In architecture, a model is a building, usually a paradigmatic or archetypal building, that serves as an inspiration guide to create a new, totally different work. Sometimes it is also used to refer to a model (as an anglicism of scale model), a representation or reproduction normally built on a smaller scale with the intention of showing the image of the building or a part of it, studying its construction details, checking its operation or judging its appearance.[1]​.

According to Ludovico Quaroni, it refers -directly or transferred- to the unique and irreproducible work that can nevertheless prompt other people other than the original author to repeat some of its characteristics, precisely due to its character of perfection and "example" (taking this word in its double meaning). The model is a unique and concrete original that contains a maximum of specific values ​​and is distinguished by its richness and perfection. It differs from the type in that this is an a posteriori, classifying and non-creative synthesis of invariant and non-original characters, a logical category of selective investigation of the past. The choice of a model implies a value judgment that recognizes the perfection or exemplarity of the work, which stimulates its imitation or interpretation.[2]​.

In the Renaissance, the Pantheon of Rome was the model taken for the incorporation of the dome in churches, from the domes of the Cathedral of Florence and San Pedro in Rome to that of the basilica of El Escorial.[3]​ The temple of San Pietro in Montorio by Bramante is a good example of this process. Originally it clearly depends on a type (the round peripteral temple described by Vitruvius), but it is linked to formal historical models (the Temple of the Sibyl of Tivoli), finally being proposed as a type and as a model.

In Neoclassicism, architects were inspired above all by another of the emblematic buildings of antiquity, the Parthenon, which was used in France in the church of Saint Genevieve, today the Pantheon of Illustrious Men"), and in the Parisian church of La Madeleine. In England the same scheme is used in the Temple of Concord and Victory") and in the British Museum, while in Germany it is used in the Munich Glyptotheque and the Valhalla of the German people") and in the United States in the Capitol, in its two facades, and in the design of the Bank of Pennsylvania"). In Spain, Ventura Rodríguez uses this model on the façade of the Pamplona Cathedral and Juan de Villanueva on the main façade of the Prado Museum, the current Velázquez door.[4]​ For Quaroni, unlike the Renaissance, the Neoclassical assumes as a model the architectural typology and not classical architecture, producing works that are nothing more than the material transcription of the types.