Elemente Magazine - architecture: FASHION OF ARCHITECTURE

FASHION OF ARCHITECTURE 11/07/07

Words :: Garth Paulson // Images :: Tiphanie Brooke

Visionaries know that the cutting edge in architecture is not sharp, but sensuous and soft. At a time when architects are pioneering fibre-based buildings and borrowing from traditional tailoring techniques to construct them, fashion designers are learning lessons from architecture to create hi?tech structures that hold their shape independently of the body.
Even though robust architecture and tactile fabrics may seem irreconcilably diverse, there are threads that bind. Fabric, in the hands of fashion designers, can craft wearable shelters, while the agency of architecture enables textiles to become structures. Cloth and architecture can truly become one in the built environment, where textile structures weave in and out of public space, popping up in sports arenas, airports, trade shows, urban parks, shopping centres and residential projects. Felted fabrics provide efficient sources of insulation, which architects piece together like the patchwork of a quilt. Some exterior textiles have a capacity for channeling and reflecting natural light that creates new possibilities for harnessing solar energy. Fashionable metallic fabrics, coated textiles and synthetic fabrics make it possible to fold and pleat whole façades, while carbon-fibre matrices and tri-axial meshes can spiral external structures and make elasticity a central component of building design.
Perhaps the most fashionable of all, pneumatic structures are among the most tactile expressions of architecture today. Practices such as veech.media.architecture are able to create outdoor pavilions, tensile buildings and membrane exteriors using a variety of woven and non-woven fabrics. The structures quickly gain mass as the air-filled membranes stitched into the fabric inflate and expand. Because they are sustained by pressure, the fabrication of pneumatic structures requires construction skills that surpass conventional sewing. If the seams are not sewn with sufficient tension or along the right curve, they pull apart and cause the structure to deflate. Likewise, the inflatable dresses pioneered by Michiko Koshino and the range of blow-up clothing that followed were designed as three-dimensional shells that would structure and define space around the wearer.
While Parisian designer Thierry Mugler is credited with reviving the corset for a young generation, Mark West, the architect leading the Fabric Formwork project at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Architectural Structure and Technology, has succeeded in making corsetry an architectural device.
“Just like a corset moulds the body’s contours into an hourglass shape,” West explains, “reinforced textile sheaths are fabricated with eyelets and laces that enables wet concrete to be sculpted into soft shapes.” After the concrete is poured, the laces are drawn in and tightened, creating a mould that compresses the concrete exactly as a corset would cinch a waistline.
Clothes, like buildings, have to be seen on the outside as well as felt on the inside. Likewise, the textile walls of Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House open to the outdoors, revealing wide deck spaces on the first and second floors of the building. The pliable fabric used in the walls’ construction makes it possible for them to fully retract, channeling more light and air into the core of the house. In winter, they close to retain heat. The supple surfaces and pleated folds of the textile walls evoke the fluid construction of a garment more than they do architectural structures. Just as some garments are worn open or closed to reveal or conceal parts of the body, the retractable walls open to expose the structure or close to hide them from public view. As weather conditions cause the temperature to change, the house adjusts by donning or shedding layers of fabric, just as a human would.
Perhaps Curtain Wall House’s sartorial equivalents are the retractable dresses designed by Hussein Chalayan for his spring/summer 2007 collection. Chalayan’s dresses are powered by machine-driven levers that open and close to reconfigure the shape and silhouette of the garment. Hemlines rise autonomously, a bustier opens of its own accord, and a jacket unfastens itself and pulls away from the model’s torso. Like digitally-controlled ‘smart’ buildings, the dresses contain microchipped fabric panels that respond to sequences Chalayan programs them to.
“The idea was to create a technological force between the environment and the person,” says Chalayan. Much of his work connects to an architectonic aesthetic, and his ideas are often expressed in unconventional materials. “The hard shells and metal fastenings I used earlier were chosen to give the body an aerodynamic shape. You could say that these dresses house hi-tech systems, bringing some of the technology housed in architecture closer to the individual.”
Just as architects are drawn to the tailoring techniques of folding and pleating, their experiments with weaving and braiding resulted in flexible structures that outperform steel and concrete. Weaving was reclaimed for architecture by Peter Testa & Daniel Weiser, who are pioneering a vision for constructing vertiginous skyscrapers by weaving and braiding carbon fibres. Los Angeles-based Testa & Weiser designed a forty-storey office building woven together from bundled fibres rather than assembled from conventional construction materials. The structure’s shell comprises forty helical bands that coil in two directions to create a cylindrical volume without relying on a network of columns or an internal framework for support.
Fashion and architecture came together spectactularly when British architect David Adjaye famously co-designed a dress with London fashion label Boudicca. Realising that Boudicca envisioned a starburst shape that would radiate outwards from the body, Adjaye designed a wooden structure that projected the ‘rays’ in directions that would preserve the modesty of the wearer. Adjaye had seen wooden dresses designed by Yohji Yamamoto and wooden corsets designed by Alexander McQueen and realised that wood, one of his favourite materials, could also find expression in fashion design.
“The project relied on linearity and recycled timber as a means of configuring a fresh form,” says Adjaye. “The material had to support the weight of the model and at the same time mimic the rays of a starburst. Wood served those purposes perfectly.”
When French fashion house Longchamp commissioned British architect Thomas Heatherwick to design an expandable handbag, the design teamed never imagined that the spiraling bands of the bag’s leather and canvas construction would later feature architecturally in the brand’s flagship boutique. The store, located in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood, comprises a two-storey retail space situated on the first and second floors of an existing commercial building. Heatherwick carved a shaft through the building’s core, winding a sinuous staircase through the space that mimics fabric pleats. The effect is created by thirty ‘ribbons’ of material that divide and converge to form walkways, landings and steps. The density of the staircase was foiled by transparent balustrades, which Heatherwick designed using aerospace technology so that they drape.
The dynamic exchanges taking place between fashion and architecture are creating a new range of possibilities that take both disciplines in exciting new directions. Not only do today’s fashion trends provide new inspiration for architects, they also seem to present fresh possibilities for urban planners and developers. As buildings, public space and landscapes are constructed with fashion in mind, the potential to experience the cityscape as a tactile arena could change our experience of design forever.

For the Full Article, Pick up Issue 6 or subscribe today. Support Canadian +

Return