Abstracts Geography

Fashion & Architecture

by Meredith Miller

Architectural theory has illuminated the inherently connected relationship between fashion and architecture. Both disciplines shelter the body, react to spatial volume, rely on a process, and take a work of creativity from its two-dimensional concept into a three-dimensional reality. They affect and are effected by current economies, politics, and cultural situations while concurrently operating outside of them at the same time. Through these similarities a disparity is revealed. Beyond a difference in scale, fashion endures in an ephemeral landscape grasping for the next innovation, rejecting past notions, altering perspective every few months. Architecture produces at a slower rate establishing a permanence and solidity in volume that is free from defined intervals of creative development and exhibition. It reacts to seasons defined by the climate rather than the fashionable elite. Designing architecture for fashion today, utilizing this temporal discrepancy, will reach beyond the surface correlations of the disciplines and speak to the experiential quality of a space transitioning through the transient perceptions of time. Architecture will become more than a space for a community to occupy but it will retain an intangible quality, a mindset reflective of the organization it symbolizes. To apply this methodology, an algorithm and process for an architecture for fashion will be designed, generating spaces for making, exhibiting, and archiving as a representation of fashion. Experiential architecture promoting perspective beyond surface similarity will establish a dynamic environment intermediating between fashion and architecture for a fashion of architecture. Advisors/Committee Members: Greinacher, Udo (Committee Chair).