Collage as an exaltation of architectural thought

Abstract

The architectural project has had different ways of representing itself and has been evolving for about a century, following the progress of science and technology that, with the advent of digital technology in the 1960s, completely subverted how a project idea was presented. Each historical period, which not by chance had its own way of representing architecture, responds quite accurately to what can be called the influential trends of the time. It is no coincidence that the beauty of architecture corresponds to models of life and society that are never in antithesis. Architectural research has historically had, until the Modern era, a way of representing itself quite univocally and has rarely tried to dialogue with the other arts, even in moments of greater reaction to the art and architecture of the time. My personal experience in the use of collage as a tool for the definition of the architectural project was mainly focused in the search for models of representation, using firstly paper collage and, later, the photo collage, with the new possibilities to impress a photographic plate and even later, in the 1980s, with the use of the photocopy. The advent of digital technology has also allowed us to perfect this mechanism, even though it has almost completely lost the dexterity in the composition of the drawing and deprived the author of the uniqueness of the work, allowing the digital to reproduce infinitely the work itself. These various and complex techniques can only be accomplished through the manual and intellectual capacity of those who know mechanisms that are not purely technical, but which are rather found in a complete whole that is the architectural project, legible in its essence and materiality.