The first miniature I ever saw was in Honey Pearlman’s farmhouse. Our family would visit Honey when we stayed with my grandmother in upstate New York: I remember feeding the chickens and swimming in the pond (with its sizable population of leeches). But most of all, I remember the hanging letterpress drawer next to the stairwell, its irregular rectangular displays filled with tiny objects: blue and white ceramic plates only a few centimeters wide; a dustbuster the size of a pinky finger; a tiny rotary phone, the base and receiver tethered by a thin piece of black thread.

As humans, our tendency to think big has been one of our most defining assets. We have built cities, engineered great wonders, and explored the solar system. But it has also gotten us into a great deal of trouble. Today, thinking big and its cousin limitless growth have conspired to send us hurtling into the era of the Anthropocene and our unstable climate future. Sometimes it can feel that the only response to large problems is even larger solutions—the unified planning theories and international regulatory frameworks that have been tried with limited success for the last three decades.

But there is another way. There is growing interest in bottom-up models of design, organizing, and policymaking, timed with a forced retreat of progressive policymaking in the U.S., from the halls of the nation’s capital to states and cities. The era of top-down solutions is on pause. But to shrink in size does not mean shrinking in ambition. It’s time for us to re-center the importance of scale and reclaim the bidirectional nature of the term. If we want solutions that fit, we may be better served with a magnifying glass than a telescope: We should investigate the many lessons encoded in the history and practice of models and miniatures. 

Memory & Message

Earlier this year, I traveled with my mother to Taiwan. She hadn’t been back to Taipei since 1979, and much of the trip involved us walking the streets where she lived in her early 20s, searching for remnants of the city she left 45 years ago. Surprisingly, one of the most memorable stops during the trip was a place she had never been: a warehouse in Kaohsiung filled with model trains. 

A single “day” in the main exhibit at the Taiwan Railway Museum lasts about seven minutes. The room tells the story of Taiwan through the history of locomotives, and as darkness falls, the miniature trains, streets, and buildings become illuminated with tiny LEDs. Japanese steam engines trace the coast with goods to be shipped out of the Port of Kaohsiung in the 1910s. A midcentury mining trolley clacks its way up into the mountains outside of Tainan, interrupted by a modern high-speed rail zooming by on its elevated track. At the far end of the model, the bustling Taipei Train station sits at the center of the capital city as it was in the 1970s. My mother is drawn immediately to the three-story buildings packed with small shops, rendered just as she remembers them. 

In full-size Taipei (seen in the main image), these buildings have been replaced by rapid development and modern construction, but the old structures remain indelibly captured in the model. I can tell from my mother’s response that the exhibition is more than just a teaching tool about trains; it’s a time machine. Our experience with the tiny buildings feels almost more intimate than walking on the streets themselves, like finding something thought lost to time in an album of family photographs. In the train model there is enough space for the 1970s and for the 2020s in a way the real Taipei seems to be unable to hold.

At times, going small can be a strategy to avoid detection. In 1832, a doctor by the name of Charles Knowlton wrote The Fruits of Philosophy, a purposely innocuous title given its taboo subject of birth control. The book was the first published manual on contraception in the U.S. and would be banned, redrafted, and republished three times due to violation of obscenity laws. Aware of this likely crackdown, Knowlton printed the book at a minute 2 x 2½ inches, allowing it to be stored easily behind the counter and passed surreptitiously between readers and practitioners. Thirty-three years later abolitionist John Murry Forbes printed a pocket-sized Proclamation of Emancipation for northern soldiers at the front to distribute to enslaved people while on the march. 

Other times, models are all that is left of things that have been lost. In 1936, Anton Keuchel was displaced from his Polish town by advancing Soviet forces. He would never return to his home. But he spent the rest of his life in Germany building small wood-and-paper-mache replicas of buildings from his hometown of Allenstein: steepled churches, the town post office, his old cottage. Allenstein is long gone, but the replicas today are on display on the top floor of the Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, in Berlin. Anton’s processed his dislocation through fabrication, rendering his loss of place in scale across his flat, and ultimately in a museum.

In these stories we find the first principle of thinking small: comparative size is not necessary when encoding information and memory. The miniaturization process embeds a message and allows it to be transmitted in a way that a full-size version would struggle to replicate. Large objects take up space that is not always available, both in the literal sense (think Keuchel’s attic) and the institutional sense (think large intergovernmental bodies that require sustained funding and maintenance). When you need a vessel to transmit an idea, bigger is not always better. 

Object Study

Considering they are everywhere, objects get surprisingly little attention. Ian Bogost writes in Alien Phenomenology (2012), “Everything that exists is filtered through the sieve of human experience, and the rich world of things is discarded so thoroughly, so immediately, so efficiently, like garbage, that we don’t even recognize it. How has it come to be that things have come to mean ideas so often, and stuff so rarely?” 

Part of the answer to Bogost’s question has to do with the disposable nature of mass-produced objects. In his 1880 speech “The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation,” William Morris bemoaned what he saw as the loss of art in daily objects, extolling, “When a man turned the wheel … or hammered the iron, he was expected to make something more than a water-pot … or a knife: he was expected to make a work of art also … this was felt to be positively necessary to the peace of mind both of the maker and the user; and this is it which I have called Architecture: the turning of necessary articles of daily use into works of art.” This reconnection between maker, object, and consumer is an essential step toward building any resistance to our limitless growth paradigm and its resulting mass waste. 

Egyptians tombs were filled with these handmade objects. The most famous of these were the 35 model wooden boats in Tutankhamun’s tomb, the most detailed records we have of Egyptian sea crafts. They were accompanied by tableaus of food production. These wooden grave goods were meant to accompany the pharaoh into the afterlife, symbolic representations of sustenance. Of course, there was a bit of magical thinking here—a bit of alchemy to move away from the wasteful and costly work of burying real ships while still emphasizing through craftsmanship the salience of worldly objects.

Minituriatization is a type of alchemy, a way to turn a mass-produced object (a telephone, say) into a work of art (a receiver and base sculpted by an artist and stitched together with a black thread). At the same time, this transformation strips the original object of its purpose, what Susan Stewart would refer to in On Longing (1992) as “use value [being] transformed into display value.” If Stewart is correct that “the dollhouse is to be consumed by the eye,” then what type of consumption are our eyes seeking? 

Many miniature displays are conspicuously absent of one thing that is quite common at human scale: people. This allows the viewer to place themselves at once above and within, imagining themselves as the principal of a Victorian manner, surrounded by fine vases and matching plates, not a single mess to be found. Indeed, part of the consumption we seek may be class roleplay. After all, American society is built on the false premise that those in the middle are much more likely to end up millionaires than paupers, and miniatures reflect those same aspirations and delusions. Perhaps the recent growing interest in miniatures is a response to changing economic outlook—a transference of the dream of home ownership back into an arena of control. 

This shift in perspective, from objects as the background and to the foreground, is the second principle of thinking small. Every model is a distortion. But if we pay attention, those distortions are themselves lenses to deepen our understanding, brushing the object-blindness from our eyes to see once again.

Toward a New Paradigm

We must become more sensitive to scale in the solutions we propose and build. But a shift in behavior requires us to understand why top-down and large-scale approaches so often struggle to achieve their desired effects. In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1992), James O. Scott argues that high-modernist planners often follow a familiar pattern of mistakes. They lack understanding of nuance, assume organic complexity is chaos, and then destroy that complexity in pursuit of autocratic order. “The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state,” he writes, “is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.” As designers and problem-solvers, if we let ourselves assume that big problems require large, administratively gridded answers, we will follow a similar path.

There are myriad examples of solutions that operate at appropriate scales, from bottom-up democratic processes—like participatory budgeting and baugruppen co-housing models—to Venkatesh Rao’s recent idea of miniaturized economies the size of a single dollar. Within politics, experts in civic engagement have said time and again that the healthiest thing for democracy would be to shift our hyperfocus on four-year presidential cycles and instead rebuild civic engagement processes at district and municipal levels. At an even more local scale, University of Cincinnati professor and designer D.J. Trischler prints a monthly newsletter called Claypole Commons exclusively for the 25 people on his block. 

Often, the right scale turns out to be regional. I think frequently of a class I took on urban agriculture that explored what model could realistically replace our industrialized global supply chain, notorious for its emissions and waste. Though buying and eating local is so often touted as the answer, it turned out that regional food networks, given their resiliency and capacity to produce the required tonnage, are a much better bet. The regional scale is particularly salient for climate solutions. The development of climate bioregions, areas which share geographic and cultural attributes rather than national borders, and therefore can benefit from similar farming practices and climate resilience strategies, is a bright spot in our race to avoid the worst outer limits of catastrophe. 

Part of what appropriately scaled solutions do is allow the space for us to project ourselves, to see ourselves in them. That is the power of the miniature as well. More than other forms of art, the miniature worlds we imagine and occupy are projections of ourselves. The tiny black telephone sits perched perfectly on the tiny table, waiting to absorb our dreams and aspirations around having time to sit and chat. My mother projects herself onto the 1978 Taipei Train Station, a suspension of disbelief allowing a moment of nostalgia.

When we fail to think at the right scale, the result is big empty things. At the Korean Pavilion at the Biennale in 2003, artist BAHC Yiso presented World’s Top 10 Tallest Structures From 2010, a critique of our cultural obsession with building ever taller skyscrapers.In it, the buildings are represented as deliberately crude and unpainted, symbols of the feelings of “desire and emptiness” Yiso sees in modern society. Our current reality demands abrupt and significant changes across almost all aspects of our society. Luckily, we have the mindsets we need already, rooted in practices that people have been cultivating for millenia on how to build worlds of all sizes, scaled to meet our needs. That is the task ahead, to model the future we want, one little thing at a time. 

Featured image: Mini Taipei. Photograph by the author.