Montage

Definition

Montage is the technique of assembling heterogeneous fragments into a composition whose meaning arises from juxtaposition rather than from a pre-established narrative or organic unity. Benjamin adopted montage as the methodological principle of the Arcades Project: a text composed of citations, images, and reflections not woven into an argument but placed side by side so that meaning flashes up in the gap between them. For architecture, montage offers a way of thinking design and historiography that breaks with linear narration and organic form: the building as a montage of materials, historical citations, and programmatic fragments rather than a unified whole. Montage connects Benjamin's method to Situationist détournement (the critical reuse of existing fragments), to the "fragmentary" character of the dialectical image, and to architectural practices that assemble rather than compose.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — the Arcades Project as "intentionally fragmentary text constructed through montage method" (Elliott).
• Brian Elliott — montage as Benjamin's alternative historiographical method.

Related Concepts

• Dialectical Image — what montage produces: a constellated moment of legibility.
• Arcades — the fragment that montage assembles.
• Surrealism — the avant-garde practice from which Benjamin derived montage.
• Tableau — montage's three-dimensional descendant: the room as collage ("a three-dimensional collage," via Meninato), meaning from juxtaposition rather than organic unity.
• Readymade — the tableau's unit operation: the displaced found object that montage's juxtaposition re-meanings.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — montage as the Arcades Project's compositional method.
• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — montage's spatialized descendant: the tableau, "fundamentally a three-dimensional collage where the space or scene is transformed not by means of formalistic manipulations, but through the disparate displacement and combination of ordinary objects" — the collage principle leaving the page for the room, with interior architecture and adaptive reuse as its disciplinary beneficiaries ("strategies of redefining existing elements, assuming tactics such as collage, displacement, fragmentation, or ready-made"). See tableau, readymade.
• Time travel (Massey 2018) — montage's exhibition-space instance: Parallel of Life and Art (ICA, 1953), installed by Alison and Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Ronald Jenkins — who "called themselves editors of the photographic images." Photographs of "diagrams, art works, missiles, insects, and vegetables" were "blown up and printed on card… propped up against the wall, hung from the ceiling with fishing wire, or pinned to the walls," the Fry and Drew screens cleared away so the images could be "experienced as a whole, as a total environment" — meaning produced by blown-up juxtaposition at architecture's scale rather than by organic composition: montage as a temporary interior, dismantled when the exhibition closed (see ephemeral-interior).
• Death of the architect (Berger 2018) — montage in the transferable toolbox: with collage, bricolage, pastiche, and assemblage, named as the art techniques interior architecture "could apply and appropriate… as well as other more human- and environment-centered approaches" — the techniques of appropriation art (from "cubist compositions of newspaper cuttings, wine labels, etc." onward) offered to the discipline as its remaking vocabulary. See appropriation, readymade.