The collage-montage as an ‘analogical method’. Compositional exercises for the new Vkhutemas Ideal Museum in Moscow

The essay aims to investigate the relationship between 'canons and expressive codes' – the object of the Call – starting with a reflection on montage-collage as a technique of approach to the project that can represent a way to "succeed in undermining all the illusions of representation" (Groupe µ, 1978) and, instead, lead to a deeper knowledge of reality. This type of ‘analogous’ composition found its first field of experimentation in the artistic avant-gardes: Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque worked with this mode of composition, made up of "fragments", with the aim of producing new relationships between figure and background and, therefore, a new unity. In architecture, Arduino Cantàfora's 'La città analog'a and 'La città banale', Aldo Rossi's 'La città analoga' and Hans Kollhoff's 'City of Composite Presence' represent just a few manifestations of the experiments that were conducted with the intention of recognizing ‘in the dialectic between the parts’ a greater meaning than that represented by the individual elements. Therefore, the technique of 'analogical assemblage', allows to make explicit the relationships that define the process of morphogenesis of a new figure through a critical redesign of the forms belonging to the past. The international research seminar, for the realization of the new Vkhutemas Museum, has represented the occasion to experiment this type of 'analogon composition'. A compositional exercise is carried out by derivation from the 'given form', an 'exemplum' - the Bibliothèque nationale de France by Dominique Perrault - to 'the figure', which detects the fundamental elements of the reference itself but translates them into a new configuration. The drawing becomes an elective instrument of representation, understood as a moment of abstraction - the morpheme - which allows to identify the significant elements that contribute to the constitution of the work. Recognizing the type of the court as a fixed structure, and making explicit the syntax between the signs through successive elaborations in a field of multiple variations, the exercise on the Library will lead to the definition of an open court composition that, ‘then’, will be 'inhabited' by forms deriving from an inverse exercise - 'from figure to form' - starting from a painting by Kazimir Malevič. The principle of definition of the exercises is based on the intelligibility and adequacy of the formal structure of the analyzed work so that it becomes a premise for the formativity of the new figure.