Cross-Talk is a recurring series on Archinect that endeavors to bring architectural polemics and debate up-to-date and up-to-speed with the pace of cultural production today. Each installation will feature an introduction premise along with four responses by four practitioners to a single topic. For this week's iteration, we look at 'Academic Aesthetics.'

The energy around representation in any architectural academy or professional practice has been long-standing. It is this energy that takes part in directing individuals to certain coasts and then, certain institutions. It is this energy that brings like-minded designers together to form sub-camps and it is the composition of these sub-camps that directs the makeup of the school and its aesthetic complexion (could this—aesthetic complexion—be said in a clearer way?).

The performance value of collage has been long-lived in its ability to reveal the unseen. Traditionally, using clippings or fragments of already made media, a new ensemble is conjured out of the paper from which the creator can extract organizational, formal, or material novelties. 

A mention of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts immediately brings a certain aesthetic flavor to mind—one of a disciplined planimetric documentation of conceptual buildings. A similar mention of an academy like AADRL might not yet bring aesthetic associations of their current units in self-assembling robotics, but it will conjure a taste of parametricism because of directors like Patrik Schumacher, who were committed to testing computational capacities in architecture. Just as academies are continuously trying to define themselves through efforts such as new branding campaigns, annual exhibitions, and school-wide portfolio publications, sub-silos within the walls of these academies are also staking their territory within the discursive arenas of architecture. 

This Cross-Talk discussion addresses a discourse of architectural representation which has made its re-entry into the academy—the neo-collage. It will also address how the aestheticization of collage and its revived interest has led to a misdirection of what this technique initially set out to do. The performance value of collage has been long-lived in its ability to reveal the unseen. Traditionally, by using clippings or fragments of already made media, a new ensemble is conjured out of the paper from which the creator can extract organizational, formal, or material novelties. These novelties can then be further developed under the scrutiny of other architectural repertoires or toolsets. The composition is a working drawing and is used to develop larger concepts aimed at more specific ideas of space.

The Miesian collage falls nothing short of this definition of the technique. In earlier compositions of projects such as the Barcelona Pavilion, a large percentage of the paper is left white or, depending on how one looks at it, many surfaces and planes of the space are omitted. What is left, after omitting planes of assumed, modern construction, is a critical investigation into the form of the space—a composition of the surface, outward facing frames, and materiality, all of which are affected by the force of perspective. The act of collage making, and therefore the compiled aesthetic of the collage, is a direct embodiment of the Miesian ideology. It is the act of arranging material parts into a greater composition—a technique of representation and resulting aesthetic that is exactly aligned with the larger theory of the architect.

...a technique of representation and resulting aesthetic that is exactly aligned with the larger theory of the architect.

The concern behind this discussion exists in the anxiety of collage aestheticization that was introduced before. Unlike the Miesian utilization of a tool that was a translation into van der Rohe’s architecture, the neo-collage is an aesthetic alias which incorporates bitmap textures, perspectival distortions, and people cut from monochromatic newsprint.

In these illustrations, surface and volume of the space, which would typically be subject to perspectival properties, are turned upside-down by a layered texture that does not comply with the rules of the surface it occupies. In many cases, the composition of the scene incorporates an oblique view of the corner of the building to play another perspectival trick. Almost like a zero-degree axonometric, the building is flattened and ultimately abstracted through its representation. Additionally, internet-acquired-textures are overlayed on the surfaces of the building and are blown up larger than their intended size. Concrete pockmarks are rendered more closely to full-size fenestrations and the conflicting scales of textures in the scene abstract the bones of the building that have already been figured out. In most of these scenes, the building can actually be clearly defined, and it is the act of layering collage aesthetics (face value appropriations as obvious as Mies’ Onyx) that serve as a post-process softening of the project at hand. This is where the neo-collage suffers. It is a composition that extracts aesthetic qualities from collages to abstract a building that has already been conjured up by the designer. This discussion argues that the strength of the collage comes from the power of reading fragmented abstractions within collage. This style of representation should be a generator, not a wallpaper.

Students in the first years of an institution’s core circuit can produce a collage as visually striking as the masterful works we all look up to - things like Rem Koolhaas’ Exodus collages, or Ben Nicholson’s Appliance house documents.

To draw distinctions between collage and the neo-collage is difficult. The technical ability of students (in addition to the infinite source of materials digital libraries make accessible) results in products that can be as beautiful as any other collage. Students in the first years of an institution’s core circuit can produce a collage as visually striking as the masterful works we all look up to—things like Rem Koolhaas’ Exodus collages, or Ben Nicholson’s Appliance house documents.

This discussion urges those students who find themselves in these studios to question the rigor of representation encouraged by critics and their affinities for a certain aesthetic. Do certain studios in the academy use collage to set a social and political context for the architecture to spawn from, just as Koolhaas did in his Exodus work? Do certain studios investigate the discourse of collage itself as in Nicholson’s case, where he is able to use the technique to transform typical consumer products into atypical imaginative menageries? On the other hand, do these studios use the aesthetic of a collage as a reactionary tour de force away from other aesthetics and behaviors developed in the academy?—an abrupt departure from things such as the hyperreal renderings that were also a popular idiom in schools for the past five years. If a technique is taken at face-value, without its content value, is this okay? Can the aestheticization of a past technique, under the new scrutiny of present technologies and contexts, contribute to the heritage of the collage itself?

Works Cited
Jones, Wes. "Can Tectonics Grasp Smoothness?" Log, no. 30 (Winter 2014): 32.Wes Jones offers a beautiful reading of two masters of tectonics - Louis Kahn, and Mies van der Rohe. Here, Jones states that each architect is more interested in the arrangement of elements than the morphology of something.
Koolhaas, Rem. Exodus Vignette. Digital image. Socks. March 19, 2011. Accessed January 16, 2018. Socks-studio.com.
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig. Barcelona Pavilion Interior. Digital image. Bigmat International Architecture Agenda. September 29, 2015. Accessed January 16, 2018. http://www.bmiaa.com.
Nicholson, Ben. Appliance house. Chicago: Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, 1990.
Nicholson, Ben. Interior Elevation of Flank Wall. In Appliance House. Chicago, IL: The Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism. 60-61.