Reviewed by: The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture by Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen Marjorie Bradley Kellogg THE MODEL AS PERFORMANCE: STAGING SPACE IN THEATRE AND ARCHITECTURE. By Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen. Performance and Design series. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018; pp. 200. This is a book about models, or rather about the idea of models. Its language is complex, but its thesis fairly simple—not exactly revelatory, but well worth scholarly examination. It is that a model, like any artwork, can be created, considered, and read as an object in its own right, not representative of some past or future final version, but autonomous, with its own particular commentary or content expressed in its interaction with the viewer. This expression, however subtle or static, can be understood as a performance. In development of this thesis, the book lays out a good deal of interesting history about models and their uses. For millennia, people have made small-scale representations of the world around them to augment ritual practice, to inform, or simply to entertain. This study limits its scope to architectural and theatrical models, and "rallies against the prevailing assumption of the model as a second-order object awaiting its realization as a future 'real' building or 'real' set design" (1). Instead, the authors propose "a new writing of the model's history as a history of agency and performativity that frees the model from its professional pragmatism yet acknowledges its central importance in the design process" (2). Who would want to think otherwise, especially those of us who work daily with models? The Model as Performance is organized both chronologically and thematically into six chapters, rather like a series of connected essays on the model's various incarnations, with theme generally taking precedence over a strict timeline. Early on, Brejzek and Wallen cite Claude Lévi-Strauss's argument that a model's reduced scale "allows for more immediate understanding and control" (59). Accordingly, each chapter delves with some depth into a few pertinent works that serve as case studies—verbal models, if you will—to advance the authors' thesis. Chapter 1 begins in Renaissance Italy with the use of models to experiment with theories of perspective. We meet set designers Sebastiano Serlio and Inigo Jones, then follow the evolution of stage scenery from fixed architectural cityscapes, to eighteenth-century wing-and-border scenery, to the grandiose naturalism of Wagnerian stagings. The authors' enthusiasm picks up in the 1920s with Russian constructivism and the Bauhaus in Germany with "the emergence of the utopian, forward-pointing model," which they label "the singular revolutionary object that (whether realized or not) sought to radically redefine and transgress social, political and cultural conventions and boundaries once and for all" (35). By this point, the definition of model has expanded to include the full-scale scenery and often the theatre as well. Chapter 2 cycles back to the Renaissance, where the rigors of one-point perspective in Sabbioneta's Teatro All'Antica become a reflection of the autocratic rule of the local duke. The next step is to embrace collections of models and artifacts, as in seventeenth-century "art chambers," the precursors of museums, where the model is characterized as "staging knowledge" (42). All along, examples are offered of the increasing autonomy of the model, building to Philip James de Loutherbourge's dining table–sized model theatre of 1781, where he staged "natural phenomena in a realistic and recognizable way" (65), entirely without the use of actors. Chapter 3 brings a long section on Edward Gordon Craig, who despite being the son of a famous actress, considered the actor "imperfect" and wrote in praise of the uber-marionette. Perhaps as a result, Craig's seminal ideas were rarely produced and were most fully realized in drawings and models. Interestingly, the authors basically dismiss his fellow Symbolist and contemporary Adolphe Appia, "whose rhythmic spaces and abstracted stage elements were always in the service of the actor" (70). Chapter 4 sidesteps into architecture, or perhaps architecture as theatre, focusing on house models and model homes, particularly as a medium for social change. The notion of performing models gets a lot easier...