Journey to the Past - Thesis "Defense" - Self-Reflecting, Chapter 0003

It is a constant struggle as an artist to fight burnout, depression, despair, and maintain creativity. I would like to pause a moment to thank Character.AI for existing at all, because it has brought me back from quite a moment of self-destruction that I am fascinated to discuss. I have never entertained the idea that I might even be a decent writer until I sat down to "play" with the AI of CharacterAI. It seems to be a brilliant website to cause people to self-reflect and grow.

I wish to establish a baseline of who I was at the time of my tutelage and compare her to the me in the maintenant. The time in my life when I most deeply valued and was excited about Architecture, the core path I thought I was meant for. Maybe in reflecting on my flash card notes, which I nervously held in my hands at the time, desperate to graduate, will I be able to reconcile with my past and present self and decide if it is the career I want. The following is the exact presentation I made of my thesis to the jury, what is commonly known as the "defense" of one's thesis. It is commonly viewed of as one's raison d'etre, and answers for how a graduate student has spent the past year of their schooling, and their final year in graduate school to receive their degree. A successful pass meant that I would receive my Master's of Architecture. I passed. The following words secured my passing of graduate school:

My thesis is called the third skin. I have always had a very close relationship with the making of clothing and my second love architecture, so this for me has been a year of weaving and melding together my two favorite things in the world. My thesis is actually a series of studies and by the end of it I found that when I pieced things together there were about 5 different sections that melded. When I compare and contrast architecture and clothing, the three things I kept coming back to, that happen on multiple scales, but they all deal with sheltering, identity and molding space and body. Some sort of mass, so whether you view of space as a mass or as a void, both architecture and clothing mold that. Architecture and clothing have always had a close relationship with humanity as you can see in this CHART. [I point to the 6' tall chart of clothing throughout time and history I made in consequential order] Whether you can look at this chart of clothing and also think of the architecture of the time period you can see ties to values, maybe innovations in technology, but the way of making clothing and architecture has always had a link. You can see it more obviously in these two comparison images. The 1700s, days of Marie Antoinette and Rococo architecture, but it is not just a Western thing. Initially I suspected that it was only something that happened in the [west, but] you can also see it in Japanese culture. For example, This is a woman in a kimono and the kimono pattern is very geometric. A pattern is essentially a template for the shapes clothing are when rolled out flat. the kimono pattern and the laying of the tatami mats. Traditional homes in Japan always featured a woven straw floor set up in modules to create different sized spaces. Each mat fits perfectly end to end to create a perfect square or rectangle. Bolts of fabric for traditional kimonos are not sold per yard as they are in the west. They are bought by full bolts, because kimono bolts are perfectly measured so each garment section fits perfectly within a module, a part of a perfect larger rectangle. A very fitted garment however has a much more complex pattern as can be seen in the pattern piece for modern clothing. Japanese clothing is made and pieced together, however, in a much more measured and precise way in terms of preventing material waste and maintaining meticulous balance. Even in the floor plan of the tea house when juxtaposed next to a kimono pattern is it obvious to see the visual connection between the making and wearing and molding of space.

Architecture and clothing have a continual feedback loop. I think that architecture has a stronger pull than clothing because architecture has a permanence that clothing does not. Because clothing has the ability to wear and change day in and out and we interact with [it] so much that it gets worn out quickly. Architecture eventually degrades after several decades, maybe millennia, but in the end is what humanity interacts with most. Historians look at architecture and clothing the most because that is the most telling of our way of life. Whenever I started to deconstruct clothing, I started to really look at things like the way things were woven, the way they were cut and pieced together, but my very first study that I was interested in is color. You can just take once glance at my thesis and see that it is a burst of color. Color for me is something that always attracts the eye and keeps it moving. [This is a reference to DIANA VREELAND's DOCUMENTARY, "The Eye Must Move]. Color really has a pretty good amount of hierarchy. So I abstracted the use of color and treated it as my site. I began my process by painting Plexiglass with acrylic ink and allowing the drips of paint to flow across the canvas to create different senses of scale and blew onto the pooling droplets to continue the language on a smaller scale where the paint had grown too viscous to continue on its own. I worked within the created senses of scale and saw what my eye was drawn to. I akin this color element as a foreign object found in a landscape and the final model that came out of this collection of studies was this plaster piece where I imagined the landscape as this soft draped motion much in the same way that fabric has this sort of softness to it and allowed the color to be the architecture that molds the softness of it, much in the same way that we mold the softness of clothing to create different bodies and silhouettes. So when you look back at the time period you can see what the ideal beauty was. You can see that the hips were more important on a woman then or perhaps mobility for men during the renaissance, but those styles are no longer valued in our current social context, where shorts are considered the clothing of boys. I hardly ever see men wearing shorts except in the cases of recreational activities. I was also interested in play between different materials in the way they draped and were moulded. There are two different schools for clothing. You can either have hyperconstructed clothing which is usually what you see in very fitted suits, or something very fluid which is called draped clothing. Draped clothing is what I wanted to study first so I started to drape these materials over the plexiglass color relics and seeing what the color brought to the table. As you see I started to create my own skin systems which are very primitive at this stage, but the next study I conducted developed this system a little more in a textile study.

Whenever I started to look into these studies, I was particularly inspired by a quote by Annie Albers, who is actually a textile artist. Initially I suspected she was an architect but I was mistaken. “Surface quality of material, Matiere, being mainly a quality of appearance, and is therefore a medium of the artist. Whilst Quality of inner structure above all a matter of function and therefore the concern of a scientist and engineer. Sometimes material surface together with material structure are the main components of a work. In textile works, for instance, and specifically in weaving, or on another scale, in the works of architecture.” So even this textile artist was looking at her textiles in a very spatial way. I started to look at things in a more tactile way. I am usually someone concerned with form, so I was truly forcing myself to look at things a little more in depth. After I started to play with these different connections, I started to try and apply it to different patterns. I wanted to create the softness in these patterns and maintain the structure in it. I was creating volume in this [Point to lasercut small textile, specifically shaped in such a way to have experimentally tested the physical properties of the fabric itself] piece and I was pleating the material. I deconstructed a seam to look at the parts of the stitch as can be seen in this diagram [Bias loom STITCH DIAGRAM]. There is a pinched section that grips the material, which I translated into a pinching clamp in this textile piece. And the thread that weaves in and out of it. In observing the different scales of the stitch, I decided to separate each portion of the stitch into its own job as holder and fixed. Once the stitch was deconstructed I created these connecting pieces to create more [tectonic] textiles with spatial qualities. Stitching is like the super glue or cement to me. You just force it in there and I wanted to look at fabric construction in a different way to find new ways of making. After I studied a couple possibilities for making connections, I looked at fabric as a self-sufficient entity and took a close look at fabric on the microscale. This image WEAVE [Point to the image of a cross-section of a loom to demonstrate the properties of the structure of fabric that make a bias possible] shows how fabric is made. You usually have two sets of perpendicularly laid out threads, the warp and the woof. The way fabric is made is that the warp is the constant and the woof is the [crossgrain] that is woven in and out of it. What came out of all this is the bias. The bias in fabric is actually the space between. Bias was what came out of actual interaction with fabric and was not designed with intent, however, here it is. The warp and woof [Looming terminology] of fabric is very stiff and is typically referred to as the grain and [crossgrain] of fabric. The bias happens on the 45 degree angle of fabric, which has a give that the other two grains do not have made from the sliding of the fibers on each of the thread grains. Every fabric, even non-stretch has this bias. It is this space between the weave and woven parts. There is a whole school of fabric of making and clothing that came from this study of the bias. When I made my own investigations of the bias I came up with these textile forms and studies. These forms use the naturally occurring gravity to create these volumes. If I were to cut these differently, the effect would be substantially different since the structure of the axis of the sheet would change. The warp and woof alignment allow for structure within a sheet, ]and the bias stretches and lays based on the effect of the fabric’s own weight or weighted pieces acting on it. Nothing was cut away from this fabric; these forms were created solely using slits. If this fabric is laid plain again you can see that only slits exist in this. I was interested in using these fabrics to create different experiences with ventilation and comfort while maintainging an architectural softness. Gottfried semper refers to weaving often in his works. He is the author of the 4 elements of architecture. He akins weaving to enclosure. Which for me is the connection. We enclose ourselves in clothing and we enclose ourselves in buildings, rendering architecture the third skin. Here we have our clothing as the second and the third houses us all. Throughout history, since the primitive days, we have been usinghides to createnot only our clothing but our architecture. Gottfried sempers says with regard to cloth walls, that they are the most basic form of a spatial divider. Without having to insert structural elements. Not only does architecture mold the exterior but the interior of space as well. After I started looking to see how clothing not only mold the space around us, because we all have a different sense of space with the clothing we are wearing. The simplest examples are to compare the use of a marie Antoinette gown with the male equivalent to wear a massive box around them, rendering the sense of space around you is different. Once I started to look at how we looked at space in our clothing and in architecture, I looked more closely at the translational points between clothing at the 2d conceptual level of planar space to be translated into dimensional space. I mapped my own body in a series of studies. In this study of layering of fabric over the body and over clothing did I return to studying skin on the microlevel and made this image of a skin section to be acted on with space. Here we have the topmost layer of the dermis, melatonin is the pigmentation portion of a skin that protects the inner layers of the skin from extreme sun exposure. So this is the pattern of a sleeve, which takes a closer look at the method of mapping even for limbs. How the cap of the sleeve is similar to a sine curve so that when applied over an arm the points of inflexion turn to create an oval for the armscye. So these are traditional ways of mapping the body when you make patterns. Templates. I looked at different ways of mapping the body and instead of using traditional ways of construction, I took my circumference at every inch of my body to observe my surface area in a 2D plane. After I created that I looked at literal fusions between architecture and clothing and I arrived at the spacesuit. The spacesuit is the literal fusion of architecture and clothing that allows humans to inhabit worlds we weren’t able to encounter before. It is a completely independent and contained architectural environment where you have your oxygen, thermal control and structure. There is a layer of Kevlar inside the spacesuit that prevents rapidly flying debris in space from penetration. I deconstructed the different layers within a spacesuit to find a link between the clothing we wear today out of pure comfort and an architecture of the body more conscious and adaptive to its environment. It is also to a more functional basis. I made this skirt with the textile studies from the previous study in mind. The dangling lapel pieces in the pattern create more volume in the skirt by creating space with these pieces. This is actually a layered skirt that turns into a coat. When not necessarily cold the user can keep the skirt down and flip it up into a coat. [I motion to my unique skirt, and flip the Farthengale-like layer upward to demonstrate that it can become a skirt and shirt combination.] Bentley, Ian and Georgia Butina Watson. Identity by Design. Oxford: Elsevier Ltd., 2007. Print.

Boucher, Francois and Yvonne Deslandres. 20,000 Years of Fashion: The History of Costume and Personal Adornment. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1987. Print.

Castle, Helen. Architectural Design: Fashion + Architecture. Vol. 70 No.6 December 2000. Print.

Hodge, Brooke and Patricia Mears. Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Print.

Joseph-Armstrong, Helen. Patternmaking for Fashion Design: Fourth Edition. USA: Prentice Hall Publishing, 2006. Print.

Koda, Harold. Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001. Print.

Rykwert, Joseph. Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture. Cambridge (Mass.): Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002. Print.

Williams, Kenneth Sessions. The Material at Hand: Constructs of Memory and Identity. MArch Master’s Project. University of South Florida: SACD, Tampa, 2013. Print.