Architecture and sewing Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Robert Barnstone
B y tying architecture and sewing together in this issue of On|Site magazine, we intended to bring into focus a relationship we believe lies at the silent core of architectural design practice, a relationship that is always present but rarely discussed or highlighted as the subject of discourse. Gottfried Semper identified textiles as a primordial art (Urkunst) that serves as a source for architectural types and analogies. But Semper was mostly concerned with notions of cover and binding rather than full range of potential real and metaphoric associations. In his writing, cover refers to the thing unifying a collective by wrapping it from the outside; binding refers to the action of joining disparate parts, traditionally in a sewn joint. Semper pointed to costumes and cladding, elements of the cover, as the two historical ways textiles affected architectural design. By costumes Semper literally understood the clothes people wear, or materials, and their aesthetic relation to contemporane- ous buildings while by cladding he meant the clothes that buildings wear! We believe that Semper was ahead of his time in foreseeing the potential in the textile arts, or sewing, for architectural analogies. Today the analogies go farther and, perhaps, deeper but certainly include Semper’s categories. We understand sewing to refer to constructive, compositional, ordering, and conceptual techniques, and to metaphors for urban, landscape and building design at the spatial, material, and constructive levels. A metaphor is a word that transfers or carries meaning over from one object to another; suggesting a connection between two dissimilar things or two objects not usually associated together. Analogy, on the other hand, is a way to reveal the similar aspects of two objects that are other- wise dissimilar. Sewing therefore is both analogous to some aspects of architectural practice and a metaphor for others. The essays in this issue sometimes examine sewing as metaphor, other times as analogy. Sewing itself is a way of connecting two things, usually pieces of fabric, along a seam. Sometimes the seam joins two similar entities and sometimes it joins two very different ones — for example, a patchwork quilt is made of many pieces of different fabric, while a shirt is made from several pieces of the same fabric. Sewing can suggest any number of interpretations depending on the context -- from the city to landscape, from individual buildings to instal- lation pieces and construction methods. At the urban scale, sewing can suggest a strategy for reading urban conditions as disparate objects stitched together at seams. The seams might be visible elements such as streets, blocks, and landscape or invisible ones such as planning zones and neighborhoods. Sewing can suggest similar readings at the scale of landscape, especially in an urban setting, or it can propose a strategy for inserting landscape elements into the built environment. Gottfried Semper,‘Prospectus: Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts or Practical Aesthetics (1859)’. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings. Trans. Harry Francis Malgrave and Wolfgang Hermann. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989) p. 175. E n reliant l’architecture et en cousant ce numéro de la revue
Arcitecture and sewing in action with techniques of pneumatic construction —sewing building components together, along with complex spatial layering —sewing space, in a third-year design studio project at Washington State University. Here we are working with the new wood/plastic composite materials being developed at the university. The wood/plastic was donated by Louisiana Pacific. The projects were part of an exhibition here at the university -- they are large scale, on average 6 feet high by 8 feet wide.
compositionnelles, d’ordonnancement et conceptu- elles, qu’aux métaphores de la conception urbaine, de paysage et de la conception d’immeubles à des niveaux spatiaux, matériels et constructifs. Le fait de coudre peut insinuer un nombre d’interprétations, selon le contexte – de la ville au paysage, d’immeubles individuels aux pièces d’installations et aux méthodes de construction. À
l’échelle urbaine, le fait de coudre peut avoir trait à une stratégie ser- vant à interpréter les conditions urbaines comme objets disparates cousus les uns aux autres aux cou- tures. Les coutures comme telles peuvent paraître comme étant vis- ibles, notamment en tant que rues, blocs et paysages, ou comme étant invisibles, notamment en tant que zones de planification et voisin - ages. Le fait de coudre peut aussi porter à des interprétations sem-
blables à l’échelle du paysage, surtout en milieu urbain, ou à une stratégie visant à insérer des éléments du paysage dans l’environnement de construction. Cette collection d’essais présentés dans ce présent doc- ument n’est pas un examen compréhensif de la couture et de l’architecture, mais elle représente plutôt une introduc- tion aux possibilités intrinsèques à ce sujet.
OnSite, nous faisons une mise au point sur la relation qui se trouve au centre silencieux de la pratique de conception architecturale, une relation qui est toujours présente mais qui fait rarement l’objet d’une discussion ou d’une mise en évidence comme sujet de dis- cours. Le terme « coudre » a trait tant aux techniques constructives,
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O n S ite review
S ewing
I ssue 8 2002
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