Chisel & Mouse (2026)

09/10/2026

Century Hotel

On a street where hotels climbed to five or six storeys, the Century stayed at two and competed on elegance instead.

Henry Hohauser designed this 26-room Streamline Moderne hotel in 1939, at the quiet southern end of Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. Its inspiration was the ocean liner: a striped mast rises from the centre of a symmetrical white façade, and circular portholes repeat in the street-level balustrade, the upper corners and the lobby doors. Hohauser was working to middle-class budgets, so a handful of clear ideas did all the work.

The whole street nearly didn't survive. By the 1970s Ocean Drive's hotels were run down, the area was nicknamed "God's Waiting Room", and developers wanted to replace them with high-rises. Barbara Baer Capitman, a former journalist with no architectural training, co-founded the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976 and spent years fighting to save them. In 1979 the district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the first urban 20th-century historic district in America to be.

Our model captures the Ocean Drive façade — the striped central mast, the stepped parapet and the porthole motifs.

🔗 Link in bio.

20/07/2026

Craven Cottage

It's the oldest football stand still in use in professional English football — and it's been standing on the same site since 1905.

The Johnny Haynes Stand at Craven Cottage was built by Archibald Leitch, the Scottish engineer who shaped the physical form of British football more than any other individual — Ibrox, Goodison, Anfield, Old Trafford, Highbury, and dozens more grounds all carry his design language. At Craven Cottage that language survives almost untouched: red brick, decorative gables, a strict symmetrical composition anchored on a central bay. Grade II listed since 1987, it has seen every Fulham home match for well over a century, in a sport that has otherwise demolished and rebuilt at pace since the Taylor Report.

The ground itself is unlike anywhere else in the Premier League — tucked into a bend of the Thames beside Bishops Park, with no ring roads or car parks, just a walk through the trees to reach it. Fulham's new Riverside Stand, completed in 2025 by Populous, now faces Leitch's brick façade directly across the pitch — a deliberate, honest contrast between Edwardian craft and twenty-first-century engineering.

Our model captures the Johnny Haynes Stand's Stevenage Road façade — the face Craven Cottage shows to the street.

🔗 Link in bio.

17/07/2026

Arsenal Stadium

Most football grounds of the 1930s were purely functional. This one was built to look like a civic institution — and it worked.

Arsenal moved to Highbury in 1913, with Archibald Leitch's typically functional stands. But the ground's defining character came in the 1930s rebuild: Claude Waterlow Ferrier and William Binnie's West Stand in 1932, then the matching East Stand in 1936, both in a restrained Art Deco language of symmetry, proportion, and simplified classical detailing. The East Stand's Avenell Road façade — thirteen bays stepping up to a central entrance porch with a moulded black marble surround — reads more like a cinema or town hall of the period than a sports venue.

Arsenal played their last match at Highbury in 2006 before moving to the Emirates. Rather than being demolished, the Grade II listed East and West Stand façades were preserved and folded into a residential development, Highbury Square, with the old pitch reborn as a communal garden — one of English football's more sensitively handled adaptive reuse projects.

Our model captures that East Stand façade on Avenell Road — the face Highbury showed to the city.

🔗 Link in bio.

10/07/2026

Old Yankee Stadium

It was the first ballpark in America ever called a "stadium." The name was deliberate, and it stuck for 85 years.

When the original Yankee Stadium opened on 18 April 1923, it was the largest sports venue in the country — a three-decked concrete colossus in the Bronx, built in under a year after Babe Ruth's arrival made the Yankees too big for their old ground at the Polo Grounds. Ruth marked the opening with a home run in the third inning. Sportswriter Fred Lieb called it "The House That Ruth Built" before the day was out, and the name outlived the building itself.

Eighty-five years followed: Lou Gehrig's farewell speech in 1939, Don Larsen's perfect game in 1956, 26 World Series championships — more than any other ballpark in the sport's history. The stadium was substantially rebuilt inside its own walls in 1974–76, then closed for good in 2008 and demolished in 2010–11. The site is now a public park, its diamonds laid out so home plate roughly overlaps the one the Yankees played on for eight and a half decades.

Our model captures the main entrance on East 161st Street — the threshold 60,000 fans crossed every game, not the famous copper frieze most people picture first.

🔗 Link in bio.

06/07/2026

London, from below.

Our London cityscape model has an invisible layer most people never think about — the Underground running beneath the streets. So we brought it to the surface. In this stop motion film, five lengths of coloured wool move along the streets of the model, each one standing in for a different line: red for the Central, green for the District, black for the Northern, pink for the Hammersmith & City, and yellow for the Circle — the same colours you'd find on any Tube map, translated into thread moving frame by frame beneath a plaster city.

It's a small, slightly ridiculous amount of work for a few seconds of footage — stop motion always is — but it's the kind of thing that only makes sense once you've spent enough time looking at a model of a place to start imagining what's happening underneath it.

Jaunty tune, faint tube sounds, tiny trains made of wool. Sound on for this one.

🔗 Link in bio.

29/06/2026

2 Willow Road

The architect of London's most imposing concrete tower built himself a quiet brick terrace house in Hampstead. It's one of the finest modernist homes in Britain.

If you only know Ernő Goldfinger from Trellick Tower, 2 Willow Road will surprise you. Completed in 1939 as his own family home, it's the central and largest of a terrace of three houses he designed on the edge of Hampstead Heath — and at first glance it's almost modest, faced in red brick to sit politely among its Georgian neighbours. Look again and the modernism reveals itself: the concrete frame, the bands of windows, the careful asymmetry, the sense that every element has been weighed and placed with absolute precision.

The interior is where it comes alive. Goldfinger designed much of the furniture himself, built ingenious folding and sliding partitions that let the first-floor rooms flow into one another or close off as needed, and arranged the spaces around a beautiful spiral staircase. The family filled it with a remarkable art collection — works by Henry Moore, Max Ernst, Bridget Riley — and lived there for nearly fifty years. Goldfinger died in the house in 1987.

There's a famous footnote: the architect's name was borrowed, with no affection whatsoever, by Ian Fleming, who lived nearby and reportedly loathed the modernist house going up in his neighbourhood. Goldfinger considered suing over the Bond villain. He didn't, in the end. The name stuck anyway.

The house is now owned by the National Trust and open to visitors — one of the very few modernist houses in their care. Our model captures the Willow Road façade: restrained, precise, and a complete counterpoint to the towers.

🔗 Link in bio.

26/06/2026

Trellick Tower

For thirty years it was shorthand for everything that had gone wrong with British housing. Now its flats are among the most sought-after in London.

Trellick Tower rises 31 storeys over the western end of the Westway in north Kensington, completed in 1972 to designs by Ernő Goldfinger. It was his last major project and his most famous — a slab block of board-marked concrete with one unmistakable feature: a separate, slender service tower standing slightly apart from the main building, linked to it by enclosed walkways every three floors, and topped by a boiler room that juts out like the bridge of a ship. There is nothing else quite like its silhouette anywhere in London.

The early years were genuinely hard. The building opened into a period when high-rise social housing was already falling out of favour, and Trellick suffered from a lack of basic security — there was, at first, no concierge, no controlled entrance — and it acquired a grim reputation in the press. For a long time it stood, alongside its east London predecessor Balfron Tower, as the very image of failed post-war idealism.

And then the verdict reversed, almost completely. The architecture that had been condemned came to be understood for what it always was: rigorous, considered, beautifully proportioned. A residents' association and a concierge transformed daily life in the building. Trellick was given Grade II* listing in 1998. Its flats — light-filled, generously planned, with long views across the city — now change hands for sums that would astonish the planners who once wrote it off. The building everyone loved to hate is now, simply, loved.

Our model captures that famous profile — the main slab, the detached service tower, and the cantilevered boiler room crowning the top.

🔗 Link in bio.

22/06/2026

Philip Johnson

He designed his first building at 36. By then he'd already lived several lives — and one of them is genuinely difficult to write about.

Philip Johnson came to architecture by the strangest route imaginable. Before he designed a single building he'd been a Harvard classics student, a museum curator, a critic, and the man who introduced European modernism to America through his 1932 International Style exhibition at MoMA.

There's a darker chapter any honest account has to include. From roughly 1934 to 1940 Johnson pursued right-wing politics, and the positions he took were genuinely abhorrent — pro-Nazi and American fascist sympathies, anti-Semitic statements, a speaking platform designed for the demagogue Father Coughlin. His biographer Franz Schulze called it the "inglorious detour." Johnson later repudiated these views entirely and spent decades trying to make amends. Whether that was enough is still debated, reasonably so. It shouldn't be airbrushed away, and we won't pretend otherwise.

The architecture, separately, is extraordinary in range. The Glass House in 1949, the Seagram Building with Mies, then his turn against modernist orthodoxy with Pennzoil Place and 550 Madison Avenue. He won the first Pritzker Prize in 1979 and died at the Glass House in 2005, aged 98.

We make models of three of his buildings — the Glass House, Pennzoil Place, and 550 Madison Avenue. Three distinct positions, held across five decades.

Photograph by B. Pietro Filardo, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

🔗 Link in bio.

19/06/2026

550 Madison Avenue

Someone put a piece of Chippendale furniture on top of a skyscraper. The argument it started has never quite ended.

When the AT&T Building — now 550 Madison Avenue — opened in New York in 1984, the crown was all anyone could talk about. Philip Johnson had topped a 37-storey pink granite tower with a broken pediment: a triangular gable with a circular notch cut out of the centre, a shape borrowed unmistakably from eighteenth-century Chippendale cabinets. A skyscraper wearing a piece of antique furniture as a hat. It was witty, provocative, and — to the modernist establishment — close to heresy.

That was rather the point. By 1984 Johnson was the most famous architect in America, and he used 550 Madison to make postmodernism's central argument as loudly as possible: that the glass box had become a dead language, that buildings could once again quote history, carry ornament, and have a recognisable top, middle, and bottom. The granite cladding alone — a building of that height clad entirely in solid stone rather than glass curtain wall — was a deliberate rejection of everything modernism stood for.

People hated it and people loved it, often the same people on different days. It put Johnson on the cover of Time magazine, holding a model of the building. Four decades on, the broken pediment is no longer shocking — it's simply one of the most recognisable rooflines in Manhattan, and the building is now protected as a New York City landmark.

Our model captures that famous crown — the pediment, the notch, the stone-clad verticality of the shaft below.

🔗 Link in bio.

15/06/2026

Pennzoil Place

Two towers, almost touching. The ten-foot gap between them is the whole idea.
By the mid-1970s Philip Johnson had spent a quarter of a century building in the modernist idiom he'd helped import to America — the glass box, the right angle, the rational grid. Then, with Pennzoil Place in downtown Houston, completed in 1976, he began to walk away from it.

The building is two trapezoidal towers of dark bronze glass, set just ten feet apart and sliced off at sharp 45-degree angles at their summits. From some streets they read as a single mass; from others they split apart and the slot of sky between them opens up. The towers don't meet, don't quite mirror each other, and don't behave like the calm rectilinear slabs modernism had taught everyone to expect. They're dramatic, almost theatrical — designed to be experienced in motion, changing as you move around them.

It was a critical and commercial sensation. The New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable named it the building of the year, and it's widely credited as one of the works that opened the door to postmodernism in the commercial skyscraper — the moment a major architect decided that a tower could have shape, drama, and wit rather than just efficiency. Johnson, ever restless, had found his next move.

Our model captures the twin trapezoidal forms and that crucial sliver of space between them — the detail the whole building is organised around.

🔗 Link in bio.

Chisel & Mouse

09/10/2026

20/07/2026

17/07/2026

10/07/2026

06/07/2026

29/06/2026

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22/06/2026

19/06/2026

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