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Three cultural 'crises', namely the 17 th century debate regarding the ontology of time and space, the passage into modernity in the early 20 th century, and the rise of postmodernism in the late 20 th century, are portrayed here as 'shifts' in the spatial theories and practices of theatre and architecture. Each shift necessarily evokes the question all over again as to how meaning is attributed and negotiated in the design of space. G.W. Leibniz's theoretical spatial model of the universe as much as Max Herrmann's notion of theatrical space, Adolf Loos' modernist struggle against the ornament and Robert Venturi's embracing of the 'hybrid and impure' elements of architecture have shown that the centre of theatre and architecture practice rests upon the negotiation between the spectator's perspectival viewing of the object or performance and its distinct spatial condition of both surface and volume. This paper is concerned with the origin, the metaphor and rhetoric of the 'scenographic' in a specific time period (1680-1980) and focuses on what might be called several 'crises' in the thinking about architectural and theatrical space. The theater, in which the architecture serves as a possible background, a setting, a building that can be calculated and transformed into the measurements and concrete materials of an often elusive feeling, has been one of my passions.-Aldo Rossi 1979 1 Since the first cultural 'turn' and with the subsequent establishment of cultural studies from the late 1950s onwards, every subsequent 'turn' has questioned existing methodologies and opened up new and formerly marginalised fields of research. The

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The idea for a special issue of Theatre and Performance Design, 'On Models', arose from our previous scholarly work on models in theatre and architecture and our practice backgrounds in both disciplines, and we would like to thank the journal editors, Jane Collins and Arnold Aronson, for taking up our suggestion and making this double issue possible. Our most recent research on models, published as The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2018), showed that the set design or scenographic model had only been dealt with marginally in the disciplinary discourses of theatre and performance studies. This seemed to be in distinct contradiction to a trend we observed during the last decade that increasingly sees models as scenographic elements on the stage as well as models becoming a fixture in scenographic exhibitions. Additionally, to us, these models represented a new, different kind of model and our curiosity was stirred. In The Model as Performance, we call this new kind of model the 'autonomous model' and define it as an artefact from which no further artefact is produced and as one that has been conceptualised and designed as its own reality, and as its own world. A close look at the history of both theatre and architecture models revealed that the autonomous model could be traced back to the Italian Renaissance, and we followed its appearances from Scamozzi's Teatro all'Antica at Sabbioneta to recent scenographic installations at the Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space (PQ) and the Venice Architectural Biennale. Our call for papers for 'On Models' thus asked for contributions that would give specific insights into contemporary and historical modelling practices, and that would address both physical and digital models as objects of research, objects of experimentation and, last but not least, as objects of desire for maker and viewer. The responses were swift, and it was evident from the contributors' comments that we had tapped into a rich yet under-researched field of practice that both designers and scholars were eager to address. As a result, 'On Models' is a curated collection of scholarly articles, personal reflections and visual essays that speaks from practice and about practice in an international context and from a range of disciplinesfrom scenography to architecture and lighting design, and from the perspectives of designer, archivist, historian and theorist. Our article, 'Cosmopoiesis, or: making worlds. Notes on the radical model worlds of Anna Viebrock', opens this issue and unfolds the complex terrain of the model as one of the designer's central media of ideation, communication and representation but also with its definition of the model as possessing the capacity for cosmopoiesis, or worldmaking. This notion is exemplified by the next contribution from raumlaborberlin, titled 'experimental arrangements', in which the large-scale structure functions as a self-referential model that can operate as a catalyst for sociospatial change. The Berli...