Dan Brady

Every novel is an imaginary world to be discovered; Dan Brady’s Architectural Model 1:50 is Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Brady explores the possibilities of architecture and fictional experience – but not in the way you’d expect.

Breaking down each scene from the book (K’s house, the bank where he works, the law offices, etc.), he designs each imagined space in real miniaturised 3D, creating a conglomerate ‘blockbuster’ of a building. The grim ambience of the novel (the omnipresent terror of the clerks’ watchful eyes, the oppressive sound of the Tinsmith’s hammer) have all been translated to minute architectural detail.

Brady’s sculpture has the same hauntingly iconic qualities as Kubrick’s 2001 set design: from the simple materials of cardboard and glue, he’s made a prototype of sublime austerity, cloyingly claustrophobic, and infinitely wondrous.

In capturing the essence of a literary epic, Brady’s gone one further than telling a story of a man trying to justify his own existence: he offers a possible future space where there’s no humanity at all. Just a cold, endless, magnetically seductive perfection.