Small wonders: stunning exhibition celebrates artistry of model buildings | Architecture

When the eerily accurate AI image generator Dall-E 2 was released for public experimentation by OpenAI this summer, most people immediately used it to create whimsical scenes such as “samurai dolphin painted in the style of Rembrandt” or “Bruce Willis angrily devouring a cheeseburger on the moon”. True, if you looked too closely at Bruce’s left ear you might have noticed it wasn’t there – but the freaky glitches were, though somewhat unsettling, part of the fun, not to mention a calming reminder that AI cannot entirely trick us that its images are real – yet.

But more than one panicked architect also typed in, “Four-storey family home in forest in the style of Mies van der Rohe” or “Japanese-Scandi lounge area in office building lobby”, and let out a tiny scream when the results resembled the renders of projects that architects otherwise spend long hours churning out. If an AI could knock out a decent interior in seconds, did it promise to be a fabulous time-saver – or would it put everyone out of a job?

There’s something of a corrective reassurance for architects – and for the rest of us – in Supermodels, an exhibition of architectural models in King’s Cross in London. Not only does it celebrate the painstaking construction of physical structures, complete with tiny people and fake trees like a model railway set, which clearly took ages to make and no AI could come close to replicating – yet, but these models are also animatronic: they move, open, chirp, whirr, creak and close like Victorian clockwork figurines or the childlike works of Rodney Peppe.

Each unpeels itself before your eyes like a clockwork onion, inviting you inside. One, a family home, with a curl of real smoke lifting from a steel chimney, slowly separates into modular sections to reveal cosy interiors while a clockwork bird flaps its wings overhead and the sounds of children playing filter from hidden speakers. In another, miniature shadows of moving people are projected on to the floors of the model of a contemporary office building, while the image of a whale skeleton is lifted high into the atrium; then a ballerina dances over the floors like a ghost. On another wall, three cuckoo clocks chirp when you move close.

Many of the models use, as their “moving” element, light. One employs small spotlights to simulate the path of sunlight during a typical day as it plays across the floors. Another uses a little camera, which runs on a track through the model – projecting the results on to a screen so that you get what is effectively a giant’s eye view of the inside of the building.

The immersive nature of each model – created by the London-based studio Piercy & Company, based on projects for the National Holocaust Centre, the Argent development in King’s Cross, a private house in Kew and others – creates a kind of drama that’s reminiscent of the theatre of Punchdrunk, where the audience glimpses snatches of scenes that suggest events playing out that are never fully explained. One of the most impressive models here is of two listed Georgian villas, side by side, which cantilever outwards like the fold-out tray mechanism of a Trusco tool box. Opened up, it reveals two little people, a couple, in the middle of whatever little drama it is that toy figurine people get up to when you’re not observing them.

“We’re lacking really tangible things – everything’s becoming a bit hard to relate to virtually,” says the studio’s founder, Stuart Piercy. “There’s something about mechanical models that are really authentic and honest: you have a childlike fascination with them.”

Indeed, it’s that lack of honesty and authenticity that has given architectural renders something of a bad rap. Property billboards of rich white people in sterile new plazas are plastered across the building sites for luxury developments where social housing once stood, their residents “decanted” to cheaper locations far from the city core.

Like the creations of Dall-E 2, which builds its images from scratch using the collective memory that is all the internet’s billions of images (and, in testing mode, reportedly had many of the same generalising problems as other AIs, showing “corporate executives” as white and “angry men” as Black, for example), many architectural renders are slick but affectless. The people they show may look real, but don’t feel real: you can’t engage with them in any way. The power of a doll’s house, however, is that you can engage with it – stick your nose in, move the furniture around, watch the light slowly lengthen in the lounge.

“There’s nothing wrong with digital – we’re not going backwards, are we? Our motivation wasn’t anti-digital, but choosing the best from both worlds,” Piercy says. He compares the models to artificial life, “and I think we’re obsessed with artificial life. AI is one way, but when you combine it with really physical things – well, that’s tangible. That’s exciting.”

• Supermodels is at Jahn Court, Regent Quarter, 34 York Way, London, until Sunday 11 December.