Why have architects stopped building physical models" We know clients love them, and we know that they are productive and useful communicative devices ... so where are all the architectural models gone"

When architects are in school, they build a lot of models during their coursework. I don’t have an actual count but I bet that over the 6 years I spent in school that I built a few hundred models. That’s what architecture students do, they build models. Cardboard, chipboard, foam core, museum board, basswood … you name it, I’m pretty sure I used it to build a model.  Fast forward 20 years and I look around and think: “What happened to all the architectural models"!"”We still build architectural models in my office, but not that many – and far fewer than I would like to see built. We probably average about 1 or 2 a year, but we don’t build them for the same reasons I used to crank out models in my school days. As we become more and more dependent on our computers, physical architectural models are becoming a lost form of communicating design ideas. In school, I would go through loads of chipboard and more #11 X-Acto blades than seems reasonable, to create massing and assembly models. While most of the models we build now are still in the Design Development stage, they represent a fairly resolved concept by the time we build them.[cue all the computer architects telling me that 3D renderings are better a...