The Bartlett
School of Architecture
Summer Show 2020
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Garden Jacket

Project details

Student Conor Clarke
Programme
Unit PG25
Year 4

The project began with a fascination for the body and its scalar relationship to the urban world. How might the body meet the city halfway? Touch is employed in this endeavour as it asks for a level of reciprocity. If the worlds created on a body could record the places in which it had been – like Jorge Luis Borges' notion of the map – it would in one moment be both the immediate condition and its expansion.


Creating an ecology within clothing, is it possible to invoke the imaginative agency of nature?


A jacket is constructed to anticipate a journey and to confiscate objects. With the places and landscapes it passes, it is a memory theatre. What is the nature of humanity's relationship with inanimate inhuman objects? Textiles are here explored as both figure and metaphor.


Tailoring as a technique was turned to making a building. Ways of creating drapes were translated to cold forming steel. When the body then does not exist, the material’s behaviour becomes very present. The form of the building's skin was found in conjunction with employing fabric and the construction techniques.

The Jacket as a Memory Theatre

Pockets hidden in seams secrete secateurs, growing media and stolen plants. It asks a question about property lines and the role of the garden in acts of enclosure and exhibition.

The Body as a Landscape

The tailor’s metric system is used to map the body as a landscape. The jacket is measured as a second skin, then manipulated to produce hidden worlds in the internal construction.

Beyond the Domesticated Body

Scaling up or down, textiles are a flexible material network between the body and the world. What are humans to the object?

Turning Tailoring to Making a Building

Draping techniques can be translated to cold forming steel, however a building cannot be entirely built this way. Many pieces are tiled and layered together.

Scale, Line and Body

Property lines; diagrammatic lines of the pattern; contingent lines that negotiate between points. Lines become figurative as both a meeting of planes and as decorative surfaces.

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