Frank Kunert's Miniature Sets Where One Detail Is Always Slightly Off
German photographer Frank Kunert has been building and photographing miniature architectural sets since the 1990s, and designboom just published a nice profile of his work. I found it a lovely reminder that a dollhouse-scale scene can be a whole story.
His sets range from roughly 1:12 to 1:43 scale and are handmade, mostly from lightweight foam board. Each one gets floors, windows, furniture, painted surfaces and shingled roofs before Kunert lights and photographs it. The trick is that ordinary buildings have exactly one design decision that is slightly wrong: a running track that curves around a stadium while one lane drops into a staircase underground, a narrow apartment wedged beneath a highway overpass, or a hotel whose guests reach their rooms by ladders fixed to the outside wall.
Kunert trained as a photographer and began with landscapes before moving into studio miniatures. His early sets included clay figures, but he removed them as the architecture became more realistic, leaving something like an abandoned glass to suggest that someone was just there. He treats the scenes as stage sets where viewers can project their own thoughts, and scale lets him bend rules that a full-size building would have to obey.
His process is slow. Ideas can sit in a sketchbook for months or years, and he sometimes starts building before the final composition is settled. He pays special attention to aged surfaces, which make the scene feel believable before the oddity registers. Underneath the humor there is often a darker edge about human hopes, failures and makeshift solutions. Titles mentioned include "Underpass", "Balconia" and "A Room with a View". His website is frank-kunert.de.
Source: designboom
His sets range from roughly 1:12 to 1:43 scale and are handmade, mostly from lightweight foam board. Each one gets floors, windows, furniture, painted surfaces and shingled roofs before Kunert lights and photographs it. The trick is that ordinary buildings have exactly one design decision that is slightly wrong: a running track that curves around a stadium while one lane drops into a staircase underground, a narrow apartment wedged beneath a highway overpass, or a hotel whose guests reach their rooms by ladders fixed to the outside wall.
Kunert trained as a photographer and began with landscapes before moving into studio miniatures. His early sets included clay figures, but he removed them as the architecture became more realistic, leaving something like an abandoned glass to suggest that someone was just there. He treats the scenes as stage sets where viewers can project their own thoughts, and scale lets him bend rules that a full-size building would have to obey.
His process is slow. Ideas can sit in a sketchbook for months or years, and he sometimes starts building before the final composition is settled. He pays special attention to aged surfaces, which make the scene feel believable before the oddity registers. Underneath the humor there is often a darker edge about human hopes, failures and makeshift solutions. Titles mentioned include "Underpass", "Balconia" and "A Room with a View". His website is frank-kunert.de.
Source: designboom
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