Scenographic

The recent popularity of architectural collage has led to a lot of cloning and some groaning. But collage is more than an aesthetic—it helps reconceive space in new, often scenographic ways.

- Samuel Medina

You’ve seen him before. The full head of hair and ’70s garb, immaculate slip-ons and all. He is stooped over, seized by circumspection; his wavy khaki mane seems to weigh on him. Is he merely lost in thought, or is he plotting? This haunting youth is the photographer Peter Schlesinger, as immortalized in David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). He eyes a body submerged in pool water, disregarding the vast Edenic landscape behind him. The place is Saint-Tropez, France, the year 1972.

The very same figure crops up repeatedly in the handmade montages of Athens architecture firm Point Supreme, founded in 2008. He and other Hockney homunculi also appear with some frequency in the collages of Fala Atelier, a Porto, Portugal–based architectural office established in 2013. Whether posed on a sunbaked building terrace or in a sparsely furnished living room, the peripatetic man is forever aloof, shoe gazing. But what is he doing here, in all these varied, fictive architectural places?

“Our beloved Hockney,” sighs Point Supreme co-founder Konstantinos Pantazis. “We were the first to use Hockney’s characters. They carry a mystery and a story with them.” Pantazis claims to be the originator of a prevalent style of architectural collage that shirks representational conventions. It is generally understood to be a reaction against the vapid verisimilitude of computer rendering, but Pantazis actually developed the method years before the popularization of V-Ray and other third-party plug-ins.