ARENAE | The Catwalk Design Agenda | Spring 2013_AA VISITING SCHOOL PARIS

Challenging the work carried out the previous workshops in Paris, Arena will focus on the role of fashion as a methodology, in developing and processing architectural concepts acting subsequently in the interrelations between humans: multiscalar versus typological, landscaped bodies to experimental tectonics. Arena will articulate plausible scenarios of brand expansion to transboundary scales and networks, from parametric surfaces to interactive mechanisms.

At the head of the spring workshop, Arena will reassess Catwalk design by blurring the frontier between fashion and architecture as disciplines, with the urgency to reconnect both of these scales in design with current global changes and their socio-cultural context. Rather than simply defining a precise trend for catwalks viewers and users, Arena will foster uncommon spatial configurations, instrumentalizing human identities performance; investigations onto material, form, skins and structure.

During this second semester framework, in order to encourage an in depth re-thinking about Catwalks as a new terrain for architectural experimentation, we will focus on the conceptual development of multi-scalar systems. Arena will examine architectural properties of the fashion spectrum uncovered so far within the research of the AA Visiting School in Paris: a new era for retail, urban systems as the catwalk scene, and ephemeral structures as popup typologies, among others. Design methodology will involve a feedback between a set of main areas of exploration and experimentation, with the use of digital tooling and production processes. Students will be required to develop their understanding of the constantly evolving trends and rules in fashion in relation to a specific urban context, an extreme scenario, or a mix of both.

AA School Program in Paris is today’s only cutting-edge unit in Academia worldwide focusing exclusively on novel approaches to the [fashion + architecture] emerging praxis, alternative forms for clothing, merchandising morphologies and methods of retailing.