Floppy Logic

Fashion and textile design have developed techniques to deal with form, structure, and material simultaneously as a way to disguise, enhance or exaggerate the form of the body. Fashion designers such as Rei Kawakubo, Hussein Chalayan, and Iris Van Herpen have designed garments that morph the complex set of forms that is the body. Architecture also deals with form and one can say that our job as architects is to translate ideas into form and form into ideas. Architects also have techniques used to develop ideas into space, but more and more these ideas are being constrained by systems and rules. This studio will look at fashion and textile design to unearth the highly developed techniques used to create form without the complexity of dealing with the body. We will adapt and develop these techniques for architecture working through scale, pattern, intricacy, material and form. Using the experiments to think about ideas as they relate to space. Students will undertake digital and physical model experimentation as a way to translate the fashion and textile techniques into architecture and then use this knowledge to develop space.

The first half of semester will be highly experimental and the second half will look to developing the ideas generated in the first half into architectural propositions with a site and simple program. This program could be a pavilion, a house, an art gallery, a commercial building and will be driven by what you produce in the experimental stage of the studio.