At least when my spouse wss in architecture school, these were mostly expensive in time, not materials. Things like the divided windows are a giant pain to put

At least when my spouse wss in architecture school, these were mostly expensive in time, not materials. Things like the divided windows are a giant pain to put together. It's pretty atypical to use actual materials in the model. When you need to see the actual materials together, you just use samples at 1:1 size and either hold the individual samples near each other or at most build a small corner to illustrate where things will come together.