Three Found Models

Three Found Models are full scale spatial objects, each demonstrating how the shape of space can create intimacy in public space. In order to make the spatial effects crystal clear, the objects are made as abstract as possible, with a minimum amount of recognisable features. This highlights the effect of each model’s shape, and as such Three Found Models becomes an important manual for how to read space.

The objects were exhibited at the Soho Revue Gallery in London, where visitors could try the spaces that the objects produce around them. In Model 1, the spatial conditions of an object in movement in public space was replicated by creating a large protruding roof on top of a small intimate space. The shape of the roof pushes passers-by away from the internal space, creating a comfortable distance for the people inside the model. In Model 2, visitors can experience the essence of having a tall object to relate and orient to, in a large room with many people. It creates a gravitational point where people withdraw from the crowd, without ever leaving the space. In the third and last model, the spatial conditions of a beach are reproduced by creating a wide space with a slope, which can only be accessed from one side and which overlooks a horizon. This reproduces a space where people orient their bodies in the same way, and make contact through a collective act, but not necessarily by talking to each other.

The project lives on after the exhibition as a tool for how to understand space. A photographic book with the same name was published in order to share the design methodology with the wider architecture community. The project is a manifestation of a process of abstraction, through which essential qualities of everyday spaces can be translated into “spatial ready-mades”, something that is central to the work of Hesselbrand. Read less