This paper discusses collage as a means to explore spatial ideas. It concerns the practice of drawing-as-research, the spatiality of drawing and the nature of paper. It questions the homogeneity of digital tools in contemporary practice. It is introduced with a discussion of architectural representation and space with a historical trajectory. It questions an understanding of space-as-geometry and discusses the potential role of non-perspectival drawings and non-digital drawing in current practice. The collage studies focus on the late nineteenth century. Working in the tradition of the collage novel, and with original engravings from the popular French newspaper Le Grande Illustré (1904), the collages work with the thematic structure and spatiality of Stéphane Mallarmé’s revolutionary poem Un Coup de Dés written a few years earlier. In this paper, the spatial and thematic content of Mallarmé’s poem are visualized for the first time. The conclusions of this study concern the role of non-digital drawings in the profession, and the potential of creative “paper technologies” to engage the material imagination at the early stages of a design process. It opens new ground as a study of the spatiality of text, the relationship between dramaturgy and architecture and on the nature of topological drawings.
References
[1]
Hessen, T. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy; Latour, B., Weibel, P., Eds.; ZKM: Karlsruhe, Germany, 2005.
[2]
“Space” as an object, is not there. Distance is measured in terms of movement in time (for instance there is long time/short time). There is spatiality that looks like space but it is not: it is spatiality and cosmogony, whose structuring principle is time: these are sequences of enclosure and openness/dark and light that differentiate events in a temporal metabolism. European spatiality doesn’t start with myth, it starts with the configuration of the whole, structured through time. It is only in ancient Greece, around 600 BC, cosmogonic differentiation begins to appear between Olympian and Chthonic gods: finally codified and we can talk of space from spatiality and even then it is “space” only to a certain extent since participation in it gives it its full meaning. And in this sense time remains the ordering principle.
[3]
Aristotle gives a discussion of topos in his Rhetorics and its role in oratory can also be found in Cicero, De Oratore.
[4]
Filippo Brunelleschi is generally attributed with the invention of mathematical perspective during the first decades of the fifteenth century.
[5]
Developments in perspective lead to Baroque theatrical illusionism, clearly illustrated by the frescos by Andrea Pozzo (1685) in the church of S. Ignazio, Rome and the subsequent adjacent piazza by Filippo Raguzzini (1727–2735).
[6]
Descartes (d.1650) articulates his geometry on Euclidian principles but in the context of homogeneity. What happens is that Cartesian space is wrongly attributed to Euclid. What is described as Euclidian is a Cartesian invention: Euclid has topos, or place in space; the milieu in which Forms materialize.
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Kline, M. The Loss of Certainty; Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 1980.
[8]
Despite the emphasis I have placed on the relationship to the body and concreteness in topos, it is conventionally understood as mathematical and science as the study of properties of geometric figures.
[9]
The engravings could be seen as a snapshot of the tumultuous political and social background that wrought such change in Mallarmé’s poetry. The cultural crisis of decadence had already heralded by Huysman’s A Rebours (1884) and 1894–1897 saw the most intense period of spatial and aesthetic development in the architecture of the Belgian Art Nouveau. It is perhaps no coincidence that Un Coup des Dés was so radically modern.
[10]
Silvermann, D.L. Art Nouveau in fin-de-siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style; University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, USA, 1989.
[11]
Pearson, R. Unfolding Mallarmé, the Development of a Poetic Art; Clarendon Press: Oxford, UK, 1996; p. 235.
[12]
Braet, H. L’accueil fait au Symbolism en Belgique 1885–1900. (In French); Palais des Académes: Brussels, Belgium, 1967; p. 27.
[13]
In this sense this revolutionary poem can be read in terms of a spatial order that works between text and the space of the page, “the precariousness of language amidst the whiteness of the (silent) page (…) comes to brilliant fruition in Un Coup des Dés” Pearson, R.; op cit.; p.235.
[14]
Seven is the most likely number to be thrown by two dice.
[15]
Poetryintranslation. A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance. Available online: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.htm#_Toc160699751 (accessed on 16 March 2013).
[16]
A new generation of painters at the start of last century deal with the issue of “simultaneity”, creating indistinguishable definitions of line and space and no longer drawing distinctions between space and the things that occupy it, nor indeed between the pure idea of space and the concrete spectacle it presents to our senses.
