The Thorne Miniature Rooms the Art Institute of Chicago are a collection of 46 historically accurate models of various European, American and East Asian interiors. They were imagined and commissioned by Mrs. James Ward Thorne in the 1930’s to house her collection of miniature furniture, and donated to the museum in 1940. Today they’re installed in a basement gallery, within the walls, behind glass, at chest level, so that small children can peer right into them, and with a carpeted ledge running around the entire room so that very small children can do the same. The rooms certainly have a dollhouse appeal. They’re built at 1:12 scale, each about the size of a breadbox, and capture the places they represent in mesmerizing fidelity. One takes in their period furnishings first (elaborately turned matchstick-sized legs on tables and chairs, hand-threaded carpets, plaster mouldings as fine as lace) but ends up transfixed by the ordinary objects with which the rooms are furnished to give them a sense of scale and warmth: a pair of eyeglasses on the kitchen table, a folded newspaper in the living room, the electrical cord on a lamp, a dinner fork. While the rooms faithfully render the proportions and splendor of a Tudor hall, a mid-century modern living room, and a traditional Japanese house, they trade less in architecture than a kind of special effects, conjuring other worlds.
The Thorne Miniature Rooms aren’t really individual rooms; most incorporate a cluster of rooms, one central space and also the rooms and passages branching off of them, as wells as the stretches of outdoor space beyond their doors and windows. Each model is lit from within, from various hidden sources, that establish a specific time of day and time of year. We see the morning sun spill over the slate floor of a Cape Cod kitchen, and the setting sun graze the curtains of a Charleston drawing room. It’s easy to look at each room and imagine what kind of life unfolds inside. There’s a fancy feathered hat on a stand in the dressing room of the Biedermeier apartment, as if the lady of the house is preparing to meet later with a gentleman friend. There’s a clarin trumpet lying on the window seat in an eighteenth-century English study, as if the lord of the estate has just unburdened his heart in a letter, in pen and ink, and summoned a servant to deliver it on foot. There’s a bronze statue of Shiva presiding over the desk of a prim eighteenth-century Virginia drawing room, as if the wealthy merchant who lives here has ties to the East, as well as a hankering to leave his life here behind and explore the far corners of the world. In the end the Thorne rooms, historically faithful, are less evocative architecturally — in their expression of space through forms and structure — than novelistically — in their expression of character through a cloud of details. Each period room is set in the dramatic present, where anything can happen.