Party Dress by Dana Karwas and Karla Karwas is a roving performance that is part living architecture: part monumental fashion. It functions as a pavilion worn exclusively by five women that seamlessly injects architecture into fashion by using the body as space.
The dress begins as a shared, bustled garment that gradually unfolds to create a temporary, inhabitable structure. Each seam, each dress, and each body are interconnected by a single, amorphous surface of flowing material.
With room for spectators beneath the fabric, Party Dress flirts with traditional concepts of public and private space while adding sparkling wit to the conversation between fashion and architecture. Party Dress works across multiple scales and environments, unraveling conventional notions of space, materiality, and temporality.
Party Dress is part of seamless v.3 fashion show at the Boston Museum of Science on January 30, 2008 at 8pm.
Via Networked Performance
Here’s an interesting wind powered streetlight from the Panasonic Center in Tokyo that I found on hyperexperience blog run by Leonardo Bonanni of MediaLab. I’m a big fan of using these Vertical Axis Wind Turbines for integrating into urban skylines when traditional propellers often seem too dramatic.
This seems to have spread all over the design and architecture blogs. Cloud by Troika is a beautiful object and really superb piece of engineering, especially with its mix of high tech digital control and nostalgic low tech actuation.
There’s a nice video here from youtube and Chris O’Shea has some details on pixelsumo blog which includes some behind the scenes images of the custom software used on the project.
Shaun Murray’s projects are harbingers for a meaningful ecological (both machinic and natural) audit of specific sites and the development of a series of tactics and protocols that can deliver to architects a full understanding of their sites and of the agents, provocateurs, cybernetic systems and disparate observers and drifters that influence and use them in some way.
Modern architecture has currently failed to provide architects with these now very necessary tools for them to create architectures that are fully in tune with the wide gamut of artificial and natural ecological conditions. For those of us interested in the architecture for the new cyberised, biomachined inhabitants of the twenty-first century Murray’s research and propositions are a beacon in a still dark landscape of the future.
Murray has not only helped to develop this interesting and original approach to architecture and ecology (the subject of a Phd) but he has also developed various methods of representing architecture. Like any architect which deals explicitly with the ravages of time; the choreography of sudden and not so sudden shifts in geography and geometry have to be charted. Murray has needed to generate a draughting style that facilitates and explains his ideas.
A New Website has been launched at Bartlett School of Architecture presenting selected members of AVATAR (the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Laboratory). AVATAR is conceived as a cross unit research group and agenda that explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain, its augmentation and symbiosis. Over recent years AVATAR has grown into an international research collaborative centre with members including Neil Spiller, Bob Sheil, Shaun Murray, Nic Clear, Marjan Colletti & Marcos Cruz.
Michael Wihart explored how ecologies of small machines made of nanotechnological and biotechnological elements might be able to swarm together to create architectural space and developed notions of how these spaces might reconfigure over time. Here’s some images of his work and some thoughts of his on the issues he raises.
“The decadence and redundancy of the integrity of architectural thinking needs to be constantly questioned in order to reveal if architecture can be a source for the sentimental titillation. The embarrassing meanders of architecture into the challenge of the feasibility must be extended into the poetry of spatial mediation. the process of designing can no longer be solely functional and operational. The creation of an architecture which is embedded in the mythical knowledge of the future enables us to extend the sentiment of in-habitation into the realm of co-existence.”
“Certainly this vision can be engaged to fulfil the concupiscence of a few heroic models but the question if this architecture can establish a casing of affirmative cultural emergence which is the source and site for the engagement of individuals with the fate of their co-habitants, is a different one. Architecture therefore stands for the manifestation of the ambivalence of the transience and the after-effect of the notion of co-existence. But when architects by themselves abandon and forget to realise fantasies which have always already been lost in the dawn of the socialisation, where then will we find the sites for the staging of our sentiments?”
