They scale the world down to model dimensions.

Summa Corp.'s marketing director, Charles McPhee, presses a button on the black box in his hand and the bottom floor of a building is fully lit by fiber optics. He walks over to the building and points out its amenities to attentive observers.

The structure is two and a half feet tall and is one of three models that sit in a marketing suite on the 14th floor of a building named after billionaire Howard Hughes. McPhee uses the suite to entice prospective tenants into leasing space in a project being developed on a 70-acre parcel of prime Westside turf owned by Summa, a real estate developer.

Two of the scale models he displays are of buildings that don't yet exist. A third is a miniature of the entire project when it's done in 15 to 18 years, complete with a pool that is a richer blue at the deep end, palm trees whose fronds are made of jelly-fish tentacles, and buildings with windows made of three different colors of mirrored Plexiglas.

All three were built by Dimensional Presentations Inc., one of six Southland companies that construct architectural models.

Other model makers target similarly specialized markets. Keith Alway, owner and president of Long Beach-based Bio-Legal Arts Inc., builds models that are used as evidence in court, mostly in personal injury and malpractice suits, but once in a while in a criminal trial. He has done about 200 models in his 25-year career.

Bio-Legal Arts specializes in medical illustrations, with model-building comprising about a fifth of the company's business. It has seven employees.

Alway once reconstructed the scene of a pile-up involving more than 30 cars on the San Bernardino freeway, recreating the accident by using dwarfed cars placed on a miniature highway. He built the model for one of the accident's victims, who won the case.

Another time, he created a full-scale model of a sliding glass door for a rape case to show how the door was jimmied open. The defense attorney, for whom Alway was working, won the case.

Alway brings the models to court and makes demonstrations to juries, often using sketches and videotapes as additional visual aids. An accident reconstruction expert is usually the one who actually demonstrates the model.

Alway and his team have to be careful to make the models small enough to fit through the courtroom door, though. Many times, before he begins construction, he finds out ahead of time what courtroom the hearing is to be held in. Then he goes to the room and measures its dimensions, as well as the dimensions of any stairways leading to the courtroom.

Once a model had to be placed on the roof of an elevator in order for it to fit through the shaft, Alway said.

Model prices are as varied as the models themselves.

Dimensional Presentations charged Summa about $140,000 for the models in the Howard Hughes Center marketing suite.

Santa Monica-based Model Concepts built a model of the 1.26 million-square-foot Water Garden project in Santa Monica, and sold it to the developers for about $300,000.

Alway charges between $1,000 and $7,500 for most of his models, with the high-end ones running as much as $12,000 a piece.

It cost Landmark $75,000 to build the Magic Lantern Theatre model.

Each model takes from one to three months to devise, and Alway says data-gathering is the most difficult part of the process -- like one of his toughest assignments, which involved recreating a construction accident that occurred several years before at a downtown Los Angeles apartment building. The building had long since been completed and the scene no longer looked the same.

To reconstruct the site, Alway and one of his employees interviewed several witnesses who were there at the time. He then made drawings to match the recollection of each witness.

Afterward, he combined the drawings to make one rendering of the scene, and asked all the witnesses for their approval of the final drawing.

Once they reached a consensus, he used the final drawing to build a model of the scene. The entire project took two months, with the preparation stages taking up half of that time.

Gathering materials is another part of the process. Alway said a search is conducted for each miniature car needed to depict a traffic accident. "Every case is so uniquely different that we shop all over the United States to find the right size," Alway said. He has a collection of catalogs from hobby shops all around the country.

Each model is built to a different scale, so cars for each traffic accident model vary in size. For instance, because so many cars have to be shown, a model showing a multi-car freeway accident is going to be built on a smaller scale than one illustrating an accident at a street intersection, Alway said.

If a one-inch-long 1957 green Chevrolet is needed for a model, one of the model makers will locate one somewhere. Most of the model cars are found in Southern California, but Alway said he once had to order a car all the way from Minnesota. Alway said he gets most of the materials he needs from hobby shops.

Materials he uses to build models include balsa wood, plaster of paris, and Styrofoam. He also uses foam core, a lightweight foam about a quarter of an inch thick, to construct buildings.

The entertainment industry also uses model builders. North Hollywood-based Landmark Entertainment Group is an entertainment design company that builds theme park attractions and sets for television. It uses models to sell its attractions.

Many times a client will first contract with Landmark to build a model of a proposed project. Then, if the client is impressed with the model, he might sign Landmark for the project, said Anthony Esparza, vice president of creative development for Landmark.

Landmark built one model for "Six Flags Power Plant," a power plant in Baltimore that had been transformed into a theme park. The model was an attraction for the "Magic Lantern Theater," and the model was complete with movable parts.

Seals toss a balloon nose-to-nose in a circus scene. Also, a lion-tamer sticks his head in a big cat's mouth and the mouth closes, but the head soon pops out again.

Landmark did end up building the full-sized attraction for Six Flags Power Plant.

Dimensional Presentations once built a model of the Grand Mosque of Mecca for Saudi Arabia's King Fahd. It's now on tour around the world with the Saudi Arabia Cultural Exhibit, said Nigel Young, senior project manager for Dimensional Presentations.

The mosque model, made of Plexiglas, is 25 feet long and 20 feet wide. It is complete with domes, minarets and 24-karat gold spires.

Scattered about the entrance to the mosque are miniature Moslems dressed in flowing caftans. Young said the unpainted figurines came from Germany and cost $15 for a package of five.

Two had to be discarded, though, because they were in a begging position. "You can't have beggars" in the model, Young said. Dimensional Presentations artists painted the figurines to look like Moslems.

The company typically builds architectural models for real estate developers, who use the miniatures of projects-to-be to help secure financing and to prelease space, Young said.

Many of Dimensional Presentations' models have been prototypes of downtown Los Angeles' landmark highrises. These include California Plaza on Grand Avenue, the Gas Company Tower on Fifth Street and the yet-to-be-built Los Angeles Center on Sixth Street.

Dimensional Presentations also builds token models that developers use as gifts for tenants. For $14,000, the model makers created a 22-inch-high model of Messeturm Tower in Frankfurt, Germany, which the building's developers are giving to one of their tenants.

At a recent visit to the offices of Dimensional Presentations, Senior Project Manager Nigel Young opened the "landscape cabinet." Sitting on a couple of shelves were hundreds of miniature date palm and fan palm trees placed side by side and sticking up out of Styrofoam soil.

Nigel pointed out packages of ground-cover material designed for models that had been bought at a hobby shop.

He also took out a package of model field grass. "We can't use that," Young said. "No architect comes up and says build me a field."

Dimensional Presentations has 12 employees, including architects, painters and sculptors, while Young himself has an engineering background.

Much of the detailed drawing and cutting is done by a group of machines in the back of the studio that are hooked up to computers. The Plexiglas for buildings is narrowed to a width of one thousandth of an inch, or "one third the width of a hair," on a numerically controlled machine, Young said.

The cut and engraved Plexiglas is being used for the model being built in the front of the studio. It's of the world's largest commercial developments in process -- the $18 billion Canary Wharf project in London.