Matthew Mindrup is a Sydney-based architect, architectural-historian and Director of the Bachelor of Architecture and Environments program at the University of Sydney whose research explores the role of materials, and especially physical models for the conception and construction of architecture. In 2007 he completed a Ph.D. on the physical and metaphysical coalition of two models created by amateur Merz architect Kurt Schwitters during the 1920s. He lectures broadly and publicly on this subject and those of his books including The Material Imagination (Routledge, 2015), his co-translation of Bruno Taut's 1919 anthology The City Crown (Routledge, 2015) and the first comprehensive history of the architectural model and its uses entitled The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse (MIT Press, 2019).