Student creations of wearable architecture featured at international exhibition

Wearable assemblies of folded paper and 3D-printed resin developed by UB architecture students were on display this summer in Hong Kong as part of an exhibition exploring expanding definitions of fashion.

The structural apparel — including towering headgear, intricate limb bands and resplendent shirt-skirt combinations called “sh/kirts” — were developed as part of a graduate architecture media seminar considering the intersection of fashion and architecture. The course, offered last fall, was directed by architecture faculty members Gregory Serweta and Maia Peck.

“Archi-texture” was installed at the Hong Kong Design Center’s landmark Design Spectrum as part of “The Full Gamut” exhibition. Curated by Robert Wu and Vivienne Yu, Full Gamut explored the boundaries of fashion design through installations by graphic designers, textile artists, and product and spatial designers, ranging from window displays and commercials to inclusive design and the culture of fashion. The exhibition ran from May through July and was held in the Sham Shui Po district, a traditional hub for wholesale and retail of garments and fabric.

Serweta, a registered architect, and Peck, along with architecture faculty member Lukas Fetzko, designed the seminar to use the body as a site of investigation for core principles in architectural media. Through hands-on workshops, students investigated the history of graphic representation of the human body within the architectural canon and the dialectics of ornamentation, developing skills in 3D-modeling and printing, basic rendering, digital/hybrid illustration, post-processing, animation and CNC milling.

According to the faculty curators, ornamentation of the body and objects has innovated the arts throughout history. From antiquity to today, humans have sought to adorn themselves and their surroundings — as a demonstration of authority or power or self-expression — to enact order upon nature, or even for the sheer joy of embellishment.

For many of the projects, students used paper to understand the relationship of two-dimensional planes and three-dimensional modeling by converting planes to forms. “Paper is a material with infinite conformal modeling potential,” Serweta and Peck say, “and its properties differ completely, depending on how it is processed, such as through folding, pleating or creasing.”

For instance, in developing the headgear, the design begins with a plane that is morphed into three-dimensional form as it confronts gravity or meets with the human body. In developing the limb bands, students learned about advanced curvilinear and surface geometries by producing patterned 3D-printed bands sized to their own body. The creation of the “sh/kirts” was both an exercise in technical skill and fashion innovation as students combined 3D printing, 2D template generation and complex methods of paper manipulation to create a novel garment.

The “Archi-texture” course culminated its second “season” with a fashion show last April featuring the semester’s latest line of student-designed wearables, CNC-milled foam seatscapes and projected animations.

As an expansion of the “Archi-texture” exhibit in Hong Kong, Serweta and Peck developed a workshop for children to assemble “headwear” from pre-prepared, laser-cut paper templates originally designed by UB students. The workshop was led by their Hong Kong-based partner, Kirin + Lab.