Economy, Quality, and Fit: Sewing at Office dA
All operations in the textile arts seek to transform raw mate- rials with the appropriate properties into products, whose common features are great pliancy and considerable absolute strength, sometimes serving in threaded and banded forms as binding and fastenings, sometimes used as pliant surfaces to cover, to hold, to dress, to enclose … Gottfried Semper,The Textile Art
Hansy Luz Better S ewing, through its various techniques and by virtue of the body it is tailored to fit, resists mass production, commodification and homogeneity. The art of sewing is self- indulgent, labor intensive, and thereby excluded from the material processes of industrial pro- duction. The stitch exposes labor; the value of textile art lies precisely in the human labor required to craft the product, making it anti- thetical to the logic of mass production and wholesale consumerism. As the construction industry conforms to its internal logic of infla - tion and recession, based on the availability of labor and materials, historically the sewing industry has proven itself to be contracyclical to major economic trends 1 . Throughout history, sewing has been perceived as an alternative means of creating higher qual- ity clothing. Off the shelf, ready to wear gar- ments are perceived by those who sew as being of lesser quality in detail and aesthetics. The sewer reconfigures garments to personal - ize the expression of each piece. Office dA collapses the craft of sewing with the logic of prét-â-porter through a form of architectural tailoring that allows for a flexibility and mutabil - ity of materials which avoid classification by type. Blending techniques of customization with computer-aided manufacturing, they par- ticipate as ‘prosumers’ in the ‘becoming’ of a product -- avoiding commodification by simul - taneously producing and consuming economic goods and services. The tailor’s insistence upon quality resists the numb consumption of off the shelf products. Of fice dA’s domestic operation on aluminum panels and woven rope employs the analogy of home sewing towards contemporary archi- tectural craft. To domesticate, in this sense, is to operate on the ready made material and transform it into a product attuned to both the human scale and to a tactile experience of the material.
Museum of Modern Art Waterfall
1 Sherry Schofield-Tomschin’s article ‘Home Sewing: Moti- vational Changes in Twentieth Century’, in The Culture of Sewing by Barabara Burman, Oxford: New York, c.1999, describes how the sewing industry does well when other industries are in a recession, and is contra-cycli- cal to major industry trends.
Office dA L ’opération domestique d’Office dA en matière de pan - neaux d’aluminium et de cordes tissées applique l’analogie de la couture-maison au métier de l’architecture contemporaine. Le
fait de domestiquer, en ce sens, implique d’avoir à travailler avec du matériel prêt à l’usage et de le transformer en un matériel adapté tant à l’échelle humaine qu’à l’expérience tactile du matériel.
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O n S ite review
S ewing
I ssue 8 2002
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