There’s a golden yet unspoken rule in architectural training and practice that scale models should be neither too realistic nor too detailed. Thus, trees and human figurines are just tolerable, but curtains, furniture, and other everyday features are questionable, if not prohibited. A model needs to retain a relative degree of abstraction as a material object to accomplish its conjectural quality—that is, to exemplify the project to which it gives scalar form. One of the most intriguing qualities of the architectural model is therefore how it balances materializing abstract plans with

Reveling in the near-Duchampian turn of its title (which could be translated as either “Behind, After the Falls” or “Behind, After the Remnants”), “Derrière, Après Les Chutes” transformed Clearing’s town-house interior into an assembly line of bachelor machines, with a collection of contraptions by Dorian Gaudin and Neïl Beloufa. While Duchamp’s bachelors grind under the weight of stunted desire, these contemporary devices strive toward a more perfect pointlessness—operating, perhaps, but not producing.

The first floor featured a suite of sculptures by Gaudin, centering around Untitled,