Chisel & Mouse (2026)

18/05/2026

She asked for a house of quiet contemplation. He built her a glass box with nowhere to hide.

Dr Edith Farnsworth was a nephrologist, a violinist, and a poet. She owned a plot of land in the Fox River floodplain 55 miles southwest of Chicago, and in 1945 she commissioned Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to build her a weekend retreat — somewhere to think, to play music, to be alone with the landscape.

What Mies built is one of the most austere and most debated houses of the twentieth century. A single open room, raised eight feet off the ground on eight white-painted steel I-beams, enclosed entirely in floor-to-ceiling glass. Five materials throughout the whole building. The structural columns sit outside the glass envelope so nothing interrupts the interior. There is a central service core — bathroom, kitchen, mechanical — and beyond that, nothing. No rooms. No walls. No privacy.

Farnsworth hated it. The house leaked, the heating was inadequate, the insects were terrible, and the complete transparency she had presumably understood in theory was something rather different to live with in practice. She sued Mies over cost overruns. He countersued. The relationship, which had been warm, ended badly.

None of which diminishes the building. Farnsworth House is one of those works that achieves something beyond the intentions of the people who made it — a demonstration of pure architectural principle that remains, more than seventy years on, almost impossible to improve upon. It is now a historic landmark, visited by architects and enthusiasts from around the world.

It is also, we think, one of the most satisfying buildings we make models of. There is genuinely nowhere to hide in the design.

🔗 Link in bio.

15/05/2026

The architect designed the building. The artist designed everything else. Between them they made something that Chicago has never quite been able to categorise.

The Fisher Studio Houses at 1209 North State Parkway were completed in 1936, commissioned by Frank Fisher Jr., an executive at Marshall Field & Co., who wanted a building of artist studios and apartments for the bohemian Near North Side neighbourhood. He chose two collaborators whose combined talents produced something that doesn't fit comfortably into any single description.

Andrew Rebori was the architect — a Chicago practitioner with a gift for inventive residential design and a preference for the streamlined Art Moderne idiom that was then emerging as a more aerodynamic, less ornamental cousin of Art Deco. He designed the building's exterior: curved white brick corners, glass block windows, flat roof, strong horizontal lines. Smooth, precise, and quietly radical.

Edgar Miller was the artist — a muralist, craftsman, and decorative genius who made almost everything inside by hand. Stained glass. Carved wood. Mosaic. Ironwork. Herringbone floors. Handmade staircases. The interiors of the Fisher Studio Houses are densely, almost overwhelmingly rich, a deliberate counterpoint to the restrained exterior. The City of Chicago designated the building a landmark partly in recognition of Miller's contribution — which is unusual, and entirely deserved.

The twelve units share a courtyard that runs perpendicular to the street behind an iron gate, entirely invisible from the pavement. You'd walk straight past it. Chicago's best-kept secret is, in a sense, the whole point.

Our model captures the State Parkway façade — the curve, the glass block, the clean modernist geometry that conceals so much behind it.

🔗 Link in bio.

11/05/2026

A London Cityscape XL, now on a wall in Munich.

We delivered this one a few weeks ago and the photograph landed in our inbox shortly after. We can't name the client, but we can say that seeing one of our cityscapes installed — properly lit, on a proper wall — never gets old.

The London Cityscape XL is one of our largest pieces: an extruded relief map of central London, assembled by hand in our West Sussex studio and finished in the same way every one of our pieces is finished, regardless of where it's going. The detail that goes into the urban grain — the density of streets, the landmarks sitting proud of the surface, the way light rakes across the relief —things we love. It has to read correctly at a distance and reward close inspection equally.

This one crossed the Channel and found its way to Bavaria. We like that. Architecture as a shared language, and all that.

If you've got a wall that needs something like this the link in bio has the full cityscape range together with examples of bespoke 3D maps.

🔗 Link in bio.

08/05/2026

The mayor of New Haven had one condition: hire a world-renowned architect.

In 1966 the Armstrong Rubber Company approached New Haven with a proposal to build their new headquarters on a prominent site near the junction of two interstate highways. Mayor Richard Lee — who was pursuing an ambitious vision to make New Haven "America's model city" — agreed to facilitate the land purchase on a single condition. No ordinary corporate box. A building of real architectural ambition.

Armstrong chose Marcel Breuer. And Breuer, characteristically, did something nobody had quite done before.

The building's structural logic is the thing. The research laboratories needed acoustic isolation from the administrative offices above — heavy machinery, testing equipment, the full noise of industrial R&D. Rather than simply stacking floors and hoping insulation would do the job, Breuer split the building into two entirely separate masses: a two-storey laboratory base, and a five-storey administrative block suspended two storeys above it, held aloft by seven massive cantilevered steel trusses weighing 50 tons apiece. A 17-foot void runs between the two sections. The offices appear, in every meaningful sense, to float.

The building is precast concrete throughout — uncompromising, sculptural, and completely honest about what it is. Armstrong occupied it for only 18 years before Pirelli bought the company in 1988. It passed through several hands, stood largely empty for years, and was very nearly demolished. Then in 2019 it was purchased by a developer with a genuinely good idea: convert it to Hotel Marcel, the first Passive House-certified hotel in the United States, generating all its own energy through solar. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.

Our model captures that extraordinary suspended mass — the void, the trusses, and the concrete precision of the whole extraordinary thing.

🔗 Link in bio.

04/05/2026

Superman's office. Also one of the finest Art Deco skyscrapers ever built — though the two facts are not entirely unrelated.

The Daily News Building at 220 East 42nd Street in New York has had a curious double life. Completed in 1930 to designs by Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, it was the headquarters of the New York Daily News — at the time America's largest-circulation newspaper. And then, some years after it opened, someone at DC Comics decided it looked exactly like the kind of building where a metropolitan newspaper called the Daily Planet would be based. The building has been Superman's fictional workplace ever since.

It deserves to be famous for better reasons than that, though it's a reasonable consolation prize.

Hood was one of the great pragmatists of American architecture. Where other skyscraper designers of the 1920s were still reaching for Gothic spires or classical columns, Hood stripped things back. The Daily News tower rises as a sheer slab of white-glazed brick, the vertical piers running uninterrupted from base to roofline, the windows recessed into alternating bands of red and black brick. No historical ornament anywhere. The effect is bold, almost aggressive — an architecture of pure vertical energy that feels entirely of its moment.

The lobby is something else again. At its centre sits an enormous sunken globe, nine feet in diameter, set within a black glass hemisphere and surrounded by compass lines and time zone markings inlaid into the floor. It is one of the most theatrical interior spaces in New York, which is saying something.

Our model captures the 42nd Street entrance façade — the three-storey limestone bas-relief and the etched brass window frames.

🔗 Link in bio.

01/05/2026

33 pallets. One articulated lorry. A distribution hub somewhere in Europe. We can't tell you who it's for.

This is what a large retail commission looks like before it disappears into a logistics network. Each of those pallets is loaded with handmade plaster props — cast, finished, and packed in our studio in West Sussex, then handed over to a freight carrier and sent on their way to one of the world's largest retailers. We've been doing this long enough now to know the drill: the distribution hub requirements, the delivery windows, the packing specifications that make sure the hundredth unit arrives in the same condition as the first.

We can't name the client. They prefer it that way, and we're fine with that.

What we can say is that making props at this scale is genuinely demanding work. Beautiful enough for a high-end retail environment. Robust enough for constant handling. Consistent enough that no one on the shop floor can tell which ones came from which batch. Handmade plaster, produced at scale, shipped worldwide. Not many people do this, and we're quietly proud of the fact that we do it well.

If you've got a retail project that needs something handcrafted and architectural, the link in bio is the place to start.

🔗 Link in bio.

27/04/2026

Bauhaus Dessau

The N***s called it a breeding ground for cultural Bolshevism. They weren't entirely wrong about what it was breeding.

By 1924 the Bauhaus had been operating in Weimar for five years, and the conservative Thuringian state government had had enough. Funding was cut. The school was told it was no longer welcome. Gropius packed up the Bauhaus and accepted an offer from the more industrially progressive city of Dessau, which promised a purpose-built campus designed from scratch. A fresh start, and a proper home at last.

Gropius produced the designs with his office and with students from the school itself. Commission agreed in 1925; building completed and inaugurated on 4 December 1926. What he built wasn't just accommodation for a school — it was an argument in steel, glass, and reinforced concrete. Every elevation is different because every wing has a different function, and the function is expressed rather than concealed. The workshop wing faces the street with a full-height glass curtain wall, the BAUHAUS lettering extruded down its southern stair block face. The student accommodation is a separate rectilinear tower. A bridge connects the school to the administration wing over the road. The whole composition reads as a building that is completely honest about what it is.

The N***s shut it down in 1933, first in Dessau, then Berlin. The faculty scattered across Europe and America, carrying the ideas with them. The building is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most studied works of architecture in the world.

We make two versions — the southern stairwell façade with the extruded lettering, and the main entrance elevation. Two very different faces of the same extraordinary building.

🔗 Link in bio.

24/04/2026

Walter Gropius

He founded the most influential art school in history. It lasted fourteen years and trained fewer than 1,300 students.

Walter Gropius was born in Berlin in 1883 into a family with architecture on both sides. His great-uncle had designed one of the city's most distinguished cultural buildings. Architecture wasn't an abstract ambition in the Gropius household — it was the family's profession. He studied in Munich and Berlin, did his military service, then joined Peter Behrens's office in 1907 — arriving at exactly the moment the Turbine Factory was being designed, absorbing everything Behrens had been working out, and leaving three years later ready to do something entirely his own.

His first independent building, the Fagus Factory in 1911, was an immediate statement of intent. Glass curtain walls at twenty-seven. Then came the war. Then, in 1919, he founded the Bauhaus in Weimar — a school that merged art and craft under the conviction that architecture was the mother of all creative disciplines, and that good design was a social responsibility rather than a luxury. He gathered a faculty that included Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, and Breuer. He ran it with a combination of evangelical conviction and real political skill until 1928, by which point the school had moved to Dessau and into the building he designed for it — which we'll post about next week.

The N***s shut the Bauhaus in 1933. Gropius left Germany, moved through Britain, and eventually settled at Harvard, where he spent twenty years training another generation. He died in Boston in 1969, aged eighty-five, still engaged with architecture.

Three models in our range connect directly to his work — the Fagus Factory, the Bauhaus Dessau southern façade, and the Bauhaus Dessau entrance elevation.

🔗 Link in bio.

20/04/2026

Peter Behrens

He trained Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier. Almost nobody outside architecture knows his name.

Peter Behrens started out as a painter. He became a printmaker, then a book designer, then — having never formally studied the subject — an architect. His first building was his own house, designed in 1900 for an artists' colony in Darmstadt. His next major building was the AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin in 1909. In between he'd invented corporate identity as a discipline, applying it to everything AEG produced from kettle designs to factory buildings. Not a bad decade's work.

The office he ran in Berlin from 1907 was, for a few extraordinary years, the most important architectural atelier in the world — not because of its output alone but because of who was working there. Gropius joined in 1907 and stayed three years. Mies van der Rohe arrived in 1908. Le Corbusier spent several months there in 1910. All three absorbed from Behrens the conviction that architecture, design, and industrial production were components of a single creative intelligence rather than separate activities. All three went on to define twentieth-century architecture. The school Gropius founded, the buildings Mies spent his career developing, the Five Points Le Corbusier would publish — each traces a line back to ideas Behrens was working out in that Berlin office.

He kept practising long after his most famous pupils had eclipsed him in reputation. He died in 1940, still working. The lack of wider recognition is one of architecture history's more baffling oversights.

We make models of two of his buildings — the Behrens House in Darmstadt and the AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin. His first and his greatest.

🔗 Link in bio.

17/04/2026

Fagus Factory

It was a shoe last factory in a small town in Lower Saxony. It was also the most consequential industrial building of the twentieth century.

Carl Benscheidt had broken away from his employer and needed to establish a rival operation quickly. He commissioned a local architect, found the drawings uninspiring, and — having seen illustrations of a project by a young architect named Walter Gropius in a trade publication — approached him instead. Gropius was twenty-seven years old and hadn't yet completed a building of his own. Bold choice by Benscheidt, as it turned out.

What Gropius designed at Alfeld an der Leine in 1911 arrived fully formed, with a confidence that many architects never achieve across an entire career. The structural trick he pulled was elegant: the load-bearing columns were moved back from the façade into the interior of the building, which meant the exterior walls no longer needed to carry anything. So he made them out of glass. Continuous steel-framed glazing wrapped the corners of the building without any supporting masonry at all — a detail so radical it had never been attempted before, and one that defined the appearance of cities for the following century.
The building is still making shoe lasts on the same site. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011. Jolly well deserved.

Our model captures the entrance elevation with the canopy and steps — the face of the building that announced everything.

🔗 Link in bio.

13/04/2026

AEG Turbine Factory

Three architects who changed the world all worked in the same Berlin office. This is the building they learned from.

In 1907 Peter Behrens was appointed artistic director of AEG — one of Germany's largest industrial corporations. His brief was unlike anything that had existed before: to bring formal coherence to everything the company produced. Buildings, products, catalogues, typefaces, street lamps — all of it answering to the same design intelligence. He'd essentially invented corporate identity as a discipline before anyone had a name for it.

The centrepiece was a turbine factory on Huttenstrasse in Berlin, completed in 1909. Behrens could have designed a functional shed. Instead he produced something that worked architecturally like a civic monument — vast steel portal frames spanning the full width of the building, glass filling the bays at an inclined angle, a plain concrete polygon at the corner anchoring the whole composition with the self-possession of something ancient. No historical ornament anywhere. Structure, material, and proportion carry all the weight, and do it magnificently.

Walter Gropius was working in that office when it was being designed. So was Mies van der Rohe. Le Corbusier arrived shortly after. All three absorbed the central argument the building was making: that industrial production wasn't a subject to be hidden or dressed up in borrowed historical clothing, but architecture's most pressing and authentic subject matter. The Turbine Factory is, in a very real sense, the building where modern architecture learned to think.

Still standing. Still in use. More than a century on.

We've modelled the gable end facing Huttenstrasse — the building's great set-piece.

🔗 Link in bio.

Chisel & Mouse

18/05/2026

15/05/2026

11/05/2026

08/05/2026

04/05/2026

01/05/2026

27/04/2026

24/04/2026

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