Architectural bodies imply in depth studies about building materials and the effects that thicker or thinners surfaces can have on the final construction.
Avant-garde movements in architecture replaced more conventional stone or wood with materials characterised by a much more ethereal consistency and quality, eliminating in this way redundant decorations and ornaments from the façades.
Examples include glass and steel frames, but also materials based on solidified liquids and liquid substances, employed to create chiaroscuro effects when struck by the light.
Russian architect Ivan Leonidov went further creating a project for the Columbus memorial in Santo Domingo (1929) in which he included a wall of gas based on a jet of air that provided the necessary insulation
Leonidov's Narkomtiazhprom (Commissariat of Heavy Industry) focused instead on verticality, consisting in a futuristic triple-towered project.
The sides of the towers - connected among them by walk-bridges - were defined by colonnades while their rear consisted of a long glass-walled office wing.
In this way, though the towers looked imposing, they also looked like beams of light rays condensing the space of the Red Square, a principle that Constructivist architect Leonidov reused for his project of the Lenin Institute with its glass sphere (the auditorium) set next to a vertical parallelepiped (the book depository) and to one-storey blocks (smaller auditoriums for research work).
This project was based on the cosmos: the way the different buildings were scattered on the ground resembled indeed the solar system.
Leonidov anchored his structures to the ground using strings, supports and braces that, symbolising a modern and futuristic network of communications, also gave the illusion to his architectural bodies of being weightless and of fluttering in the air.
In this way his structures achieved a sort of harmonic balance between celestial and earthly dimensions, while the materials employed for their surfaces also refracted the cosmic rays.
Leonidov and issues of cosmic space and the human body came back to my mind while looking at threeASFOUR’s Autumn/Winter 2011-12 collection.
Though string instruments may have been a starting point (mind you, anchored to the ground with robust strings, Leonidov's structures would actually be seen as gigantic string instruments, able to produce vibrations when hit by the wind), geometrical figures (videos of platonic solids were actually projected during the show), circles and sculptures prevailed.
Red and white strings created intricate embroidered motifs on black or pinstriped dresses, crisscrossed and wrapped around the bodies of the models anchoring around their neck or kept the skirts decorated with snaking tube-like pleated ruffles suspended like Leonidov’s structures.
Spirograph drawings were also reproduced on dresses and quilted leather and neoprene coats and jackets.
Though the leather trousers/leggings that spliced along the knee area to reveal a pinstriped fabric were probably more practical (and commercial as well), I found the string designs more interesting for their architectural and structural configurations.
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