Models and World Making

Annabel Jane Wharton

Description

From climate change forecasts and pandemic maps to Lego sets and Ancestry algorithms, models encompass our world and our lives. In her thought-provoking new book, Annabel Wharton begins with a definition drawn from the quantitative sciences and the philosophy of science but holds that history and critical cultural theory are essential to a fuller understanding of modeling. Considering changes in the medical body model and the architectural model, from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, Wharton demonstrates the ways in which all models are historical and political.

Examining how cadavers have been described, exhibited, and visually rendered, she highlights the historical dimension of the modified body and its depictions. Analyzing the varied reworkings of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—including by monumental commanderies of the Knights Templar, Alberti’s Rucellai Tomb in Florence, Franciscans’ olive wood replicas, and video game renderings—she foregrounds the political force of architectural representations. And considering black boxes—instruments whose inputs we control and whose outputs we interpret, but whose inner workings are beyond our comprehension—she surveys the threats posed by such opaque computational models, warning of the dangers that models pose when humans lose control of the means by which they are generated and understood. Engaging and wide-ranging, Models and World Making conjures new ways of seeing and critically evaluating how we make and remake the world in which we live.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Argument
1. Unmanageable Models/Definition
2. Body Model/Science/History
3. Building Model/Architecture/Politics
4. Black Boxes
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• architectural history
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: University of Virginia Press
• Date de parution: 14 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780813947006
• Langue: English

Extrait

Models and World Making
Models and World Making
Bodies, Buildings, Black Boxes
Annabel Jane Wharton
University of Virginia Press • Charlottesville and London
University of Virginia Press
© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper -->
First published 2021 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 -->
ISBN 978-0-8139-4698-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8139-4699-3 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-8139-4700-6 (ebook)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.
Cover illustrations ( clockwise from upper left ): Female reproductive system, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Basileae: Ex officina Joannis Oporini, 1543), 378 (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University); 3D glass molecular model created by Purpy Pupple, November 22, 2010 (Purpy Pupple—own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12121577 ); “Weather Forecasting Factory” by Stephen Conlin, based on the description in “Weather Prediction by Numerical Process” by L. F. Richardson, Cambridge University Press, 1922, and on advice from Prof. John Byrne, Trinity College Dublin (Image: ink and watercolour © Stephen Conlin 1986, All Rights Reserved).
This book is dedicated to Kalman Bland, who was fully engaged in the project both pre- and postmortem. His death delayed its writing; his life enabled its making.
Looking down on the helpless model, which resembles a crab squashed on the beach, one can only admire Eisenman’s success at this task [of demonstrating architecture’s post-Holocaust role of symbolizing impotence].
—R ICHARD P OMMER , Idea as Model
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Argument
1 Unmanageable Models/Definition
2 Body Model/Science/History
3 Building Model/Architecture/Politics
4 Black Boxes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Many have contributed to the slow evolution of Models. I am very grateful to the staff and referees of the National Humanities Center, who provided me time and support for research and writing as the Birkland Fellow of 2016–17. My home institution, Duke University, has been most generous in allowing me time away to think about models as the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and the Harry Porter Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. The students in the graduate courses on model theory that I taught at Duke, Yale, and Virginia contributed greatly to my understanding of the subject.
The participants in interdisciplinary venues in which I presented preliminary work on the definition of models also facilitated its refinement: notably the De Marchi Economic History Colloquium and the Media Arts and Science Forum of the Levine Science Research Center at Duke. Similarly, the audiences at lectures that I was invited to give at the schools of architecture at Yale, North Carolina State, and Bilkent University in Ankara, as well at the University of Minnesota and Princeton University, were most helpful. My work on cadavers and early modern Holy Sepulchres was also first presented in invited lectures at the University of Virginia and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC.
I have additionally benefited from extended discussions with model experts: Mary Morgan, economic historian at the London School of Economics, Derek Ehrman, lead programmer for Red Storm Entertainment (Ubisoft), David Levinthal, model artist and photographer. Peter Eisenman and Alan Plattus enriched my understanding of built space; Charles Sparkman and Chris Brasier refined my sense of the powers of BIM. Also essential to my work has been the access to models provided by those who curate them, notably Dora Thornton, curator of the Waddesdon Bequest and of Renaissance Europe at the British Museum, Gabriella Sorelli, director of the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, and Yoram Tsafrir, former director of the Jewish National Library and longtime superintendent of the Model of Jerusalem. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Matthew Velkey, Dr. Daniel Schmitt, the five medical students of table 21 (Meg, Jackie, Jon, Steven, and Jessy), and Lucy, our cadaver, who opened with me the deeply affecting archive of the body in Duke’s first-year gross anatomy course through the fall of 2018. And to Rebekah Hudson, John Garnham-Davies, and Mark Curwood of the Nottingham Repository Centre in England for an introduction to cadaver preparation and embalming. Friends in my neighborhood—Catherine Hart and Susan and Elliot Schaffer—tried, with limited success, to help me make parts of this book more accessible. Ásta and Dore Bowen, my comrades at the National Humanities Center, were wonderfully provocative interlocutors. My colleagues at Duke, Marc Brettler, Elizabeth Clark, Paul Jaskot, David Morgan, Mark Olson, Victoria Szabo, Sheila Dillon, and Augustus Wendall have offered both support and productive criticism. I am also grateful to the many commentators on bits of the project, among whom are Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Kevin Hoover, Meltem Gurel, Valeria Finucci, Larissa Carneiro, Dale Kinney, Kaylee Alexandra, Helmut Puff, Alexandra Masgras, David Turturo, Bruce Hancock, Patsy Vanags, Alan Griffiths, Robin Cormack, Mary Beard. Helping me with my translations and, more generally, with my thinking, were James Rives and Gigi Dillon. Contributing to the refinement of my arguments were the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript; greatly facilitating the process of publication were my editors at UVA Press, Boyd Zenner, Mark Mones, and Maura High. My greatest debt is to Kalman Bland. He shaped this study not only while he lived, but also after he died.
A note on text recycling. An early version of my definition of models, presented at “ Imagined Forms, Modeling, and Material Culture,” a conference organized by Martin Brueckner, Sandy Isenstadt, and Sarah Wasserman at the University of Delaware, appears in the conference proceedings, published by the University of Minnesota Press. In addition, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a central object in Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (University of Chicago Press, 2006). That sanctuary’s varied appropriations by the West from pre- to postmodernity (from London’s twelfth-century Temple Church to the Holy Land Experience) provided the basis for an argument about the progressive commoditization of the sacred in Protestantized societies. In the present text, the same sites appear along with new ones to document historical shifts in model making and representation.
Models and World Making
Introduction
Argument

“Model,” in my view, is just a word for people who cannot spell “hypothesis.”
—D EREK A GER , The New Catastrophism
From algorithms and economic pie charts to Barbie dolls and video games, models are everywhere. As climate change models and pandemic maps now demonstrate with particular force, models are not only an integral part of our daily lives; they are also intimately involved in conditioning the future of our species. The power and ubiquity of models make them a crucial object of study.
Models’ essential contribution to research is fully acknowledged in the physical and social sciences, where models are not only pervasively deployed in research and its evaluation but are themselves the subject of serious scrutiny. Critical interest in models in the arts and humanities has also emerged. 1 But the illimitable variety of models has discouraged the interdisciplinary investigation of models. Most model studies treat a single genre of model: mathematical, climatic, architectural, economic, literary. Scholarly examination of models in general, like Max Black’s Models and Metaphors, Marx Wartofsky’s Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding, Reinhard Wendler’s Das Modell zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft, or the magisterial Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science, edited by Lorenzo Magnani and Tommaso Bertolotti (which defines “science” very broadly) are relatively rare. 2 This book contributes to that broader conversation about models by defining, historicizing, and politicizing them.
The structure of Models and World Making is simple. The first chapter, “Unmanageable Models/Definition,” works to control models by defining them. Definitions generally assert our ability, through the power of language, to manage some small aspect of the world. An inclusive definition of models offers some sense of mastery over this particularly unruly form. The process of thinking through a definition of all models also reveals their strengths and weaknesses. It further suggests that characteristics conventionally attributed to certain model types are found, to a greater or lesser a degree, in all others. This definition thereby establishes commonalities between humanist and scientific models. The first part of my definition is derived from common language; the second part depends on the sophisticated investigations of models undertaken in the quantitative sciences. The resulting formulation certainly demonstrates how much humanists like myself might be taught about our own models by scientific ones. Nevertheless, a definition of “model” dependent exclusively on common language and on research in the sciences and social sciences remains incomplete. A humanist perspective supplements that definition in an effort to make it more effective.
That humanist perspective critically addresses disclaimers made by some