The problem of architecture is not to be seen from outside, nor to live inside. It is in the dialectical relationship interior-exterior, at the scale of urbanism (houses-streets) and at the scale of the house (interior-exterior). Guy Debord¹
The most extreme and inf luential proposals in the history of modern architecture were made in the context of temporary exhibitions. Beatriz Colomina²
While the problem of presentation is a central concern for any research in epistemology, metaphysics, and aesthetic philosophy, its correlative actualization in mass culture, by way of the architecture of the showroom (also now often publicized as the ‘Presentation Centre’) has received only scant attention. This essay initiates an archaeology of the showroom—with specific regard to the peculiar space of presentation that contains both the model suite and the model building in relative proximity—as a speculative provocation regarding the presentation space of model domesticity and model urbanism in contemporary mass culture. Our intention within the context of a preliminary investigation such as this is to delimit the role of the model in the political-economic reproduction of our current social reality. In his most recent monograph, The Possibility of Absolute Architecture (2011), the architect and theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli contends that the history of the city and the history of urbanization are antithetical processes that deploy opposing spatial logics of organization, with equally oppositional political assumptions and implications. For Aureli, “Both the idea of architecture and the idea of the city as defined through the categories of the formal and the political are mobilized against the ethos of urbanization, the ‘managerial’ paradigm that, with the rise of capitalism, has characterized our global civilization since the twilight of the so-called Middle Ages.”3 Aureli explains, “Urbanization is here understood […] as the ever-expanding apparatus that is at the basis of modern forms of governance” that are characterized by “the absorption of the political dimension of coexistence (the city) within the economic logic of social management (urbanization).”4 While Aureli’s position is worth discussing at greater length, not least because of the clarity and subtlety of his project, what matters for us is the recognition of these two antagonistic forms-of-life— architecture and the city, and urbanization.5 On the side of urbanization, one model has crossed a threshold of total ubiquity within the metropolitan centers of North America, despite the recent 144