ABSTRACT
This text reimagines the practice of re-collage as a methodology for participatory site analysis and space-making. Asking how one might activate the cultural narrative and collective memory of a site as generative tools in the design process, this paper challenges the socio-cultural neutrality of the techniques we traditionally rely on to contextualize place. Latent with the ability to appropriate the material conditions of one built environment, the city, and transpose them into another one, on paper, re-collage is read as a regenerative, capable of creating a new spatial syntax in its dismantling of disciplinary norms.
Breaking away from traditional data collection techniques which allow for documentation of space but not for discovery, this paper defends the appropriate(ness) of illicit collage activities—scavenging urban walls, defacing posters, and chipping away graffiti—in the scouting of source material. Resulting debris reveals a ledger of local incentives, temptations, and taboos, captured characteristics of place which serve simultaneously as collage medium and site archive. Focusing on the technical operations, formal characteristics, and perceptual qualities that establish re-collage as a tool for spatial appropriation, this text expands our notion of what constitutes the domain of the interior, challenging us to consider who gets a voice in shaping our built environment while exposing the cultural values which speak to our contemporary narrative of place.
