Output details

Elevating Mallarmé’s Shipwreck

This journal article and collage series called 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 the paper the spatial and thematic content of Mallarmé’s poem are visualised 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. The collage series (of which there is a small selection in the paper) will be submitted for exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2013, and will also be elaborated with a Greek colleague for an exhibition, ‘Shipwreck' in Athens, also in 2013.