Collage di carta, collage digitale: concetti di architettura a confronto

In the years following 1968, marked by the international student revolt, some architects refused the traditional type of project and professional practice, enacting a revolution in society through the architectural drawing. This refusal has taken a particular form and manifested itself with an expressive type of drawing, which sometimes took on the features of a manifesto for prefiguring a society to come. As a consequence, a proper universe of images has been generated which has been defined, often with contempt, as “paper architecture.” Those drawings alluded to an architecture that did not intend to be built, but that wanted to become the expression of a dream for a different society. That “paper architecture” was revolutionary, as were Piranesi's drawings and Mies van der Rohe's collages. In that “paper architecture,” collage has played a fundamental role. The collage technique, although in use since the early twentieth century, has acquired a very special value in the cultural, political and ideological climate of the 1960s due to the immediacy and the power of representation of the image. The visionary premises of these drawings from the 1960s will not be lost. The ideas that crystallized on paper will evolve in the following decades, until finding a concrete substance between the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. The collage technique of the digital age allows architects to outline an image of synthesis with narrative values, impacting the cultural dimension and the form itself of architecture. The digital collage process—with images, signs and colors mounted layer by layer with different software—avoids the realism of the so-called renderings and makes the drawing similar to those created with conventional techniques, although with a novelty: a fantastic realism and a use of perspective altered through calculated forms of pictorialism. The present issue of «piano b» aims to stimulate and collect wide-ranging reflections on the issue of architecture that is narrated and interpreted through a special genre of drawing, which entrusts its creative potential to techniques such as collage, and which intends to be first of all the expression of a cultural dimension, which is substantiated through the image itself and its details.