Content area
Full Text
doll's house, n.
Also doll-house, dolls’ house.
A miniature toy house made for dolls; also transf. and fig., applied esp. to a diminutive dwelling-house.
Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 2015)
dollhouse, n.
A small toy house that is used by children for playing with dolls
Merriam-Webster Dictionary (Springfield, MA, 2015)
British and American spellings of the same word attest to cultural difference. For Americans, the doll simply provides an indication of the scale of the model in which it is lodged. The doll, like its house, is just another passive product in a commodity culture made for our own or our children's consumption. In contrast, for the British, the use of the possessive (doll's) indicates that the model house is possessed by the miniature figure who occupies it. By ascribing proprietary rights to the doll, the British tacitly acknowledge her agency. An investigation of the Stettheimer dollhouse/doll's house now in the Museum of the City of New York suggests that British English is, at least occasionally, more accurate than American English in its representation of the world.
Here I use the Stettheimer doll's house to argue that scale models (like other model types) have a life of their own: they are agents capable of acting independently of their human producers. Scientists and social scientists commonly accept the independence of their models. Margaret Morrison, a recognized master of economic models, argues compellingly that economic models are “autonomous agents” independent both of the world and of the particular theory or idea about the world that they are designed to demonstrate.1 Although architects, designers, and humanists, like scientists and social scientists, use models extensively in their work, they have rarely investigated their properties with equal theoretical rigor.2 No less then algorithms or pie charts, it seems to me that scale models act independently of both their archetypes and their originating ideas. I would add further that scale models, and indeed all other model-types, are, once complete, also independent of their makers and their consumers (as children are independent of their parents; or, perhaps better, as buildings are independent of their architects).
Despite an ever-growing body of literature on the agency of objects, humanists may still be skeptical of the claim that models are independent agents.3