At last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, architecture firm Aranda\Lasch presented together with the Island Planning Corporation, a collection of pieces entitled "Modern Primitives" inspired by 17th century mathematician Johannes Kepler and by researches into quasi-crystals.
The project consisted in expanded polystyrene foam mineral-shaped furnishings coated with Line-X, a spray-on truck bed coating.
Each piece was built from small tetrahedron-shaped fragments designed using 3-D software.
Put together one on top of the other with adhesive, the small pieces created larger aggregates that could be used to sit on or lean against.
The second phase of Aranda\Lasch’s project was developed in December at Design Miami: this time the pieces were integrated in a 5-day performance and also used for a collaboration with Fendi.
The latter consisted in custom hand-made leather coverings for some of the Aranda\Lasch furniture pieces, and in an innovative Japanese handmade fabric called Washi with prints inspired by Aranda\Lasch’s tetrahedrons used for a limited edition scarf and for the lining of a Peekaboo bag.
The collaboration was essentially based on combining technology with craftsmanship and tradition, the essence of quite a few art projects launched by the Fendi fashion house in the last few years.
Aranda\Lasch are currently developing a 3-D iPhone/iPad app that will allow users to build shapes with their series of tetrahedrons, a very interesting idea not only for people who are into fashion and interior design, but also for film-makers and set designers (think about Aranda\Lasch’s tetrahedrons employed to create futuristic digital landscapes - if you are interested in such landscapes and in the relationships between scientific and technical change and the transformations of architecture and cities, check out the volume Digital Culture in Architecture by Antoine Picon...).
In a previous post last year I focused on the possibilities and applications of triangles and tetrahedrons in fashion. Such geometrical figures will apparently be very fashionable this year.
Japanese menswear label Molfic’s Spring/Summer 2011 collection features for example quite a few garments - comprising shorts and tops - with textured fabrics embossed with triangular patterns.
Somarta's Tamae Hirokawa included in her collection ethereal white or pale blue billowing dresses and tops with origami motifs and patterns around the shoulder area or the breasts.
The best experiment regarding the incorporation of triangles and tetrahedrons into fashion designs and the transformation of 2-D shapes into 3-D motifs, remains the one carried out by Issey Miyake and his Reality Lab team.
The latter comprises a group of designers plus textile engineer Manabu Kikuchi and pattern engineer Sachinko Yamamoto.
Entitled “132 5. Issey Miyake”, the project - heavily relying on science and mathematics - was inspired by a conversation with computer scientist Jun Mitani, Associate Professor at the Graduate School of System and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba.
Moving from Dr. Mitani’s three-dimensional paper models created from flat materials and based on mathematical methods, Miyake and his team designed foldable three-dimensional structures.
The principle was transferred to a collection of ten basic pieces of clothing – including shirts, skirts, trousers and dresses – that, when folded, look like squares or flat geometrical figures.
When one picks the top of the folded square and pulls it, the 2-D origami-style piece expands, revealing amazing three-dimensional shapes.
The name of the project, “132 5.”, has some mathematical connections: “1” refers to a single piece of cloth; “3” to its three-dimensional shape; “2” relates to the two-dimensional shape in which the piece of clothing can be folded and “5” to the time it takes to a person to actually put the foldable form on and to the multiple ways each garment can be worn.
All the pieces are made in a polyester fibre generated by Teijin Limited from chemical recycling by pulverizing, melting and spinning threads out of polyethylene terephthalate.
The pieces were exhibited at the “Reality Lab” event at the 21_21 Design Sight cultural centre in Tokyo last year next to the work of photographers, scientists and a planetary physicist (the sort of clever and desirable collaboration between very different forces that I hope we will see happening even more frequently this year).
The collection can currently be admired at the Barbican’s exhibition “Future Beauty – 30 Years of Japanese Fashion” (until 6th February – more about it in a future post; don’t miss it if you are in London).
The research behind this collection makes me think about Buckminster Fuller's concept of Synergetics, intended as the empirical study of systems in transformation, embracing various scientific and philosophical disciplines, also tetrahedral and close-packed-sphere geometries.
I hope the Autumn/Winter 2011 collections that will be presented in a few weeks' time in the main fashion capitals will display a deeper research and exploration of disciplines such as geometry, architecture and mathematics. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to take fashion to a new and higher level through such disciplines rather than splashing out money on the umpteenth and useless catwalk show?
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Posted by: missouri architecture | March 08, 2013 at 12:05 PM