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fashion II architecture
fall 2018





What is it to be a body in space? The five senses of the body register surroundings. Emotions and pheromones extend outward temporally and chemically. Encounters with objects and others orient the body to the world relationally. Echoes of events and encounters that came before - a trail of movements, memory, and conditioning - connect the body to space palimpsistically and socially. But we are not simply bodies in space. Our ontologies are inexorably entangled with our epistemologies and our ethical groundings, which is to say that we are more than somatic sacks.



above: a set of prosthetics that isolate different body parts to restrict and restrain movement (from top left: shoulder restraint, leg brace, leg brace unfolded, plaster sock, wrist restraint, wrist restraint unbound)




Oscillating between fashion and architecture, this project explores the dimensions of inhabitation through explorations of body notation, the making of “fashion,” or near-body architecture, and finally, explores a house for a person and their alter ego.



drawing method using the entire body, half restricted by prosthetics, the other half moving freely


Who are we, where are we, and where are we going? This project questions orientations in space (positions, stances, balances, personalities, sexualities, ideologies, sociologies) through the creation of body language (somatic semiotics) in order to challenge what we think of a body in space, particularly traditional notions of the ideal body, and to challenge the totalizing and patriarchal notion that spoken language can perfectly reflect experience (Haraway, 52). Architecture traditionally centers its ergonomics and dimensions on the male body, the Vitruvian man (Agrest). How do we begin to transgress the naturalization of oppression and erasure of the “other” that this privileging of specifically male bodies allows?



defamiliarization of space within a piece of plaster fashion

above: a drawn collage of defamiliarized plaster fashion


above: house for Amelia and her alter ego, Ophelia

Using fashion, something often characterized as holding marginal socio-political weight, and peering through the deviant and abject lens of the Carnivale, this project uses what is on the periphery to research the dimensions of inhabitation, the multiplicity of identity and the mediation of space through explorations of body language made physical in order to dismantle the historically constituted female body. Afterall, body-image and body language are fundamental to world-view and to the creation of a new political language (Haraway, 53). Here, body language is a tool for communication, manifested in scarves, plaster, and cheese cloths. Here, experience is placed before spoken language.



final fashion piece. a hybridization of Amelia’s and Ophelia’s sartorial preferences.