The models we keep

There is a shelf above the drawing desk in Porto that runs the full length of the studio. It holds forty-one models. We build one for every client meeting, sometimes three, and most of them go into the recycling within a month. About one in ten earns a place on the shelf. This note is about how they get there.

Card first, then everything else

Every model starts as grey board cut at 1:200 on the big table by the window. At that scale a house is the size of a hand, and the only questions you can ask are the important ones: where does the light come from, where do you enter, what do you see first. Card is cheap and fast, which means nobody is precious about it. We cut, look, argue and cut again.

A model is the only drawing a client never has to learn to read.

Plans and sections are a language. Most of our clients are fluent in it by the end of a project, but at the first meeting they are not, and it would be unfair to expect them to be. A model can be picked up, turned towards the window and looked into. People lean in. They point. The conversation changes from what we intend to what they want, which is the conversation we need to have.

Fig. 02 — Card and balsa study model with pencil sketches. AI-generated studio study.

What makes a model worth keeping

A model stays when it changed a decision. The balsa roof study for Light Well House stays because it showed us the light well needed to be a metre wider. The plaster massing for the Vineyard Annexe stays because the client held it for ten minutes in silence and then asked us to sink the annexe into the slope. The pretty ones, the presentation models with tiny trees, almost never make it.

We also keep the ones that failed well. A first attempt at the Granary Retrofit put every window on the south wall; it was bright, hot and completely wrong for a building that should feel like a cool store. That model sits next to the final one as a reminder of what we nearly built.

Why we photograph them outside

Before a model leaves the studio we take it to the site, put it on the ground and photograph it in the light it was designed for. It takes an hour. It tells us more about the building than a day of renderings, and the photograph goes into the drawing set as sheet A-001, before a single plan.