In yesterday’s post I mentioned Nike designer Jesse Leyva being inspired by Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium when he worked on updating the Air Max 90. Yet this is not the first and last pair of shoes inspired by a building. Indeed designing shoes with sculptural or architectural elements seems to be a big trend.
Dutch designer Marloes ten Bhömer was one of the first who experimented with shoes and new forms. Using materials such as leather, carbon fibre, fibreglass, polyurethane resin and crepla (a type of foam), ten Bhömer alters not just a part of the shoe, but its entire shape, creating post-modernist buildings you can literally wrap up your feet with. 
Her futuristic work mixes glamour and technology and some of her models vaguely remind me of the random curves of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum or Richard Serra’s minimalist sculptures such as “The Matter of Time.”
Architect Zaha Hadid recently collaborated with Brazilian plastic shoe company Melissa (that also worked with the Campana Brothers, Vivienne Westwood, Alexandre Herchcovitch, J. Maskrey and Lorenzo Merlino). Hadid designed a pair of shoes that might not look too practical, but are definitely unusual and in style with her buildings. 
The trademark cut out motifs of her structures are replicated on the shoe together with the fluid curves of Vilnius Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Lithuania and of some of Hadid’s projects that we will be able to see at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, such as Hadid and Patrik Schumacher’s installation “Aura”, that will celebrate the 500th Anniversary of Palladio’s birth, 
and the “Lotus” room, a fragmented enclosure that can be compressed and expanded into different spaces for resting, sitting, storage and browsing.
Founders of the luxury footwear brand Omelle (pronounce as ‘ähm’ elle’), Los Angeles-based Cherise Angelle, a former luxury product placement specialist, and graphic and knitwear designer Nicole LaFave, recently launched their new collection that features a pair of grey sandals with coned high heels and a circular cut out motif that reminds me of the sinuous curves of the futuristic buildings designed in Italy in the ‘30s that vaguely had Art Deco elements and were shaped like ships or planes.
Art Deco buildings, sculptures and decorative elements are also the main inspiration behind Miu Miu’s shoes with their sculpted heels that echo the movement’s interest in ziggurats with their successively receding stories or levels; 
Prada’s sculpted heel pumps with exaggerated ruffle details remind instead of the interest of the Art Deco movement for curvilinear structures, while Pierre Hardy favours the stark geometric forms of cubist buildings with his sandals characterised by simple geometrical forms.
These experiments are not just an attempt at mixing fashion and architecture, but they aim at launching innovative footwear, cutting edge shoes that can offer alternatives to women and a chance to get freer from the chains of more conventional styles.
If you want to know more about that eternal quest for architecture to take on the dynamic complexity of contemporary society, check out the events in programme for the Venice Architecture Biennale. 
Entitled “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building”, the 11th International Architecture Exhibition wants to encourage experimentation. “Architecture is not building,” Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI)
in Rotterdam recently stated. “Buildings are objects and the act of building leads to such objects, but architecture is something else. 
It is the way we think and talk about buildings, how we represent them, how we build them. This is architecture. More generally, architecture is a way of representing, shaping and perhaps even offering critical alternatives to the human-made environment.”
The possibilities of architecture are endless; if they are applied to footwear they definitely guarantee variety and extreme originality.
The 11th International Architecture Exhibition is on in Venice from 14th September to 23rd November.
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