PRIMA PAGINA
Mnemonic, -adj. That which helps memory, a short rhyme or phrase, or other mental technique that helps to ease memorizing an information (from the Greek mnemonike (tekhne), «the art of remembering».
I was walking rapidly through the Venetian streets and squares, heading towards the pavilions of the Venice Architecture Biennale (the actual purpose of my trip), admiring the architecture on the run, as I had felt, with every minute that passed by, the growing flow of my own curiosity, and then I stopped. I had arrived among the stalls of an antiques market and my view had been drawn by a pile of old clothes of which I distinguished a composition of colours and geometric patterns that I found fascinating. I lost a few tens of minutes admiring the cut and feeling their texture, which continued to fascinate me beyond the gates of the Arsenale. I found myself drawn into a memory game where the clothes seen shortly before (at the fair) overlapped some of the architectural images on which I was now trying to focus my attention. I entered the game, taking my own route in which the architectural objects were becoming mnemonic apparitions of the garment I had seen earlier. If I had earlier found architectural forms and proportions among the folds of those clothes, the fluidity of a built form was now almost instantly bringing to my mind the image of a vaporous dress.
Throughout his practice, the architect is constantly forced to feel and think the space from a different perspective than that of his formation as an architect. Fashion is an area that gives him this opportunity. If Adolf Loos himself asserted in the 20s that «clothes are nothing but a primary form of shelter», 60 years later, Japanese designers Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto were introducing a series of new forms in fashion, forms that questioned the way beauty and femininity were perceived in those times, introducing a conceptual thinking regarding the human body. The two designers presented their creations for the first time during the pret-a-porter parades which took place in Paris in April 1981. The clothes were oversized, often asymmetrical, black, perforated, or with intentionally unfinished edges. All this contrasted sharply with the fashion of those times, when clothes were designed in an elegant style and were tailored immaculately in order to perfectly fit the body.
The dynamic exchange of ideas which begins to take place between fashion and architecture creates new possibilities and new directions of development for both disciplines. Architecture gains transparency and fluidity of form, while fashion has a structural rather than decorative approach on garments which increasingly take into account, not only form, but a certain language or a certain expressiveness of the human body. Both architecture and fashion involve an exercise of remembering the experience of a body, absent from the actual act of creation – the human body.
The act of transferring some of the organics and fluidity of clothing creation into those forms that make up a building, brings architecture closer to the human body. In some cases, even the sense of belonging to that space becomes more profound, because architecture, like the clothes, should be seen from the outside and felt from the inside.
(Translation: Elena Smeianu, Ionut Butu)