Assignment: Architecture and Fashion
Word limit: 2000 words
Instructions.
What do I really want to explore?:
How does F&A relate other than those surface similarities?
How can we bring both disciplines closer?
Can fashion designers and architects work together?
Can both eventually use the same materials?
Why should they even use the same materials? Sustainability?
What about the same construction methods?
Fashion IN modern architecture
What about the design elements of fashion and architecture?
How architecture and fashion design relation evolved and developed over the years?
How has fashion influenced architecture??
Proposed title(s):
Convergence of fashion design and architecture
Parametricism in architecture and fashion
The potential of fashion and architecture to enhance the human condition
What does the relation between fashion and architecture mean?
- Design elements used in each discipline are similar
- Construction materials, methods, techniques are similar - high tech textiles, pliable building materials, Computer Assisted Design software
- Fashion adopt architectural materials
- Architecture adopt fashion materials
- Fashion runways designed by architects/have architectural qualities
- Buildings designed with fashion elements like ornamentation
Proposed chapters/arguments
- Introduction:
1. Define Architecture and Fashion (A&F)
2. History of both A&F
3. Correlation between A&F - When did the relationship start? (convergence over the years) Example: Modernism - rejected the idea of ornamentation. Post-modernism/Parametricism - more similarities Focus on one period/style in the dissertation
- Mention/explore F&A interactions eg. African influence on modernity??
- Similar design elements and processes used in both disciplines - folding, patterning, parametric design etc.
- Include theory:
1. Gottfried Semper: The Vitruvian Virtues of Architecture: Utilitas, Firmitas, Venustas (https://art3idea.psu.edu/locus/vitruvius2.pdf)
2. Gottfried Semper: Theory of Dressing (Refer to ACSA pdf)
- Parametricism - how it came about.
- Counterargument: why parametricism is still not embraced by many
Questionable:
- Is Fashion temporary/momentary process??
- Architecture is known to be an "interpretation of space", but so is Fashion - space in which your body occupies? Both can be experiential as well.
- "This identity is not necessarily to be the real identity of the person; it is rather about what we want the society to think about us, but not really what we are in real life. Taking architecture as a language defined by Jencks, contemporarily, architecture could be both defined as the visualization of our REAL identities, and identity does not change as often as fashion trends do" - True to an extent but fashion is used more frequently in a way, on an individual? When you occupy different buildings, your identity changes as well? But one can choose fashion more so on a daily basis then they can choose architecture. Therefore fashion leans towards the ever-changing characteristic?
Influences on disciplines:
Architects-fashion:
- Henry Van de Velde, Josef Hoffmann, Lilly Reich, Frank Lloyd Wright or their wives (Anna Muthesius, Lilli Behrens)
Fashion designers-architecture:
- Iris Van Herpen
- A. Mcqueen
- Pierre Cardin - "The avant-garde, space-age designs he was known for-such as bubble dresses, the worldwide fad he started in 1954-place an emphasis on clothing as bodily architecture rather than pieces of fabric. Like a classic architect, his designs demonstrate more concern for geometry than for the female form.
- Raf Simons - Simons has described his own work as having "innovative construction with emphasis on shape and form". His architectural influence showed in the choice of venue for his 2016 Dior resort collection.
- Tom Ford - Ford described Mies van der Rohe as the one architect who influenced him the most. "With Mies, God was in the detail," he said. "I find the idea of chromed I-beams in the Tugendhat House so simple but so luxe. Refined minimalism-this is what excites me as a designer."
Historians/Writers:
- Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and Hermann Muthesius
- Gottfried Semper
1. Fashion and Architecture
https://www.ukessays.co.uk/essays/architecture/fashion-and-architecture.php
Main argument:
- Fashion and Architecture have a lot in common - inevitable occurance and correlation
- Many propose closer relationships
- However, it creates a risk for the architecture field, such that it may stray from conceptualisation and move towards commercialism and commodification.
- "to understand the relationship between A&F from the past practices and to design a structure representing the timelessness of the architecture compared to the short life of fashion."
Key arguments:
"most importantly, fashion is a tool for joining to the society, being a part of it while architecture provides privacy, i.e. isolation from the rest of the world."
How true is that?? Architecture is also a tool to integrate into the society, a hub to meet people with common interests etc? Fashion ieclothings also provide self-privacy.
"could create a risk for architecture reducing the architectural ideology to the cladding and exterior picture, only."
It can be compromised - form and function. (but to some extent?)
"In sum, fashion can be described as the wall of the body while architecture is the body itself and the dwelling surrounding that body."
Fashion gives individual identity while architecture provides identity for the society.
"However, these borrowings today are observed so frequently that it holds a danger for architecture to be reduced to surface, and the harmony between the outer and inner of the structure is almost lost (this will be further explored and discussed in the globalisation concept)."
Does the introduction of new materials really disrupt the harmony between the exterior and interior of architecture??
2. Dezeen - Technology adds an icredible advantage to fashion design (article)
https://www.dezeen.com/2014/09/23/julia-koerner-interview-fashion-technology-3d-printing-haute-couture-ready-to-wear/
Main point:
"This parametric design process derives from architectural design and allows for custom mass fabrication, which will have a big influence on online shopping and the whole fashion industry."
Encouraging cross-disciplinary work at the "convergence of fashion design, architecture and industrial design" is necessary to maintain standards and continue to push boundaries, according to Körner.
3. Patrick Schumacher on Parametricism - ‘Let the style wars begin'
https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/patrik-schumacher-on-parametricism-let-the-style-wars-begin/5217211.article
Parametricism's crucial ability to set up continuities and correspondences across diverse and distant elements relies on its principles holding uninterrupted sway. The admixture of a post-modernist, deconstructivist or minimalist design can only disrupt the penetrating and far-reaching parametricist continuity. The reverse does not hold, because there is no equivalent degree of continuity in post-modernist, deconstructivist or minimalist urbanism.In fact, parametricism can take up vernacular, classical, modernist, post-modernist, deconstructivist and minimalist urban conditions, and forge a new network of affiliations and continuities between and beyond any number of urban fragments and conditions.
Preparing for the style war
What are the current styles that must be combated by parametricism? Is there really still some kind of stylistic pluralism, as posited by Jencks? In fact, post-modernism has disappeared, and the contributions and advances of deconstructivism have been incorporated within parametricism. The mainstream has, in fact, returned to a form of pragmatic modernism with a slightly enriched palette; a form of eclecticism mixing and matching elements from all modernism's subsidiary styles. The inability of post-modernism and deconstructivism to formulate a new viable paradigm led to the return of modernism in the guise of minimalism as the only consistent, ideologically stringent style that confronts parametricism today. The primary confrontation in the struggle for stylistic hegemony is thus between parametricism and minimalism.
Parametricism claims universal validity.
It cannot be dismissed as eccentric signature work that only fits high-brow cultural icons. Parametricism is able to deliver all the components for a high-performance contemporary life process. All moments of contemporary life become uniquely individuated within a continuous, ordered texture.
The latest built works from ZahaHadid Architects are much more than experimental manifesto projects; they succeed as highperformance projects in the real world. The Nordpark Cable Railway stations in Innsbruck are a good example. No other style could have achieved this coincidence of adaptive variation to the different site conditions with genotypical coherence across those phenotypical variants. Parametricism is ready to go mainstream. The style war has begun.
What is parametricism?
Parametricism implies that all architectural elements and complexes are parametrically malleable. This implies a fundamental ontological shift within the basic, constituent elements of architecture. Instead of classical and modern reliance on rigid geometrical figures - rectangles, cubes, cylinders, pyramids and spheres - the new primitives of parametricism are animate geometrical entities - splines, nurbs and subdivs. These are fundamental geometrical building blocks for dynamical systems like ‘hair', ‘cloth', ‘blobs' and ‘metaballs' that react to ‘attractors' and can be made to resonate with each other via scripts.
Parametricism aims to organise and articulate the increasing diversity and complexity of social institutions and life processes within the most advanced centre of post-Fordist network society. It aims to establish a complex variegated spatial order, using scripting to differentiate and correlate all elements and subsystems of a design. The goal is to intensify the internal interdependencies within an architectural design, as well as the external affiliations and continuities within complex, urban contexts.
The avoidance of parametricist taboos and adherence to the dogmas delivers complex order for complex social institutions.
Negative principles (taboos)
• Avoid rigid forms (lack of malleability)
• Avoid simple repetition (lack of variety)
• Avoid collage of isolated, unrelated elements (lack of order)
• Avoid rigid functional stereotypes
• Avoid segregative functional zoning
Positive principles (dogmas)
• All forms must be soft
• All systems must be differentiated (gradients) and interdependent (correlations)
• All functions are parametric activity scenarios
• All activities communicate with each other
Websites/links:
https://maisonmaisnon.com/exhibition/the-extraordinary-process
https://www.academia.edu/26942704/Elastic_Space_Latent_Formations_in_Fashion_and_Architecture (IMPORTANT)
https://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/sijpkes/aaresearch-2012/12-student-files/architecture-fashion.pdf (IMPORTANT)
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/20z389tt#page-6
https://www.academia.edu/15271328/Architecture_Fashion_A_study_of_the_connection_between_both_worlds
https://curve.carleton.ca/b5f96908-ac61-421c-98cb-ddd51aee9505
https://www.uniassignment.com/essay-samples/cultural-studies/the-link-between-architecture-and-fashion-cultural-studies-essay.php
https://ryuc.info/creativityphysics/creatio_within_creation/body_is_a_vehicle.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/arts/design/zaha-hadid-extraordinary-process.html?_r=0
https://i-rep.emu.edu.tr:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11129/294/Hedayat.pdf?sequence=1
https://curve.carleton.ca/87559d3e-9485-46cf-af8e-0714879f7eda
https://art3idea.psu.edu/locus/vitruvius2.pdf
The writer does not necessarily have to stick to the materials/papers the client has found. They have noted two as important as they feel these will set the essay in the right direction, however the researcher doesn't have to use these if they feel other sources would create a stronger argument.