Architecture school is demanding. The hefty workload can be overwhelming, presenting suitable ideas to your professor requires a lot of time and effort and the final results may not match your expectations. But what if I told you there was a way to present projects stress-free, efficiently and effectively?
A collage at the start doesn't have meaning, it’s what we make sense of the materials that assemble meaning and therefore design. When we gather pictures and other sources to use in our collage, we are training our minds to think outside the box. Many times in our projects we tend to focus on achieving realism and intensive rendering may not get the idea across. However, presenting simple shapes and how they coexist with the environment can speak more than you could imagine. In one of my previous posts, I mentioned a quote from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was a professor at the Bauhaus where he emphasised ‘less is more’. Now of course, some universities will prefer rendering and realism, it primarily depends on your course and professor, but even then you can create rough designs using the aid of collages. Using this technique you can see how your design can impact the environment and people. Furthermore, exhibiting your work in different styles can help you with the design process as you’re allowing your mind to almost comprehend different perspectives.
Following my point, many professors and schools want to see how your designs influence the surrounding area and a collage does a fantastic job at giving an overall visual. Adding scale figures will not only create a lively environment, it will add certainty to your designs. Another point is that, in general, collages are rule-free, you can experiment with it however you see fit, but perspectives and proportions should still be taken into account, without that we cannot properly visualise what our project would look like in the real world.
Another issue we tend to face are colours. We get caught up in providing contrast, shading, rendering and detailing which is a tedious process to undergo, especially when you’re short on time. Providing detail does not mean overdoing something, it means the work should be speaking for itself. With collages, you can restrict yourself to using a specific colour palette. This simplifies the thought process, allowing ease of expressing ideas. It also goes to say that your work doesn’t need to be fully coloured, white spaces tend to improve the simplicity of the design giving an enjoyable and interesting piece of work to look at. Whilst most colour palettes for architecture-based collages go for lighter tones, experimenting with a variety of palettes helps remarkably.
Aiding the composition of the piece is also the variety of textures you use. By doing so, we are forming unique individual images that when constructed together give off a much more energetic impression. It ultimately makes the artwork interesting to a viewer.
Designing also requires us to allow the environment to influence our designs. This means we should take into account how external factors can affect the display of a building. It is of immense importance that such factors be listed when giving your project design and you should always aim at displaying environmental conditions, especially when using softwares. If you happen to find this difficult, convey your idea in the form of a collage and try to work out where the issue lies.
As with any art medium, you need the practice to get that level of quality you want. Moreover, as you keep making collages you can find a pattern to your designs, hence you can find your style. Since we are training our minds to work with what we have, when it comes to renovating a structure, we can come up with aesthetic ideas almost in an instant. Even artists in general focus on collages for this one particular reason, it trains their creativity and decision-making. If there are some of you who want to try collages for architecture, I heavily suggest working on abstract collages as it lays out a solid foundation.
Comentarios