Object to be deployed: architectural models and Max Dupain

In the late 1970s, and late in his career, Max Dupain undertook a series of photos of a fictional commercial development that became central to the plot of the film Heat Wave, set in Sydney in the same time. The photos position the object as a spatial device that transcends its own scale and begins to represent the model as a piece of architecture. Heat Wave is only one of a number of examples throughout his career where Dupain was engaged to document models of architecture, often as architecture.

Dupain is known within the domain of architecture for his dexterity in framing views into and out of architectural modernism which shifted architecture’s relationship to its broader context and provided the visual aesthetic for a new era in building. What is less widely investigated in his work is his role in the photography and dissemination of the architectural model, as a commercial arm, but also aesthetic extension of his practice. The photographs of architectural models by Dupain, in a period in Australian architecture that was criticized for its objectivity and homogeneity, shows a subtlety and nuance to human scale as well as a new sensitivity towards the human experience of architecture.

This paper argues that Dupain’s work with shopfront design influenced his photography of architectural models and betrayed an allegiance and an awareness of the work of Frederick Kiesler, whose photographs of his Endless House, and career in shop dressing had become iconic moments of surrealism in New York. While there is some scholarship already addressing this important paradigm, this paper argues that the architectural model became an important object in transforming spatial representation and had a role in advancing Dupain’s practice and its relationship to architecture.