A COMMON THEME FOR ART, CITY AND ARCHITECTURE CRITICISM: URBAN COLLAGES

Collages, traditionally made by using paper and scissors, today also with computer simulations, entered to the architectural discourse not as a device as in the other arts, but to critique and dismantle the aesthetic structures of modern architecture. Archigram has utilized collage in the repertoire of architectural and urban esthetics in 1960's. In 1975 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter set out their theory of Collage City, in their book with the same title where they envisaged the city as an aggregate of discontinuous fragments, creating a highly impacted condition of symbolic references all constructed from disparate elements, artifacts and allusions. In Calvino's Invisible Cities, while the urban relations are transformed and renewed, life is perceived as collages. Nils Ole Lund however, in his urban collages refers to the technique of collage as a common theme for art, city and architecture criticism.