Jordi Colomer, Nicolas Moulin, Wilfrid Almendra: Three Miniaturizations of Modernist Architecture

“Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m.,” declared architect Charles Jencks in the first chapter of his book, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism (New York, 1977), referring to the demolition of the massive Pruitt-Igoe housing project which typified modernist ideals. For Jencks, the page had been emphatically, and happily, turned. It was the end of a putatively universal style, marked by a belief in progress, the marriage of ­technology and humanism, and based, aesthetically and economically, on ­functionalism.

But can we dismiss modernism so easily? Questioning characteristic features of our era, artists are showing interest in what it once was and what remains of it today, though it is in a ruined and ghostly state. Significantly, this reassessment is accompanied by the production of models and miniatures replicating constructions of the twentieth century. Thus, while adopting very different methods and theoretical approaches, Jordi Colomer, Nicolas Moulin, and Wilfrid Almendra have all produced models after the fact, not to plan for future constructions, but to reflect on what has been done in the past, for, as Moulin points out, “we are in an age where the concept of speculation has replaced that of the project.”¹ 1 - From an email interview with Nicolas Moulin, March 2010. With these three artists, models become formal strategies for examining what modernism has become.