Post Factum Model (Full-Scale)

Definition

The full-scale, post factum model is Marian Macken's analytical instrument for preserved and reconstructed interiors: the room that stands where the original stood, at original scale, made after the event, read as a model rather than as recovered reality. Her founding case is the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion — Mies van der Rohe's German Pavilion for the 1928/29 International Exposition, rebuilt "nearly sixty years after the original was dismantled" — and her extension is the artist's studio-museum: "The studio-museum, as a replicated original space, has analogies with a full-scale, post factum model of the space." Naming the reconstruction a full-scale, post factum model "makes explicit the experience for the visitor: one is walking within a replica."

The concept's force is critical. Full-scale usually works as an authenticity-guarantee: "Usually the permanence of the full-scale assumes a reality" — the room's size, materials, and walkability are taken to prove that it is the real thing. Reading the studio-museum-as-replica as a full-scale model "questions this. Instead, the studio-museum investigates spatial artificiality. These spatial documents question the inherent authenticity that the full-scale space demands." The concept thereby converts the replica's strongest claim (identity of site, structure, and scale) into its diagnostic weakness: the spatial document "occupies the same site and structure as the original and is imprinted with traces of its own original space, but it is no longer the original" — and Benjamin's authenticity-thesis names what is missing: "the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in a particular place… The here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authenticity."

The concept also specifies the two conditions under which a replica can stand next to the original as another version rather than replacing it: separation "either by an interval of time, which offers a caesura, or by the different form that a reinterpretation provides." In relocated studio-museums (Brancusi's moved to the Centre Pompidou; Francis Bacon's moved from London to Dublin, its contents mapped "even including the dust" by a team led by conservator Mary McGrath that "included archaeologists"), formal displacement makes the fabrication legible: "These studio-museums operate as 'metonymic signs of the experience,' somewhat like representation." In the Barcelona Pavilion's and the Whiteley Studio's same-site cases, the caesura is the only separator — and where the temporal interval is small ("in the case of the Brett Whiteley Studio… the interval between the original and the reconstruction that stands to separate the two and overcome the common factor of the two occupying the same site is small"), the risk is that the visitor "conflat[es] simulacra with the thing imitated."

Key Thinkers

• Marian Macken — the concept's author (2018; anticipated in her "Solidifying the Shadow: Post Factum Documentation and the Design Process," Architectural Theory Review 14.3, 2009, cited in the chapter): the Barcelona Pavilion and the studio-museum as full-scale post factum models; spatial artificiality against full-scale authenticity.
• Walter Benjamin — the concept's authenticity-theory (via Macken): "In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art."
• Kester Rattenbury — the concept's usurpation-theory (quoted via Macken): the image "becomes the quintessential image: the 'real' or 'authentic' version of it, of which the occupied, adapted … or inaccessible building seems only a partly valid version," and "as the only record of a demolished building, it almost replaces the architecture in the idea of being 'real'" (This Is Not Architecture, p. 57).
• Thomas Demand (artist) — the concept's formal-separation witness: his full-scale paper models are separated from their referents "by the different form that his reinterpretation manifests," so the photographs "do not 'make a claim over the real.'"

Related Concepts

• Spatial Document — the concept's object: the full-scale post factum model is the scale-form the spatial document takes when it replicates its original in situ.
• Simulation / Hyperreality — the concept's risk-register: the walkable replica's "possibility of 'conflat[ing] simulacra with the thing imitated'" (via George Dodds on Benjamin's era, when "the two remained relatively distinct").
• Representation — the concept's metonymic pole: relocated studios "operate as 'metonymic signs of the experience,' somewhat like representation."
• House Museum — the concept's typological site: the studio-museum as full-scale replica, against the Freud houses' re-creation and the architect's house museum's authenticity-by-inhabitance.
• Adaptive Reuse — the concept's negative space: the reconstruction is not reuse of fabric but remaking after loss; the post factum model is what alteration becomes when nothing original survives.
• White Cube — the concept's viewing apparatus: the replica's walkability retains the visitor as "viewer… at once existing within the space but also a member of the audience."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the concept's source and sole full statement: the Barcelona Pavilion analogy; the two separation conditions (temporal caesura or formal difference); the relocated studios (Brancusi; Bacon's dust-mapped Dublin move); Rattenbury's usurpation-thesis; Benjamin's "here and now"; the "spatial artificiality" terminus.

Open Questions

• "Usually the permanence of the full-scale assumes a reality" — does the concept indict all full-scale reconstruction (the Barcelona Pavilion; rebuilt city cores; 1:1 interior museums) or only the same-site case? Where does the rebuilt-but-distant replica sit on the caesura/form continuum?
• The Whiteley Studio's temporal interval is too small to separate original from reconstruction. Is the sufficient interval a number of years, a generational forgetting, or the death of all witnesses — and can a curatorial programme manufacture a caesura (signage, date, explicit "this is a replica" framing) or is the caesura irreducibly experiential?
• Rattenbury's usurpation-thesis concerns images; Macken's concerns walkable replicas. Which direction does usurpation run at full scale — does the walkable replica replace the original in the "idea of being 'real'" more completely than any photograph, or does the body's walk keep the difference alive?
• Demand's models are "never things unto themselves; they are a means to an end, painstakingly crafted and subsequently discarded." Is the post factum model's honesty then a function of its disposability — and would a permanently preserved replica (the Barcelona Pavilion, the studio-museum) always tend toward the conflation the disposable model escapes?