Style in a Vacuum

Recently I have been thinking about the recycling wave of clothing and styles with the creeping resurgence of the poets blouse, bright colors, and maximalism. Before this the primary fashion “trend” has been neutrals and basics. With this interest I dug into why bishop sleeves/puff sleeves and frilled collars ever became a style – what was their function – and if there was a political or social similarities in the times that they seem to reemerge during. You see them in the 15^th century through 16^th, again in the 19^th, and multiple times throughout the 20^th century. I assume the same repetition happens with the neutral/minimal style, and all other trends. This curiosity led me to think about how architecture changes in materials and styles with political and social rotation as well; as happened with modern architecture following World War II.

Why I share this rabbit hole is because when reading about Eisenman’s attempt to theorize architecture into an object and imagine it within a vacuum aside from human influence, I had imagined this thought with clothing. Will there/can there ever be anything new in this cycle or language? What does it look like?

Eisenman’s theoretical architecture is just that. It is a tool of exploration in what could be, by taking a step back and removing the convoluted consciousness of all existing swirling narratives.

 

“what is entailed when architecture represents the very process of “archi-tecting”: that the effort to represent the inner logic of the object in the object itself is made not because of some preordained decision to exclude other considerations but because of the felt consequence of a historical evolution crucial, if not unique, to the discipline of architecture itself.”