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'.