Making architecture in miniature

WICHITA, Kan. -- When artist Bill Rutherford and his wife moved to Wichita in 1959 from Highland Park outside Chicago, they missed the Victorian houses.

"We were used to heavyweight architecture," Rutherford said.

It's a love that still feeds the artist in the miniaturized renderings he does of beautiful examples of architecture in Wichita and other parts of the country.

His latest delivery came in the form of a Tudor house in College Hill, done in the scale of a half inch to the foot. It was commissioned by the house's owner, Monty Briley, another fan of architecture who hopes to leave the model to one of his daughters as a reminder of the house she grew up in.

Rutherford, an artist drawn by metals and kinetics, has been doing such models since the mid-1970s.

"I did one for a woman for her husband for Christmas," Rutherford said.

Another one of his commissions was for a woman who ordered four copies of a bungalow in his old Illinois neighborhood.

"It was the sweetest thing, for each of her children. The kids were in their 30s. It was the house they'd grown up in."

He's done businesses and other venues as well. He has rendered the Riverside boathouse, the Eaton Hotel block and the Orpheum Theatre -- four copies -- as gifts to patrons.

He doesn't like to do the models absolutely to scale, but prefers something more sculptural and aesthetically pleasing. He'll even leave off whole parts of buildings as he did in a sculpture of North High for the 50th reunion of the Class of 1935. He foreshortened the wing next to the tower that comes south toward 13th Street because he thought the actual scale would detract from the beauty of the piece.

"It reminds me of making model airplanes, but none of my model airplanes flew," Rutherford said.

Each offers its own challenges.

"This one is driving me crazy," Rutherford said during the building of Briley's Tudor house. "It has so many hills and valleys in the roof."

The process is laborious.

Rutherford starts out by casing the house: measuring windows and bricks, photographing it, and then going home and doing a "pretty darn accurate drawing" of the house.

He builds the form over the drawing, using bronze rods.

At that point, "it looks like a great big jungle gym -- you want to climb all over it. It's like an airplane frame."

He covers all the openings with "real lightweight copper that I've tooled with a ball point pen." He then goes back and cuts out window openings.

Rutherford figured on 20 hours minimum for the windows on the Briley house, using a straight edge and a ball point pen and making many fine measurements. The tiles of the front porch had a crazy-quilt design that he had to emboss.

"What I had to do was make separate window units in the Brileys' which I soldered into the back side."

While many of his works are done in a scale of a half inch to a foot, the circa-1916 Market Square shopping center in Lake Forest, Ill., was in a quarter-inch scale.

"It's tough on the hands," Rutherford said. "Embossing that copper is just tough. And if you're trying to emboss the bricks -- I'm not a jeweler by nature."

The pieces range in price from $800 for a small, simple piece to $5,000 or more for the larger, more complex structures.

Most of the houses are flush on the back side, though Rutherford has done models that go all the way around.

Rutherford sometimes counts the hours he spends on a piece. For example, it took him 401 hours to render the four copies of the Orpheum. But others are pure labors of love, such as Monty Briley's Tudor.

"This is one I knew I didn't want to keep time," Rutherford said.

"It's a fine piece of architecture, and I wanted it in his collection."