bodys Isek Kingelez. He makes models of his visions of cities, including his hometown Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. These models are visions of the future: a mixture of existing architecture and new subjective ideas about what is possible. Although the shapes, colours and scale of the architecture all seems fantastic, the materials used (bottle caps, corrugated cardboard and tinfoil) are from our own world.

The primary colours, curvy shapes and slides, stripes and spots, are a world away from the restrained, grey models that have formed the bulk of my research in Liverpool so far. Are these models for kids? I think children would appreciate them though that's not to say they wouldn't prefer the model of Liverpool city Centre in the Central Library. In anycase, the model represents a very different kind of vision, and perhaps for a different audience. Is Kingelez actually proposing that the buildings would be these strange colours, or even the same shape? They might seem ridiculous but in some ways it is no more ridiculous than the Liverpool One model; buildings that in reality will be made from metal and glass, here rendered in wood, a strangely nostalgic vision of the future. Kingelez models are ridiculous and fantastic in a way that encourages you to enjoy his personal vision and then think about your own vision, "what if...".

Bodys Isek Kingelez profile on Culturebase