2.3 Reconstructing disciplines

This study argues that architecture could benefit from including everything designed to shelter human beings, such as buildings and clothing. Renowned architect Zaha Hadid said: “[B]oth architecture and fashion are based on structure and shape and turning basic necessities (like clothing and shelter) into art” (Rudy, 2019). Fashion designer Coco Chanel said: “fashion is architecture, it’s a matter of proportion” (Rudy, 2019). Architects and fashion designers have the same aim: to make inventive designs developed from theory, technique, and philosophy (Rudy, 2019).

In using the words ‘fashioning architecture’, this study critiques the limitations of architecture as buildings and fashion as clothing. In this study, ‘fashion’ refers to the making or designing something and ‘architecture’ as a collection of buildings and clothing designed for the body.

In the essay ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, art theorist Rosalind Kraus (1979) identifies three disciplines in the built environment: sculpture, architecture, and landscape. She questions the spaces between the identified disciplines and describes how the spaces were claimed as sculptures. Kraus argues that sculpture is something that is simultaneously neither architecture nor landscape. The essay reconstructs the foundations of what art practices were and were not and what the foundations of art practices could become. Kraus (1979) redefines the boundaries of the mentioned disciplines then claims that spaces that are difficult to classify as architecture or landscape can be sculptures. This study also redefines boundaries between clothing design and building design by arguing that the building and clothing practices are a collection of architecture, thus claiming territories that are occupied by both or neither discipline.

Venn diagram demonstrating the interchanges between clothing and buildings.

Figure 10: Venn Diagrams (Author, 2021). 23