Slicing life: collage and its role as a neo-avant-garde strategy in architectural representation

Focusing on the early collaged drawings of Coop Himmelb(l)au, this paper will look at the migration of collage into architectural representation in the 1970s and 80s as a political and polemical strategy of “seeing”. Drawing heavily from important evolutions in the technology of film and installation art, these drawings pre-empted the revolutionary infiltration of computer technology into architecture a decade or more later, as well as assimilating the rich visual tapestry of popular culture into the broader context of architectural representation. The paper will draw on the embodied criticisms in Bürger’s thesis, to position these drawings as neo-avant-garde visual strategies that draw from the historical avant-garde but in a radicalised and contemporary context