Montage

Definition

Montage is the technique of assembling heterogeneous fragments into a composition whose meaning arises from juxtaposition rather than from a pre-established narrative or organic unity. Benjamin adopted montage as the methodological principle of the Arcades Project: a text composed of citations, images, and reflections not woven into an argument but placed side by side so that meaning flashes up in the gap between them. For architecture, montage offers a way of thinking design and historiography that breaks with linear narration and organic form: the building as a montage of materials, historical citations, and programmatic fragments rather than a unified whole. Montage connects Benjamin's method to Situationist détournement (the critical reuse of existing fragments), to the "fragmentary" character of the dialectical image, and to architectural practices that assemble rather than compose.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — the Arcades Project as "intentionally fragmentary text constructed through montage method" (Elliott).
• Brian Elliott — montage as Benjamin's alternative historiographical method.

Related Concepts

• Dialectical Image — what montage produces: a constellated moment of legibility.
• Arcades — the fragment that montage assembles.
• Surrealism — the avant-garde practice from which Benjamin derived montage.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — montage as the Arcades Project's compositional method.