The early digital collages of OFFICE - Kersten Geers, David Van Severen: narrative intentions of the eclectic visionaries of the 21st century

Abstract

Collage is no longer a simple representation of the project or either a discourse through images meant to remain confined to the format of paper architecture. In the digital age, it has become a decisive tool in the design process. It is thanks to Photoshop collages that the new generations of architects, active since the early 2000s, began to challenge their discipline and its history, to reactivate interrupted paths and to introduce fragments of retroactive visions in the contemporary project, avoiding stylisation resurged in the postmodern times. Through the work of Office, and its unpublished drawings, the essay proposes to reconstruct the advent of Photoshop collage and its perspective vision as design criteria in today’s architecture.