Search

Copyright of Bibliothecae.it is the property of University of Bologna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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 Through the work of Office, and its unpublished drawings, the essay proposes to reconstruct the advent of Photoshop collage and its perspective vision as design criteria in today’s architecture.

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.

Research on the sensual experience of place is not a mainstream topic in the architectural debate; it is more common in other disciplines like landscape architecture or interior design. The curriculum sometime offers opportunities of cross-pollination between disciplines; students in architecture courses might be exposed to different theories of space more typical to other fields. This paper explore the teaching/research nexus within QUT Master of Architecture research stream; the focus of the discussion is students’ experimentation with people’s experience and navigation of the public space. Theories of placemaking in relation to urban design are first introduced; then the teaching/research nexus is discussed; finally students’ experience in approaching phenomenological research within the Master of Architecture are presented.

This paper is about the architectural experience which evolved through the design of cemeteries. Describing five different cases, we identified the relationship between the foundamental principle of the enclosure and its variations due to specific contextual conditions, both related to existing historical elements and to the local landscape. In this way the project for new cemeteries or their enlargement become an experimentation on "identity variations".