Model Matters

The end point of State Route 710 that bisects the city of Pasadena, CA, is known locally as “the ditch,” because the 50-acre strip of road lies 30 feet below the city’s street grid—and the life of the community. But that’s soon to change. The state relinquished this never-completed highway section to Pasadena in 2022, and Perkins Eastman is guiding an ambitious vision concept plan to reconnect a city where a large number of businesses and residents, including many living on low incomes as well as people of color, were displaced through eminent domain in the 1970s.

To imagine a new future for the site, the project team has been building cardboard study models atop aerial photographs of the existing city grid. They are using a kit of interchangeable parts to experiment with different types of building structures, urban block types, and green spaces that can fill the ditch. “It’s been a freeway for so long, I think it’s really ingrained in people’s cognitive map of the place,” says Lowell Morin, a Perkins Eastman urban planner and architect. Without the use of models, he explains, “They couldn’t envision something else being there.”

“We’re co-creating solutions with citizens to shift decision-making from the top down to having more grassroots involvement.”

—KATE HOWE

Project Manager, Reconnecting Pasadena

In an era of increasingly slick digital visualizations and simulations, physical models continue to be exceptionally effective for large-scale urban design projects involving vast swaths of a city. “The study models help decision-makers and the public understand the scale of the site, and it brings them into the design process,” says Kate Howe, project manager of the Reconnecting Pasadena consultant team. Howe, alongside the Perkins Eastman design team, has led many presentations to Pasadena city officials, staff, and the public over the past year. “The tactility of the models attracts people,” Howe says. “We’re co-creating solutions with citizens to shift decision-making from the top down to having more grassroots involvement.”

Nashville East Bank Redevelopment

Perkins Eastman’s planning and urban design practice has also guided the city of Nashville as it redevelops a 308-acre industrial area along the East Bank of the Cumberland River. The project aims to convert the desolate area around the Tennessee Titans’ football stadium into a thriving, mixed-use
community that will connect with existing residential neighborhoods and extend the downtown, which sits across the river. Practice leaders Vaughan Davies and Eric Fang created a model to help then Mayor John Cooper and his staff visualize the new landscape where the existing stadium will be taken down and a new one built further back from the river. Amid a stadium and other buildings made of cardboard, colored pieces of construction paper represented green space flowing toward the waterfront and a new boulevard that traverses the site.

During one review session, Cooper had an idea for repositioning the open space, so Davies cut the paper with scissors and reassembled it on the spot. “We won his approval right away. The meeting was a success because the mayor was able to see the change implemented immediately,” he says. Even in their rough state, models have the power to grab the attention of business and political leaders who’ve seen it all, Fang notes. “These days, everyone is so inundated with digital media, it’s all the more important to have something that is tangible and that you can interact with directly.”

“We won his approval right away. The meeting was a success because the mayor was able to see the change implemented immediately.”

—VAUGHAN DAVIES

Co-Principal in Charge, East Bank, Nashville

Fording Landing North

Planners and developers are also using models to figure out how a new development can nestle into a thicket of urban infrastructure in New York City. Perkins Eastman is in the early design stages for Fordham Landing North, a 1.5-mile strip of Harlem River waterfront in the Bronx that will become home to a mixed-use neighborhood of office, residential, and retail—a project similar in size to Perkins Eastman’s marquee project, The Wharf in Washington, DC.

The development of the northern end of the Bronx site needs to contend with a 40-foot change in grade between existing highways and a new waterfront boulevard, which will have to rise up and over railroad tracks to meet those arteries. “It was an eye-opener for the client and the consultant team to see the actual conditions. Nobody understood the scale of the elevation change without the model,” says Vijo Cherian, the project’s urban designer and architect. The model will help inform the development as it goes through multiple levels of city, state, and federal review.

While renderings can be used to illustrate certain angles or portions of large-scale, mixed-use developments, models can provide critically important site context. Davies says, “There’s a sense of immediacy and accessibility from the observer point of view—to really get to know the model and understand it and see [the whole project] the way they want to see it, from multiple angles—rather than an audited single view from a rendering.”

“It was an eye-opener for the client and the consultant team to see the actual conditions. Nobody understood the scale of the elevation change without the model.”

—VIJO CHERIAN

Urban Designer, Fordham Landing North

Making
Models

Walking into the model shop at Perkins Eastman’s New York headquarters is like entering a miniature construction site. A large central table fills much of the space where model builder Kazimierz Rzezniak assembles everything from riverfront developments such as The Berkley Riverfront district in Kansas City, MO, to the smallest details such as a bookcase design for a university library. On this day, the main level of a museum was taking shape on Rzezniak’s table. Multiple versions of a central stair were lying about, and the design team for the new Manhattan location of the National Museum of Mathematics (known as MoMath) was pondering which version would successfully twist up and around a ceiling-mounted sculpture planned for the space.

“It’s a fixed dimension that we need to design around,” says Pablo Cabrera Jauregui, an architect and computational designer who coded and 3D-printed the stair models—each of which takes about 10 hours to complete—before the team selected three options to show the client. “Having an object that you can see from everywhere—contrary to having something drawn on your screen that only gives you part of the full geometry—helps you comprehend the proportions,” he explains.

The model shop’s 3D printer, in addition to its laser cutter, can be programmed to mold and carve the intricate building components for designs that architects are creating in software programs such as Rhino, Revit, and SketchUp. And though these programs can be used to produce photorealistic renderings and create flythroughs of a virtual building, they don’t replace the impact of a physical model. “We are always trying to make this dialogue between the digital world and real-world construction and manufacturing, and physical models can connect them,” Cabrera Jauregui says. In this respect, even the most basic cardboard study model can more effectively help a client understand scale and context in comparison to a 2D rendering.

Rzezniak has been building models for 36 years. And though he retains his reliable woodshop with traditional wood-shaping tools, saws, and drills, he says the computer-driven machines, including a CNC router, are a most welcome addition. Model making “was really hard work” before the new technology, he says. Site elevations had to be carved by hand, but the laser cutter takes care of them now. Building elements had to be glued individually, where the 3D printer can mold their assembly all at once. “Now it’s fun to make models with these new technologies,” Rzezniak says, “but you still need experience and hand skills to put the pieces together.”

As for the MoMath model, the team tried nearly two dozen iterations of a self-supporting stair to circumnavigate a conical sculpture that will hang from the museum’s second-floor ceiling. Each time, new calculations adjusted the stair’s contours—where it would begin at the bottom and land on the top, whether there would be any landings, how wide the handrail should be, and which materials should be enlisted for each element. “These are subtle things that only physically you can perceive,” Cabrera Jauregui says. The MoMath leaders were thrilled with the final model, he adds. “They totally understood what we were trying to produce.” N