Museum Exhibit Project

Process

For the museum exhibit project, I made the unintentional decision of making my life hard by creating a cardboard miniature of the Florence Cathedral. I began by looking for a papercraft template and 3D models of the Cathedral for reference.

I printed the 3D papercraft template and traced it onto cardboard for the right proportions and scale. I then went through the long and tedious process of cutting out, ripping apart, and gluing together the cardboard which took a long 20 hours to complete. This was definitely a mistake and something I should have taken more into account, but here we are.

Cardboard miniature of the Florence Cathedral

For the visualization, I took inspiration from another cardboard miniature of the Tin Lizzie, an example Paul showed us, to do a physical setup and take a photo. I looked around my house and found a very good mini lamp for more direct lighting, a mini platform for the miniature to sit on, and black cardboard to put under the platform. Taking advice from the feedback Paul gave for the Tin Lizzie example, I decided to get a background for the miniature to make it more interesting visually. I found a stock photo of an aerial view of the Florence Cathedral with the beautiful surrounding houses and buildings; I divided the photo into fourths, printed them out and taped them together.

For the label, I used the fonts Jenson and Bembo which were created around the time the cathedral finished, and because they were pretty readable. I created it in illustrator, and I took inspiration from a page from the book The Dream of Poliphilus which was also released around the same time.

Page from the romantic novel The Dream of Poliphilus

I then assembled everything on a small table and took a photo.

Reflection

I decided on creating a cardboard miniature because I have always loved papercraft and creating 3D models. However, I made the mistake of doing it for this project, as the majority of my energy was spent on the model, and it had taken an enormous amount of time. In total, I spent over 25 hours completing this project. I am pretty happy with the visualization though, especially with the raised platform and the lighting.