This lecture is a comparative study between two types of architectural models: the small scale bure kalou (spirit houses) of the Fijian people and Fillipo Brunelleschi’s proposals for the dome of the Santa Maria Novella in Florence Italy (Duomo from now on). These two case-studies were specifically chosen to complicate the contemporary definition of an architectural model as a three-dimensional representation of a building created by a designer in order to communicate his/ her vision to a client or builder on site. While this was certainly true for the Duomo models created by Fillipo Brunelleschi which were meant for his client/ patron and craftsmen on site; the model bure kalou of the Fijians were in fact meant as ritual objects that priests used to communicate with spirits and gods. However, as this lecture shows in pre-Christian Fiji the model bure kalou were often created by the same priests and elder men who made the full-scale bure kalou. Similar to Brunelleschi’s models, most of which were created for a powerful and wealthy patron, model bure kalou were made by and for the elite of Fijian society.
Following European colonization and mass conversion of Fijians to Christianity in the mid-nineteenth century, model bure kalou became collectors objects—taken by Europeans from Fiji to museums and ethnographic collections in Europe and the United States. As commodities in a global trade, model bure kalou were no longer created for religious purposes, but for new patrons who were eager to show them off as specimens of a “primitive culture”. In addition, all of the original bure kalou of Fiji were destroyed during the process of Christianization; model bure kalou are now the only evidence of these important structures of pre-Christian Fiji. Meanwhile, Brunelleschi’s wooden models of the Duomo are also preserved in museums in Italy: now serving as signs of his genius and exemplars of Renaissance innovation.
By juxtaposing the model bure kalou with a model of the most iconic Renaissance building, this lecture seeks to broaden the definition of an architectural model beyond its narrow Eurocentric framework. The expert craftsmanship of the model bure kalou and its extrapolation in monumental spirit houses complicates the narrative of Fijian architecture as primitive and without structural finesse. Meanwhile, the models of the Duomo seek to reframe Brunelleschi as a singular Renaissance genius working alone to solve one of the greatest technological feats of his time. Instead, models produced by many other architects and craftsmen were crucial to the innovations in the Duomo. In short, this lecture proposes that in the pre-modern world architectural models served many different purposes that do not neatly align with our contemporary understanding of models as objects made in an architect’s studio and presented to clients as a means to gain a project. Instead, architectural models straddled the worlds of designer and patron and religious object and explanatory device, and served as talismans for the maker as well as its audience.
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