Dr David Lund

Dr David Lund is a historian of models and modelmaking and a Senior Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Modelmaking course at AUB, with responsibility for the development and implementation of the theory, history, and critical thinking elements of the curriculum across all three levels. A trained architectural modelmaker turned historian of the discipline, David's research specialisms include the history and heritage of architectural modelmaking, the nature of models as epistemological tools, and the status and value of making within creative practice.

Since 2019, David has been leading the preservation and cataloguing of the Thorp Modelmaking Archive, a unique collection of over 30,000 photographs and documents charting the history of the oldest architectural modelmaking company in the world, which is held by AUB. As one of the world's leading authorities on the history of architectural modelmaking, he is the author of Model Britain: The Architectural Models of Twentieth Century Dreams (Routledge 2024), and A History of Architectural Modelmaking in Britain: The Unseen Masters of Scale and Vision (Routledge 2022), and his writing has also been published in Architectural Theory Review, The Modernist, and The Twentieth Century Society Magazine. He is currently working on a new monograph entitled The Postwar Architectural Model Boom: Architecture and the Miniature Transformed (due 2027), and is leading a major digitisation project that will see the launch of a new website for the Thorp Archive containing thousands of images from the collection.

David is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.