2005

MY Studio

For Meejin Yoon of MY Studio the creation of a Mobius-strip dress was an opportunity to explore ‘surface as a seamless transformative condition between interior and exterior’. It is a piece that through its differentiation and continuity of surface provides a wholly architectural interpretation of the elegant.

In examining the body and its material envelopes — skin, clothing and architecture — the relationship between surface and space comes into question as a conceptual and corporeal construct. The Mobius Dress uses the mathematical principle of the Mobius strip, a two-dimensional compact manifold with a single boundary component, to re-examine surface as a seamless transformative condition between interior and exterior. The project uses the topological principles of this one-sided, one-edged, non-orientable surface (a loop with a half-twist) as both envelope and spatial device.

Exploring and exploiting the continuity of this twisted, single-sided surface, the dress uses the generative logic of splitting to knot a series of occupiable spatial loops. Structured by the body, it is non-directional in terms of form and materiality. By varying the parametric relationships between the measures of the body, splitting edge and surface area, the internal and external logics are intertwined to exact elegance. Splitting the Mobius strip reveals the simple rules and complex interrelationships between surface and space.

Redefining the relationship between inside and outside, and between internal organisation and external constraints, the Mobius Dress exemplifies a smooth, continuous, homogeneous surface that is simultaneously simple and complex. It exploits the surface logic of a one-sided, oneedged, non-orientable surface, clothing the body in a variable and evolving form, and applies the transformative potential of a half-twisted loop by exacting simple rules of splitting that allow the topological principles to not only become visible, but occupiable as the surface is split into knots.

The Mobius Dress splits, turns insideout and forms two intertwined loops that conform to the body at different scales, meeting around the hips and torso, and is made of industrial recycled felt, a homogeneous and seamless material created through friction as opposed to weaving. The felt has no warp, no weft, no orientation and no hierarchy. In order to clothe the body in a new type of garment — one that negotiates the internal logics of a two-dimensional compact manifold with the external constraints of a threedimensional body — the Mobius Dress employs certain surface logics and material properties. The form of the dress as it unravels becomes differentiated, while the surface remains continuous. Applying a simple set of rules to an inherently supple geometry, the project challenges the conventional understanding of envelope as a delimiting condition. Using technique not only to rethink the stable separation of inside and outside, but to investigate new spatial possibilities, the principles of the Mobius Dress provoke a rethinking of architecture as stable limits, suggesting instead a more smooth and seamless understanding of interiority and exteriority.

Reference

Meejin Yoon, (K)not a Loop, AD, Volume 77, Issue 1, January/February 2007, Pages 86–87