Written by
Inês Moura
Founding Partner
Every project in the studio reaches a moment when the drawings stop being useful. The scale is too small, the screen too flat, and the question on the table — how thick should this edge be? — can only be answered by looking at the thing itself. So we build it.
The plywood corner
For Casa do Vale we built a full-size corner of the living room in the car park behind the studio: a slab edge, a column, a section of window frame. It took two days and cost less than a single round of renderings. Within an hour of standing next to it, we had cut eight centimetres from the slab and moved the frame twenty millimetres deeper into the reveal.
None of those changes would have survived a drawing review. They are too small to see at 1:50 and too subtle to argue for in words. At 1:1 they were obvious to everyone, including the client.
What a mock-up is for
A mock-up is not a prototype. It does not need to work, keep out the rain or last more than a week. Its only job is to put a decision in front of the people who have to make it, at the size they will live with.
We now budget for at least one full-size mock-up on every project, and we photograph each one before it is taken apart. The archive has become one of the most useful things the studio owns.
Next note →