If you like modern architecture you’re probably familiar with French architectural practice R&Sie(n) (pronounced as “heresy” in French).
Founded in 1989 by François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux, the practice has been pushing the boundaries of architecture, experimenting with modern forms and shapes.
To keep up to date with the changes in design, its founders based it on a sort of chameleon strategy: according to it the company will change its name every few years to allow it to preserve a fresh and radical approach to the dynamic transformations design goes through.
What’s interesting about this revolutionary practice is that it bases its principles on a very simple concept, the destruction of any constraint and the subversion of conventions.
Moving from extreme aspects of nature and human psychology, R&Sie(n) developed in the last twenty years organic, biological and critical work, attempting a mutation of geographic landscapes through technological experiments.
While the buildings and structures created by this practice are strongly related to the environment, the latter is also transformed through the futuristic shapes and materials of the architectures.
Some of the practice’s best projects are based on opposites such as machine Vs nature, threats Vs safety and purity Vs corruption that help developing scenarios that fuse reality with imagination.
In 2001 the practice designed "(Un)Plug", an office building in the Defense area of Paris.
Commissioned by the research department of the French Public Electricity Company (EDF), the skyscraper was supposed to gain energy from the sun thanks to a reactive glass façade that integrated alien-looking swelling and photoelectric cells.
In this way the building almost developed a life of its own, being able to unplug from the urban ground and from its energy network.
Further projects focusing on buildings that somehow integrated with the environment while altering it at the same time followed: the practice suggested for their “Dustyrelief / B_mu” project to cover the building of a Bangkok-based museum with an electromagnetic skin that attracted pollution from the air and turned it into a sort of fur-like cover growing on the exterior of the building and dressing it up.
The result was a new study about contrasts focusing on the aseptic environments of the museum and the urban external conditions.
A year later the practice developed for a Trinidad-based art collector the “Mosquito Bottleneck” project, an intestine-shaped private home in which all the surfaces of the house were woven together with plastic wire and plastic shrink-wrap and acted like a trap for West Nile Fever-infecting mosquitoes.
One of the latest projects of the practice, “The Building That Never Dies”, will instead be exhibited in the International Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture (starting on 29th August).
This project features a nocturnal research laboratory of light employed to analyse “the dark adaptation” to reduce urban light pollution and “the melatonin effect” with Oled lamp to test the human metabolism circadian cycle.
The way R&Sie(n) develop their projects, the shapes and forms they define through their buildings, the work carried out on the alteration of surfaces and their projects based on dichotomies, could be easily applied to fashion, inspiring innovative silhouettes and leading to exciting experiments with different fabrics.
Indeed R&Sie(n)'s work offers an infinity of stimuli that can definitely generate new ideas for what regards style and fashion.
One interesting comparison may be attempted for instance between R&Sie(n)’s projects and the creations of young fashion designer (and finalist at the 2010 Hyères Festival) Yiqing Yin.
The creations of this designer are indeed based on restricting some sections of the fabric employed and letting others loose, creating bulbous and voluminous shapes through sinuous draping and pleating techniques.
Yin's collection presented at the Hyères Festival was based on shapes that sheltered, cocooned and protected the body like armours, concealing or exaggerating some of its parts.
At the same time Yin's designs manage to retain a certain degree of femininity thanks to their fluid shapes that seem to be directly sculpted on the body.
The fabric employed in these creations also forms a sort of tactile experience like the technically advanced surfaces explored by R&Sie(n).
It's almost impossible to look at R&Sie(n)'s work and not to see that, in many ways, that's where fashion will go in future: towards extreme forms that, employing technology, will change the image of the body, altering its dimensions and indirectly morphing the perception of what surrounds us.
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I love those dresses, the first one in particular is stunning. Similar in stlye to the one worn by sarah jessica parker recently.
Posted by: costume jewellery uk | May 25, 2010 at 02:39 PM