Architectural inspirations for fashion collections do not necessarily need to come from specific buildings or projects. Installations and temporary structures created for special events can indeed offer great inspirations. Let's take for example the sand printers at the Israel Pavilion at the 14th Venice International Architecture Exhibition (until 23rd November 2014).
Curated by Ori Scialom, Roy Brand and Keren Yeala-Golan with designer Edith Kofsky, and entitled "The UrbUrb", the pavilion features four large printers designing on beds of sands with thin metal styluses patterns, dots and circles that form urban plans. Once the printers finish their work, they sweep it away and start their job again. The project comments upon the national master plan designed by the Planning Department in 1951 (and published in 1952), later known as "The Sharon Plan".
Based on five aspects of planning – agriculture, industry, transportation, parks and forest and the development of new towns – the plan consisted in creating over 400 small and mid-sized towns across the whole territory of the newly-constituted State of Israel, distributing the population across the country's different regions and in numerous ready made towns, often located in rural areas.
As a result, Israeli cities became a fusion of fragmented pieces: the plan generated indeed the "UrbUrb", a mosaic-like hybrid mixture of urban and sub-urban settlements, independent entities disconnected from historic city centers and existing neighborhoods.
The four plotters (accompanied by a sound piece by Daniel Kiczales that turns the UrbUrb patterns into a music box) continuously print different urban patterns from the four masterplans for Israel (from the places of settlements from 1949 to the existing day), to the city plans for Jerusalem, Holon, Hadera and Yahud; and from the neighborhood layouts to various residential building programs.
The shapes, intricate geometric patterns and twisting lines printed on the sand address the dichotomy between modern planning, old land and previous building typologies, indirectly exploring the concept of the aerial view (as the curators point out, only when seen from above the geometric shapes and patterns of the new neighborhoods reveal their identity). Yet there's more behind this project.
The "UrbUrb" could be interpreted not just as a physical phenomenon, but also as a state of mind, pointing us towards a fractured and fragmented society, at reshaping and reinventing concepts, at architectural mutations, and at urban textures and endless, repetitive cycles and dynamics. Last but not least, it's surprising that the sand printer hasn't been adopted (yet) during a presentation for a fashion show: its constant pattern making and erasing process would perfectly symbolise the repetitively useless and tiring rhythms of modern fashion.
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