Some investigations and reflections around City of Composite Presence

Abstract

The City of Composite Presence – an enigmatic drawing contained in Collage City – and the La città analoga – a panel displayed at the 1976 Venice Biennale – are icons of the architectural culture of the late seventies. Although both composed assembling paper fragments and conceived to be reproduced serially, they express two very different attitudes towards architecture and its project. Starting from these two famous works, it is possible to analyse some divergent attitudes to the use of the collage technique as a rhetorical machine to assert and disseminate ideas of architecture. In one case, the composition of diverse fragments on a panel is a material instrument to practise the project; with that, the architect, like a bricoleur, ironically assembles his city prophecy. In the other, it is an expedient to describe, through analogies, the urban form in a melancholic dimension of souvenirs and atmospheres. In its different forms and variations, the collage – as a subversive technique of surrealist juxtapositions, a photographic story-telling device, an abstract assemblage of typological fragments and an archive of elective affinities – has managed to rise to autonomous narrative dimensions that the figurative tradition of architectural drawing had never reached before. Thus, more than a simple graphic representation technique, the collage appears to be a poetic and intellectual attitude to look at the things of the world; to transform ideas into tangible forms; to measure the dimension of the surroundings and of the memory.