Two days ago someone semi-offered me a job. It arrived like all my job offers have arrived for the past dozen years or so; it was from a friend of a friend who was semi-randomly fishing for available skilled labor, and in this case we were both waiting in line for a buffet lunch. It’s not something I really see as a career path now, but you never know.
He is beginning work on an enormous architectural model of Disneylandworld (I never can quite keep them straight, even after going to one of them). The model is to be 35 feet square and constructed on an ILM soundstage over the next couple of years. When it’s done, ILM will make it into some sort of movie, as is their way.
So why me? Architectural modelbuilding, oddly enough, has always been a sub-specialty of mine. I worked in New York for a year doing nothing else; ironically, I worked quite a bit on various support buildings for Disney, among other things. After I moved out to the Bay Area, I taught a hands-on workshop at the Building Education Center in Berkeley for over a decade. I finally handed over that class to a colleague of mine from the GTU a little over a year ago, so I’d thought I was pretty much done with it. But modelbuilders find each other through mysterious paths, comrades together under the spell of the Rapture of the Tiny.
Building models is really quite an entertaining way to spend your day, if you can avoid 1. carpal tunnel problems and 2. also spending all your nights at it. You just make, make, make, improving constantly on various planning mistakes and improvising to suit your materials, and you wind up with these toy buildings. While many architectural models are almost or totally monochromatic, giving them (with luck) an air of elegance and dignity otherwise lacking in buildings that are six inches tall, some of them are in full color, so with experience you know that the colors you use must be extra vivid in order to appear natural because the painted areas are so small.
I used to irritate one of my architecture professors by painting my models after using them in presentations. She wanted them to stay pristine, but I loved the sensuality of applying color, not in any slavishly representational way, but as a way to think about my project and its next phases as I turned it over and over in my stained hands, mine and not mine all at once.
