Both instrumental technique and potentially radical political critique, montage occupies a crucial place within architectural culture. From August Schmarsow to Manfredo Tafuri, Le Corbusier to Colin Rowe, a wide array of architects, theorists, and historians have used montage while seeking to comprehend and reshape modern urban space. El Lissitzky's 1924–25 Wolkenbügel (Cloud Hanger) is a paradigmatic example (Figure 1). The term montage refers generally to a technique involving the synthetic spatial and temporal arrangement of image fragments, whether from still photography or moving pictures. It is difficult to pin down, however: while constructed primarily from photographic fragments, montage imbricates multiple media, as evidenced by its centrality to cinematic discourse. Its importance to the formation of modernism is indisputable, and alongside collage and assemblage, montage remains a paradigmatic type of modern image making charged with the symbolic representation of twentieth-century experience.
In Montage and the Metropolis, Martino Stierli...
University of California Press