{"id":33527,"date":"2017-11-02T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog-test\/?p=33527"},"modified":"2017-11-11T23:50:46","modified_gmt":"2017-11-11T23:50:46","slug":"scaled-fit-bless-brings-architecture-fashion-years-chicago-biennial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.arc.ht\/blog\/inspiration\/industry\/scaled-fit-bless-brings-architecture-fashion-years-chicago-biennial\/","title":{"rendered":"BLESS brings the Architecture of Fashion to the Chicago Biennial"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared on the <\/span>Chicago Architecture Biennial blog<\/a>, which is edited in partnership with <\/span>Consortia<\/a>. The Biennial is the largest platform for contemporary architectural projects and innovation in North America. The 2017 Biennial, entitled \u201cMake New History\u201d, will be free and open to the public between September 16, 2017, and January 6, 2018.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The interdisciplinary in architecture has our attention now more than ever. Fashion, dance, music, visual art and design feed off of one another \u2014 often in the same installations, films, performances and environments.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to the stream of digital content that spreads culture around the globe, fashion and architecture overlap in particularly fluid formats. Dematerialized and recontextualized, the trends that shape buildings and clothing interact in fascinating new ways on our Instagram feeds as well as out in the physical world.<\/p>\n

Arts institutions have explored these new ties and tensions to great effect. The Met Costume Institute\u2019s recent retrospective of Rei Kawakubo, for example, took pains to emphasize the architectonic structure of her designs. It situated the Comme des Gar\u00e7ons founder\u2019s bulbous, raffled, and reconstructed garments within a geometric landscape of gallery spaces that embodied the quality of \u201cin-betweenness\u201d the legendary designer chased throughout her career.<\/p>\n

Another New York exhibition, \u201cItems: is Fashion Modern?\u201d just opened at the Museum of Modern Art. Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli was inspired by the museum\u2019s 1944 exhibition, \u201cAre Clothes Modern?\u201d organized by Bernard Rudofsky, whose kitchen-sink approach to material culture anticipated our own globally interconnected cultural moment. Channeling Rudofsky, Antonelli\u2019s show foregrounds the objects themselves, their constructions and their relationships with functionality, aesthetics and technology in an expanded cultural field.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cItems: is Fashion Modern?,\u201d installation view, Museum of Modern Art<\/i><\/p>\n

But the fashion-architecture relationship is being reshaped in the style marketplace as much as it is within the gallery. Take Virgil Abloh, the Kanye West collaborator turned fashion designer whose label Off-White recently shot from cult favorite to global mega-brand. In a recent talk<\/a> at Columbia\u2019s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation entitled, \u201cYoung Architects Can Change the World by Not Building Buildings,\u201d Abloh \u2014 who also happened to earn a degree in architecture from IIT \u2014 urged students to set their sights on the world of cultural production.<\/p>\n

Abloh is another modern-day Rudofsky, whose own creative output ranged from country gardens to a popular line of leather sandals. But influence takes faster and more unpredictable paths in the world that Abloh and his generation of cultural polymaths have made. Designers appropriate architectural traditions toward other ends while architects take cues from fashion\u2019s cultural preoccupations, and both sources and final products end up juxtaposed endlessly on the mobile web.<\/p>\n

This is the environment where the beguiling German fashion and design studio BLESS has found its voice. Nominally a fashion label, <\/span>BLESS<\/a> refuses to separate garments from the wider continuum of artifacts, images, environments and platforms that frame our contemporary cultural life.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Bless N\u00b028 Climate Confusion Alliance included the now-famous fur hammock<\/i><\/p>\n

BLESS\u2019 meticulously numbered \u201ccollections\u201d have often included tongue-in-cheek twists on luxury goods and more pedestrian items which abandon utility in favor of an uncanny tension. No. 26, \u201cCable Jewelry,\u201d<\/a> bedazzled the charging cords for household electronics in a combination of lace, buttons, pearls, and beads. Other inventions have included hammocks lined in luxurious fur, bike helmets sewn into throw pillows<\/a>, and entire sets of desk furniture that hang like mobiles<\/a> rather than resting on the floor.<\/p>\n

When Artistic Directors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee asked BLESS\u2019 Ines Kaag and Desiree Heiss to create an interactive installation for the Chicago Architecture Biennial<\/a>, the designers aimed to manipulate every variable that factored into the site \u2014 making \u201cthe space, the furniture and the visitors \u2026 of equal importance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

BLESS N\u00b060 Lobby Conquerors, installation view, 2017<\/i><\/p>\n

The installation itself, which takes the shape of a public lounge space on the fourth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, is a collaboration and dialogue with the classic Finnish furniture brand Artek. \u201cBLESS N\u00b060 Lobby Conquerors\u201d is also a clever spinoff of the studio\u2019s 1998 installation \u201cLiving-Room Conquerors<\/a>,\u201d in which BLESS presented a collection of what the designers dubbed \u201cchairware.\u201d This was a series of garments for furniture, which owners could use to dress up and customize their homes in styles that epitomized BLESS\u2019 interest in playfully reinterpreting practicality.<\/p>\n

In the Chicago Cultural Center, a new generation of customizations is directly inspired by the building itself, drawing colors and material inspirations from the ornate fittings and burnt-orange floor tiles of the turn-of-the-century interior designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

BLESS N\u00b060 Lobby Conquerors, installation view, 2017<\/i><\/p>\n

BLESS created one small unit of \u201carchiturniture\u201d out of Artek\u2019s well-known Kiki lounge chair. Another dressed the brand\u2019s Lukki stools in hairy \u201cclothing\u201d that completely covers the seat, forcing visitors to choose whether to sit down or treat the whole construction like a miniature sculpture.<\/p>\n

Many of the chairs have sprouted concrete walls, marble platforms and fur covers. Some of these add-ons create their own private enclosures and form something closer to a room than a piece of furniture. Some even morph into small staircases. Others expand and interact to encourage social interaction. As the studio describes, the lobby becomes a \u201clocation of encounter between human and furniture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

BLESS Beauty Hairbrush, 1999, Architecture Purchase Account Fund, Art Institute of Chicago<\/i><\/p>\n

This is not the first time BLESS has created work that straddles fashion, industrial design and architecture. Previous collaborators have included fashion houses Longchamp and Linda Farrow, and the studio has designed interactive environments for the Istanbul Design Biennial as well as its own inventive presentations. Part of BLESS\u2019 mandate is to deconstruct ideas that would ordinarily fit within one of these fields and put them back together in inventive ways that come to feel inevitable after the fact.<\/p>\n

Heiss and Kaag call it \u201cchallenging the formal confines of function,\u201d and their lobby installation at the Biennial is a case in point. The simple problem of designing the lobby breaks down into a fuzzier question: how to give each visitor a unique feeling of personal comfort in a public gathering space? Their solution by misdirection hinges on the contradiction of inhabiting a transitory space and inviting interaction in multiple ways, \u201csome with the aim of connecting people and others, in contrast, [with the ability] to provide privacy and shelter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

SO-IL and Ana Prva\u010dki, l’air pour l’air, installation view, 2017, photograph \u00a9 Iwan Baan<\/i><\/p>\n

There was plenty of further evidence at this year\u2019s Biennial that the design world is catching up to BLESS\u2019 iconoclastic poetics uniting fashion and architecture. A site-specific performance created by architects SO-IL<\/a> and artist Ana Prva\u010dki featured a performance by members of the Chicago Sinfonietta, who moved within Garfield Park Conservatory while ensconced in wearable, mesh structures that filtered the air around them. Nick Cave\u2019s iconic \u201csoundsuits\u201d were also on view in a new collaborative performance project entitled \u201cHere Hear Chicago,\u201d appearing this time with a cast of performative objects created by Studio Gang.<\/p>\n

One of BLESS\u2019 most indelible designs, the Hairbrush, is also on view across the street from the Biennial, as part of the Art Institute of Chicago\u2019s \u201cPast Forward: Architecture and Design at the Art Institute.\u201d Originally collected for a 2012 exhibition entitled \u201cFashioning the Object<\/a>,\u201d its inclusion in the museum\u2019s permanent collection of architecture and design artifacts highlights fashion\u2019s expanding connections to architectural design and the depth of BLESS\u2019 contemporary influence.<\/p>\n\n

Hussein Chalayan, Coffee Table Skirt, 2000, included in \u201cSkin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture,\u201d organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles<\/i><\/p>\n

Each of these designs reaches back to the idea of sheltering the body, where clothing design and object design intersect as distinct approaches to a common problem. From Bernard Rudofsky\u2019s \u201cAre Clothes Modern?\u201d to the recent travelling exhibition \u201cSkin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture,\u201d pluralistic curatorial approaches have brought these two disciplines into deeper and more fruitful collaboration.<\/p>\n

In the case of BLESS N\u00b060 Lobby Conquerors at the Biennial, the result is a fantastical game of dress up and an after-the-fact collaboration between designers that \u2014 given the BLESS\u2019 social media star power and its focus on the everyday \u2014 will no doubt be felt far beyond the galleries of the Cultural Center.<\/p>\n

Explore more work by BLESS and more connections between architecture and fashion in the Biennial\u2019s Are.na<\/a> channel below, or visit the Biennial\u2019s profile<\/a> to add to its collection of images, links and resources.<\/i><\/p>\n