Collage dominated many areas of the twentieth century from Kurt Schwitters’ surrealist/suprematist compositions of bus tickets, scraps of colour and typography in the 1920s to Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City of 1968. Collage was all about the surprise conjunction, the unlikely pairing, one world view butting up against a different one creating a seam where irony, complexity and contradiction abide. The frisson at these edges and borders left the systems in collision largely unchallenged.
Weave on the other hand, is about simultaneity, the ability to hold two or more contradictory thoughts in the mind at once — nothing privileged. Debate does not occur at interesting but marginalised edges, it occurs throughout the whole weave, across and beneath its entire surface. Bruce Mau’s Life Style of 2000 is a manifesto of the weave as a paradigm to supplant collage as a working method.
The Weave: Life Style by Bruce Mau, among other things Stephanie White
W hat is the connection between these words and their appear- ance in architecture as metaphors? Collage, in particular, is used to describe the unresolved collision of program parts and forms. As a metaphor, it is by now so tired that it has lost all the delicacy of the early fragile assemblages of scraps of material culture, and all the improvised inventiveness of bricolage. The sloppy use of metaphor and words as metaphors in architecture — collage, stitching, threading, sewing, weaving — anyone who actually does sew is well aware of how far from original meaning and action these terms have strayed. Sewing is, literally, a thin weak line attaching one thin sheet of material to another. This would be like using your clothesline to lash the back wall of the house to the side. Interesting and difficult. Much easier is to build a conventional corner with a reveal and call it a seam. How we use language to drive architecture is very revealing. Words and terms are used to pluck out certain concepts from the vast wheel of time and history when they serve current political thinking. Rowe presented the eccentric eighteenth century women’s penitentiary in Wurzburg by Speeth as a brilliant example of the collage of bits from the rattlebag of architectural history — something that really appealed to us towards the end of the bloody and ruthless stripping down that went on in the modern twentieth century. So what is it that appeals to us at the beginning of the twenty-first? Collage is linked semantically to partition, margins and edges, cultural mosaics, difference — all things vapourizing in the face of the global economy, global terrorism and cultural convergence. So, weave pops up. Interwoven as everyone in the world now is, weave as a concept that can be used in design has a certain philosophical currency.
Collage, all on the front, layered, essen- tially ironic, dependent on each fragment carrying references.
Weave, the back and the front connected, equal, flexible, con - tinuous.
In the weave that is this article, let us look at current Canadian writing. Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces is an immensely fat narrative with many threads. In the space of two pages we have lived with the dying members of Scott’s expedition to the south pole, hid with Greek Jews in crawl spaces, walls, boxes; seen Jews shot at sea off Corfu,‘paraselenas like smoke across a violet sky’, combatted scurvy with lemons and nasturtium seeds, made glue from nasturtium roots which thrive in volcanic soil, stood in a Toronto kitchen thinking about lost Bella. Dense? Very. Images tumble off the pages, never smudged, never lost in the crush of colours, voices, stories. This is, increasingly, a defining quality of Canadian writing — the number of simultaneous layers on each page, as un-manichæan as could possibly be, all in endless negotiated relationship with each other. This begins to also describe the deeply interconnected world, the good, bad and indifferent, rich, poor and everyone else, clean, dirty and recover- ing. Singular, discrete narratives (the Cold War, the First, Second and Third worlds, North-South, East-West) now seem overly deterministic, thin, simplistic. Perhaps we get the narratives we need.
Style de vie, par Bruce Mau, entre autres L e collage, qui a dominé plu- sieurs périodes du vingtième siècle, a surtout trait à une conjonction inattendue, à l’appariement saugrenu et à la collision d’une vision du monde contre une autre, créant ainsi un raccordement où l’ironie, la complexité et la contradiction
plutôt à l’échelle du tissage, à travers et en dessous de sa sur- face tout entière. Le Style de vie de l’an 2000 de Bruce Mau est un manifeste du tissage, un paradigme au collage supplanté comme méthode de travail. Bruce Mau est un typographe, un concepteur graphique. Il tra- vaille avec des lettres et des polices plutôt qu’avec des mots
se côtoient. Le frisson que l’on retrouve à ces rebords et à ces bordures laisse ces systèmes en collision largement non contestés. D’autre part, le tissage a trait à la simultanéité, à la capacité de retenir deux ou plusieurs pensées contradictoires de façon simul- tanée. Le débat n’a pas sa place si l’on pense aux rebords intéres- sants et marginalisés. Il se produit
et des phrases. Le fait de pouvoir lire entre les lignes a toujours représenté un genre de tissage. Mau nous force à lire entre les polices. Sa « Proposition immodeste » d’une revue de l’architecture rassemble en trois voix et en trois polices, la page qui couvre le premier plan, l’arrière- plan et le deuxième plan du sujet. Intitulée, d’après Mau, « un tissage
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O n S ite review
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I ssue 8 2002
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