This style and medium became a formal device for practicing architecture, acting as a metaphor for space making in any context, exploring concepts of overlap, juxtaposition, contrast, analogy, texture, and transparency, in design diagramming. It introduces the possibility of a conceptual reading of multiple surface layers compressed onto the reductivist surface of the image. This intentional, if unconscious, sublation of architectural collage within high modernism became its rallying point against the disparate and confused excesses.

The abstraction of dreamlike imagery thereby retreated into a brand of non-objective, individualistic form-making, referring more to purely stylistic precedents in my work.  My compositional spaces and materials are compressed onto the compact density of a single plane.

The collage is ideally suited to capture the noise speed. Collage became the medium of materiality. In my view, collage is an intersection between painting and architecture. Fragmentation or dislocation of form is the method by which I am able to present simultaneous views. It is a materialized experience of space and a language of vision.

Always within the collage, there is fragmentation and there is organization. For the most part, there is a rectilinear organization, which is then related perhaps to curvilinear elements and there is a sense of structure. The structure in a collage is generally based on the material at hand, so although the structure of the building is based on perhaps a more clearly defined grid within there can be fragmentation and shifting of grids, there are certain formal similarities.

In the process of long years of practice on Indian Postcards, its identity has now blended in perfectly with the materials and has taken shape of characters of various interpretations. These explorations majorly started in the ‘jugal-Bandi’ with Joseph Mathew’s architecture diagramming and in the classrooms with the design students. 

From left to right:
A reality that starts with a dream and a nightmare of practicality
Endures and passes
A mass to hide the reality of the outside and to live the dream within
How to compose imperfection
A reality check for a king in chess

Medium:
Mixed media on Indian Postcard

Credit:
Hetal Shah & Joseph Mathew
Perspective to architecture