Document Type
Article
Abstract
Many large cities offer their visitors and inhabitants two versions of the city to experience. There is the full-scale city, able to be walked around and become immersed within. Then there is the three-dimensional scale version, navigated differently, yet travelled over all the same. These city scale models document the urban situation, for viewers to understand the place within which the model resides. By modelling the city at a smaller scale, the city becomes graspable, its entirety able to be walked around, or in some cases, over.
City scale models represent the city in three dimensions. However, many spatial experiences and qualities of the city cannot be recorded in these models, hence highlighting the limits and specificity of this type of representation. The difficulty of representing the event of 9/11 in miniature is one such omission on the Panorama of the City of New York model; on this model, miniature Twin Towers still stand. The model portrays the city as a cohesive, designed whole: an idealised, unweathered metropolis with definite parameters. The city is seen to develop in staccato-like bursts, jumping from one static instant to another. This representation of surface, time and temporality defines these types of models. This essay uses the lens of architectural representation to read the 1:1 scale city, through the specifics of the event of 9/11.
Repository Citation
Macken, Marian. "The Event in Miniature: 9/11 and the New York City Model." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–23. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss2/7