Architect David Kemnitzer spent decades collecting paper models of castles, nuclear power plants, modernist houses, farms, and skyscrapers, starting from his childhood in the 1940s. But he never assembled the 4,500 pieces he donated to the National Building Museum between 2013 and 2016. So before a display of the miniature architecture could be installed, museum staff, architecture students, and volunteers all pitched in to carefully construct color copies of selected models, with the more elaborate examples taking weeks to erect with scissors, glue, and razor blades. ... As curator Sarah Leavitt, who organized Around the World in 80 Paper Models, explained to Hyperallergic, the time making the models “does give you this connection to the structure you’re building.”
Drawing from a magnificent 4,500-piece collection recently donated to the Museum, the architectural paper models represent buildings, cultures, and countries from Austria to Wales. The collection includes examples of hand-drawn castles, intricate cathedrals with water-colored gardens, and micro-models smaller than a postcard. Some are viewed flat; others are copied and constructed in 3-D.
In keeping with the “around the world” theme, the exhibition displays a wide variety of structures exploring how states and countries are represented through paper models. Architectural representation sometimes showcases iconic grandeur—the Dome of the Rock, the Roman Baths, a World Cup soccer stadium in South Korea—and sometimes devolves into a patronizing primitivism, in which cultures disappear into myth. Viewing a selection of paper models from the 1950s, for example, visitors will recognize that unfortunate stereotypes are often linked to a limited architectural understanding of foreign cultures. (from the exhibition website)