Cold Couture
Somewhere cold
This experiment takes its starting point in an inspiration of one of the most iconic design items made by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. The Savoy vase, or as it was originally named when competing in an open Finnish design competition “Eskimo woman’s leather trousers“. A name that today sounds prejudice but might give a hint of why the vase became a design icon. When something soft and fluent freezes into a hard solid shape something fascinating happens. This proposal seeks to explore just that but in a more literal sense. Can soft fabrics be shaped and decorated into beautiful, delicate, fragile spaces and then be frozen into a strong protecting organic architecture. To do so we designed a simple wood structure to hold lines with decorated fabric hanging in it. A Structure that permits unexpected shapes to happen, failures and success to be explored and when finding the right shape be frozen into a cold haute couture architecture. This proposal was originally designed as a competition entry for the Winnipeg warming hut competition although we like to test this experiment soon in Sweden.
