A Focus on Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper examines the cut-up, a divergent technique developing from the practices of fragmenting and reassembling, originating within the Dadaist art movement of the 1920s and popularized by William Burrough and Bryon Gysin. The paper will unpack and propose cut-up as a ‘divergent leap’ that instils a degree of randomness within the architectural design process, thus allowing transcriptions and transformations of physical sites within and across media terrains. In its original form, cut-up operates with text as its primary subject matter, taking advantage of the sequential but modular structure of language as an assembly of discrete, pre-existing components to derive new concepts and ideas. The critical difference between the Dadaist and the architectural cut-up as defined here, lies in the framing of the design process as a narrative itself, which can embrace both text and image. In transposing the cut-up into the architecture, the introduction of architectural elements articulated in the description of physical sites and their experiences, inevitably sees a new narrative enter the frame: that of the design process. This unwritten narrative is bound up between the media being montaged, which carry narratives of past design moves, a syntaxes, and the consciousness of the designer. The methodological tool for analysing these spatiotemporal transitions is found in filmic montage, itself based on the cut. Montage offers a means to reflect on a series of student projects, which engage with different iterations of the cut-up technique. These projects demonstrate that the narrative embedded within the thinking of the design process can manifest within and be motivated by visual material. The wider framing of the filmic cut will act here as a borrowed framework through which to develop a syntax of divergent leaps within the teaching of architectural design as an emerging media field.