Materiality and Ornament - Paris

rab paris 07

roshelle a born

herzog & de meuron national stadium

jean nouvel louvre museum hussein chalayn wi00

hussein chalayan sp08

yeohlee teng sp/su06

alexander mcqueen fa/wi07

Last summer abroad, I spent a lot of time in art galleries and museums looking at art and fashion exhibits, and going into high end boutiques to get a glimpse of the upcoming season’s fashion designs. The coursework that summer had us look critically at the street level of the urban environment, and how the materiality of the facades in Paris and Italy functioned at street level in contrast to the urban environments of Germany and Switzerland. The following January in India solidified my interest in relating to the human scale at the street level, the sensory engagement of our environments, and fashion via the beautiful textiles produced in India. The following booklet serves as an entry point of research into these interests, diagrammatically and textually.

li

nearity

conceal

reveal

phenomena

al transparency

literal

perspectiv

ve

order v. nature

materiality

build up

break down

pur interior

rity exterior

void

solid

This glossy text targeted to those interested in innovative fashion and design (and pretty pictures) in an imagery-based catalogue of designs that “dress for the urban environment�, including the city in transit, the gaze, as well as practicality, comfort and protection. In the introduction, Supermodern is defined. Supermodern space is the interstitial, transitional space, or non-places found in roads, railways, airports or streets. The Supermodern condition is described as the overabundance of space, of information and of individualization. Supermodern Clothing puts an emphasis on the physical aspect of clothing (over the psychological and social aspects), and needs to achieve a balance between selfsufficiency and interconnectivity. These features are evident in high performance sportswear, military dress and wearable electronics. Sections in the text are: Functionality, Modular Systems, Mobility, Shelter, Protection, Urban Camouflage, Supermodernity in Detail, and an interview with Lucy Orta.

AUTHOR NAME Bolton, Andrew.

TITLE The Supermodern Wardrobe.

PUBLISHER V&A Publications,

LOCATION London YEAR 2004 ********************************* *********************************

This text accompanies the 2006 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles that covered 40 architects and fashion designers from the U.S., Europe and Japan from 1980 to the present. Many of the fashion designers and architects covered in the other texts are once again covered in this exhibition catalog, including fashion designers Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen, Narciso Rodriguez, Yeohlee Teng and architects Zaha Hadid, Herzog & deMeuron, OMA/ Rem Koolhaas. This exhibition notes the common ground between architecture and fashion, such as the human body as a basis of design, and of space, volume and movement, to suggest areas for potential growth. The text begins with a few essays on the creative processes and deconstruction, but a majority of the tome focuses on the designers, a short bio, and selected images of their work.

AUTHOR NAME Hodge, Brooke and Patricia Mears.

TITLE Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture.

PUBLISHER Thames & Hudson,

LOCATION London: YEAR 2006. ********************************* *********************************

Harold Koda is the Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute at the MOMA who created this exhibition for those interested in fashion, anthropology and body imagery across time and culture. The introduction provides a history of the ideals of beauty that persisted or shifted across time and culture. Each chapter covers a major part of the body: neck and shoulders, chest, waist, hips and feet. Many of the more modern designers present in The Fashion of Architecture are featured here, including: Alexander McQueen, Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, and Thierry Mugler. It may be of interest to study the architectural aspects of their design in the other texts, and then how this relates to the multitude of meanings and intentions for the variations from the normative naked body in contemporary fashion design focused on the Extreme Beauty exhibition.

AUTHOR NAME Koda, Harold.

TITLE Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed.

PUBLISHER The Metropolitan Museum of Art

LOCATION New York YEAR 2001 ********************************* GT 503.K63 2001 *********************************

In Loos’ essay he describes dress as the most basic shelter, and prescribes that all architects must first engage with textiles as a method of grasping the meanings and aesthetics of dwelling.

Only after an architect has worked with textiles can they move on to the built form, employing the principles used in the creation of textiles.

AUTHOR NAME Loos, Adolf.

ARTICLE TITLE “The Principle of Cladding.”

COLLECTION Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897-1900.

PUBLISHER The MIT Press:

LOCATION Cambridge, Massachusetts, YEAR 1987 PAGES 66-69 ********************************* *********************************

This text provides a series of case studies intended for architects that describe the affects and materials that allow architecture to connect with culture. The introduction begins by distinguishing between decoration and ornament. Decoration is contingent and produces communication and resemblance (aligned with fashion.) Ornament is necessary and intrinsically linked to architectural affects and resonance (aligned with clothing.) The way in which the authors describe ornament as necessary for affect and sensation is similar to the way in which Juhani Pallasma, in The Eyes of the Skin decries modernism and its ocularcentric nature. Following, each case is given 4 pages: The first spread describes the affect, while the second spread describes the materials used to construct these affects via sectional perspectives. This text provides a lot of architectural information succinctly and graphically, capturing of the multitude ways in which architecture can engage (something that Pallasma begins to do textually in her essay).

AUTHOR NAME Moussavi, Farshid, and Michael Kubo.

TITLE The Function of Ornament.

PUBLISHER Harvard Univ. Graduate School of Design:

LOCATION Harvard, YEAR 2006. ********************************* NA 3320.F86X 2006 *********************************

Pallasma’s polemic was created as a lecture for students and now as a work respected by both architects and academicians. The text is organized in two parts, the first essay serves as a background and the second is instructive in the ways in which architects can reengage. The first essay gives an overview of the development of our modern day occularcentric culture that stems from the ideals of modern design to the over-use of computers in architectural design today, and how this strips our everyday experiences of sensory engagement. Pallasma gives architectural, art and film examples for this phenomenon.

In the second essay, Pallasma lays a framework to begin thinking about a multi-sensory approach to architecture that fosters integration and engagement. This aligns with the ideas behind The Function of Ornament but takes an interdisciplinary theory-based approach.

AUTHOR NAME Pallasma, Juhani.

TITLE The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Polemics).

PUBLISHER John Wiley and Sons

LOCATION

YEAR 1996 ********************************* *********************************

Bradley Quinn is an author and journalist also wrote Techno Fashion and other esoteric fashion/ style based publications. This text is intended for designers or academics interested in a futuristic, predominantly textual, description of the relationship between fashion and architecture. The text emphasizes the ways in which architecture has aesthetically and technologically influenced fashion via theoretical and high tech fashion design examples. The chapter titles and sub-topics (Place and Non-place, Mapping Fashion Space, Surveillance and Visuality, to name a few) suggest a lot more in the way of architectural and spatial evaluations than is actually covered in the text.

Further research could include fleshing out some of these topics from an architectural standpoint.

AUTHOR NAME Quinn, Bradley.

TITLE The Fashion of Architecture.

PUBLISHER Berg Publishers: LOCATION Oxford, YEAR 2003. ********************************* *********************************

Bradley Quinn, also the author of The Fashion of Architecture, on the integration of fashion and technology. The introduction covers, and perhaps overemphasizes, the influence of space suits and Star Trek on our apparel. Many of the artists covered in The Fashion of Architecture, Extreme Beauty, and The Supermodern Wardrobe are again covered in this text. Topics include innovative materials and technologies, transformables (or what Andrew Bolton would refer to as modularity), body image and surveillance, providing many cross-references between this text and the other fashion-related texts cited. Of particular interest in the section on Hussien Chalayan, explaining how he explores the extent to which fashion and interiors and architecture can be integrated into a single design.

AUTHOR NAME Quinn, Bradley.

TITLE Techno Fashion.

PUBLISHER Berg Publishers: LOCATION Oxford, YEAR 2002. ********************************* *********************************

This text, intended for art/architectural historians and theorists, challenges the architectural history of the 20th century by questioning the neutrality, purity and nakedness of the modern white wall. Modernism advanced the white wall as a symbol of stripping off the fashion and decoration of previous times; however, Wigley emphasizes the loadedness of the white wall in the sense that it is a layer and a fashion in itself and cannot be considered naked. The first chapter contributes to the bibliography in that it requests that “modern” architects clothe their buildings according to the terms of “modern” times. This text has parallels with Pallasma’s Eyes of the Skin in that it attempts to expose the negative influence that modernism has had on contemporary architecture. In describing the shortfalls of modern discourse on the white wall,Wigley highlights the layers of paint, the necessity for youth, and the perceived nakedness of the building, subjects which are also covered in the texts that focus predominantly on fashion.

AUTHOR NAME Wigley, Mark.

TITLE White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture.

PUBLISHER The MIT Press: LOCATION Cambridge, Massachusetts, YEAR 1995. ********************************* NA 3485.W54 1995 *********************************