SCISSION: The Architectural Collage and Gordon Matta-Clark's Circus Caribbean Orange

Abstract

SCISSIONS: Architecture, Collage-Making and the Fragmented Imagination of Gordon Matta-Clark reconceptualizes cutting as a generative architectural operation. Bridging archival research, material culture studies and critical theory, the dissertation advances three claims. First, purposeful subtraction—breaking, excising, peeling, splitting—has been embedded in architectural practice from spolia and sgraffito to post-digital sampling; it therefore warrants the same analytical status traditionally reserved for additive design. Second, Gordon Matta-Clark's 1971-78 Circus or The Caribbean Orange project 1978 constitute a paradigmatic laboratory in which cutting becomes design, drawing and phenomenological event at once. Third, the operative logic of the cut is best unpacked through its tools: knife (drawing), saw (Building Cuts), scissors (Silver Photo Collage) and scalpel (Photo Strip Collage) Methodologically, each chapter pairs close readings of primary artefacts—blueprints annotated and physically incised by Matta-Clark; Cibachrome photomontages sliced on a light table; film strips re-stitched into chromatic lattices—with anthropological and philosophical lenses (Bachelard's material psychoanalysis, Ingold's "workmanship of risk", Turner's liminality). Technical analyses of cutting implements are interwoven with accounts of their ritual and symbolic afterlives, revealing how blades carry coefficients of valiance, intelligence and social agency. Matta-Clark translated compass-drawn circles on survey plans into full-scale spherical voids, then re-translated those voids into collaged images employing two states of the photograph starting by cutting the silver photo and later on using the —an iterative loop that collapses design, demolition and representation. By framing cutting as at once destructive and generative, the dissertation contributes to debates on adaptive reuse, non-finito aesthetics and the ethics of architectural intervention. It argues that cuts act as "operational diagrams" that store knowledge for future makers, reframing negative space as an epistemic resource. Ultimately, SCISSION positions collage—not as an artistic supplement to architecture—but as an architectural methodology that integrates built matter and its erasures offering a framework for practice in an era marked by scarcity, maintenance, and repair.