Every once in a while, an architectural model rises to the level of sculpture—and there's one quietly sitting in a vitrine over in Bellevue right now, made of brass and concrete, like a canyonland of Brancusi pencil sharpeners.

It's Brad Cloepfil's killer prototype for the National Music Centre of Canada in Calgary (video), incorporating pieces of a sliced-up trumpet.

That's not the only model at Open Satellite this month. There's also Cloepfil's almost equally groovy model for the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, made of shaved-off sticks of graphite. Its surface darkly vibrates like a Still, against that blast of milky white on top. (I imagine the building, which is set to be made entirely of concrete, will look nothing like this.)

Cloepfil almost never comes to Seattle to give a talk, despite living close by in Portland. But he's coming to UW a week from tomorrow, on March 10; it's a special occasion.

The reason he's coming? Open Satellite coaxed him into juryingshowing alongside a contest of designs by architecture students, whose models ring the walls at the gallery. The show's called Supermodel. Winners for most out-there are Hunter Ruthrauff's Wayqecha Cloud Forest Research Station (left) and Andrew Tsai's The State of the Church—a church you attend by going through a baptist-by-underwater-tunnel.