The Artists Remaking Everyday Buildings in Dollhouse Scale
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Miniaturists are memorializing the architecture of quickly changing cities with meticulous renderings of corner stores, restaurants and even dumpsters.
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IN A QUIET studio on Skeppsholmen, the small, wooded island in central Stockholm, the Swedish artist Christopher Robin Nordström spends hours immersed in a miniature version of Tokyo. He tracks the slow deterioration of the Japanese city’s more nondescript storefronts and homes via Google Maps: the way awnings fade, the path that water damage takes across a facade. His work consists of remaking these buildings, with their mundane imperfections, at sizes that mean they could fit neatly into his bike basket. “It intrigues me that Tokyo is a megacity built up of mini houses,” says Nordström, 44, who designed accessories for a major fast-fashion brand before shifting his attention to scale-model making during the pandemic. He fell in love with the city on his first visit, in 2018, and recently spent over a year creating a knee-high likeness of a three-story apartment block in the Taito Ward, which he was drawn to for what he calls its “very normal” residential quality. The walls are stuccoed in fine-grained sand repurposed from nesting materials for guinea pig habitats, and the frosted windows were cut from the plastic of translucent three-ring binders. Peering through the panes, you can make out a stack of thimble-like ramen bowls, each one formed with the help of a machine used to cast molds of teeth.

Hyperrealist structures like Nordström’s — often compact enough to sit on a mantel and depicting unassuming buildings, sometimes in a state of minor disrepair — have multiplied across social media and in galleries in recent years. It’s an art form perfect for our trompe l’oeil-obsessed digital age: pieces so detailed they require a spare coin or USB drive for scale to prove their true, tiny size. The work owes a debt to older miniaturist traditions, including the making of hobbyists’ model kits — think polystyrene replicas of World War II planes — professional architectural models and, of course, dollhouses, which evolved from 16th-century Bavarian baby houses, shrunken versions of real grand dwellings. But today’s practice upends the expectations of preciousness that often come with these child-friendly dimensions, swapping out fantasy for grime. Indeed, if the style has a birthplace, it’s New York, where fine artists, including the sculptor Alan Wolfson and the mixed-media duo Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber, have long paid tribute to the city’s streetscapes, down to tiny effigies of trash cans.

This new generation of makers works in scales ranging from 1:24 to the sometimes ceiling-grazing heights of the painted cardboard sculptures by the Philadelphia-based artist Kambel Smith, 37, known for recreating monumental structures that he measures entirely by sight. His nearly 27-foot-tall version of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai — at 2,717 feet, the world’s tallest skyscraper — breaks into five interlocking towers. At any size, the work can be tedious and time-consuming; makers may spend weeks handcrafting seemingly unromantic items like air-conditioners. But for many, including the Canadian set designer and miniatures artist Tracy Ealdama, 45, the satisfaction of problem solving makes up for the frustrations, much like, she says, “completing a thousand-piece puzzle.” Resourceful by necessity, she relies on odds and ends foraged from junk drawers and her children’s toy boxes: The red vinyl counter stool seats at her eight-inch-tall take on a cafe in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood are, in fact, painted googly eyes.

UNLIKE DOLLHOUSES, DESIGNED as spaces for collaborative play, miniature buildings allow an artist to impose their own vision of a place. “You feel like you’re Godzilla roaming around the city,” says the Manhattan-based artist Nicholas Buffon, 36, who was first drawn to the craft for the sense of control it gave him at a time when he was, he says, “superbroke and living from sublet to sublet.” Since then, working in foam core and polymer clay, he has created scaled-down odes to New York’s queer institutions — such as Julius’, the historic tavern in Greenwich Village, whose TripAdvisor decals and rainbow garlands Buffon reproduced in paint and cut paper — as well as East Village bars where he’s gone on dates.

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