M+M: Graphic Assembly

Craig Buckley’s research explores the intersections of modern architecture with avant-garde movements in the visual arts, the entanglement of architectural design with changes in print culture and optical media, as well as the historiography of modern architecture.

His recent book Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) provides a new understanding of the role of montage and collage within architectural culture. Montage, it argues, was a cultural technology that architects used to envision experimental assembly processes at a moment when rapid changes in the industrialization of building was changing the character of the architect’s intellectual work. Looking closely at montage practices, it brings to light how architects responded to changes in technologies of photomechanical reproduction that bound architectural culture to more closely to the technics of optical media.

Respondent: Brigid Doherty (German)