Warburg Models

Architectural patronage was crucial for the thinking of AbyWarburg and his circle. In Hamburg the purpose-designedKulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, completed in1926, organized Warburg's remarkable library. From 1927Warburg developed ideas about orientation in the radicaltransformation of a disused water tower into the HamburgPlanetarium. After the Warburg Institute transferredto London in 1933 this pattern of seminal architecturalcommissioning continued, including projects designed bythe avant-garde practice Tecton during the 1930s, and culminatingin the construction of the library's present homeat Woburn Square, Bloomsbury in 1958. Warburg Models:Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge follows this history, usingarchive photographs, architectural drawings and a seriesof architectural models to show how the Warburg scholarsprojected a connection between their own physical occupancyof architectural space and their shared ideas aboutintellectual order, cultural survival, and memory.

MARI LENDING and TIM ANSTEY are both professors of architecturalhistory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Their continuing archive-based seminar on the relationshipbetween the Warburg Institute and architecture has developedinto an exhibition and a book, not least because of the skilledparticipation of their model-building students.