CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS 

FM VII: COLLAGE

FM: What are your thoughts on architecture’s preoccupation with collage?

Farshid Moussavi: I don’t know whether I’m the person to talk about, or to advocate for collage. If anything, I would be against it as a way to think. I think accidental encounters or discoveries are of course part of life, but I prefer to work with intelligence, not accident. The world is incredibly complex and any design project is very multifaceted. I am interested in how architects navigate this complexity, how they create certain paths of coherence and add value to dynamic forces that are ultimately out of their control; at some point, you have to find transversal links across this sea of information in order to make projects; this is an intelligence through which architects exercise their agency. I am very interested in that, and I think it has nothing to do with collage. I have to say I’m really uninterested in the idea of collage.

For this issue of FM we are pursuing the idea of collage, and by extension the ideas of decollage and bricolage. This idea interests us in several ways: as a representational technique with a specific history in art and architecture; as a conceptual underpinning for some current practices; and as a genealogical approach to history, which is to ask, how do architects cope with the anxiety of influence?

FM aims to gather the widest possible range of submissions. Minor contributions such as a comic panel or lines of text are as interesting to us as extensive essays or novels.The call for material provides a context to situate contributions. While we encourage contributions that respond to, or reinforce the proposed theme, we are equally interested in contradictory and polemical responses. After all, it is important to identify what a thing is not in order to understand what it is.

Please submit text as .pdf; images as .jpegs or .tiff at 300 dpi; vector drawings as .ai or .pdf; and videos (for online submissions) as .mpegs. Please include a numbered list of all illustrations and provide the following information for each: illustration source, name of photographer or artist, name of copyright holder, or “no copyright”, and caption, if needed.

Contributions to FMVII must be submitted electronically to FM@freshmeatjournal.com by 31 January 2015. Please note all contributions are made voluntarily and without profit.

FM is the official student publication of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Founded in 2008, the journal is produced entirely by students, with support of faculty and staff. By publishing content that both reflects and challenges UIC’s pedagogical agenda, FM acts as a vehicle to further the dialogue of the school among students and faculty, as well as between the school and other voices in the field.