Sensorial Spaces, Complex Structures, Flexible Textiles: Farshid Moussavi @ the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale

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While exploring the works at the 13th Architecture International Exhibition in Venice I identified themes and issues that can be employed as starting points for researches into art, architecture and fashion and that we will hopefully explore in depth in future posts. I have seen quite a few interesting projects and installations that could also be immediately applied to fashion. One of them was the video installation "Architecture and Affects" by Farshid Moussavi.

The architect projected on the walls of one of the rooms in the Arsenale different textures and images of buildings focusing on various themes, among the others quilting, arching, enclosure, tenting, rotundity, irregularity, axiality, cristallinity, diamonding, cruciformity, spiralling, centrality, exclusion, orthogonality, granularity, scalloping, asymmetry, visibility, verticality and exposure.

Some of these studies are inspired by Moussavi's new volume The Function of Style that will be published soon (follow up to the previous works The Function of Ornament, 2006, and The Function of Form, 2009)

“Farshid Moussavi's work proposes that the shared meanings that once grounded architecture's public reception have disappeared”, state the installation notes. “Contemporary culture is now so fragmented that meanings are no longer shared values and architecture with intended meanings must be replaced by an architecture that acts on the senses. Her installation uses projection to create a space that is as sensorially immersive as the buildings she imagines. The content is based on a series of books by Moussavi developed in conjunction with her teachings at Harvard which proposes a new taxonomy of architectural history stripping works of architecture of their origins of providing 'intended meanings', and instead categorising them in terms of their 'affects' on the observer.”

The installation mainly plays with the idea of sensorially immersive spaces with images taken from Moussavi's studies, but I found it also very inspiring from a textural point of view. I did a brief video of the installation and, though it doesn't make it any justice, it shows how many constantly changing textures and images Moussavi included in just a few minutes. Could this morphing effect be replicated in fashion and would it be possible to create more than just one texture in the same garment? In which way? Anybody up for the challenge?