Thomas Demand first encountered John Lautner’s fragile, rarely seen cardboard maquettes in 2010 as a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. His subsequent photographs of the California architect’s models, printed in the book Model Studies (2011) and shown throughout 2012 at the Thirteenth International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, Nottingham Contemporary in the UK, and Esther Schipper in Berlin, testify to what an artistic—or specifically photographic—research method can reveal. Besides the series’ titles, which, for the most part, name the clients of Lautner’s