Warburg Models

Architectural patronage was crucial for the thinking of Aby
Warburg and his circle. In Hamburg the purpose-designed
Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, completed in
1926, organized Warburg’s remarkable library. From 1927
Warburg developed ideas about orientation in the radical
transformation of a disused water tower into the Hamburg
Planetarium. After the Warburg Institute transferred
to London in 1933 this pattern of seminal architectural
commissioning continued, including projects designed by
the avant-garde practice Tecton during the 1930s, and culminating
in the construction of the library’s present home
at Woburn Square, Bloomsbury in 1958. Warburg Models:

Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge follows this history, using
archive photographs, architectural drawings and a series
of architectural models to show how the Warburg scholars
projected a connection between their own physical occupancy
of architectural space and their shared ideas about
intellectual order, cultural survival, and memory.

MARI LENDING and TIM ANSTEY are both professors of architectural
history at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Their continuing archive-based seminar on the relationship
between the Warburg Institute and architecture has developed
into an exhibition and a book, not least because of the skilled
participation of their model-building students.