Layered Aggression

Stephen Ellis, Yannick Rodriguez-Diaz
University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Spring 2015 Instructor: Ali Rahim

Set in the high fashion Tokyo district of Aoyama, due east of the notorious Harajuku neighborhood, Stephen Ellis & Yannick Rodriguez-Diaz imagined the building that would house the Alexander McQueen flagship store. Set in the rolling boulevards of high society, high-end fashion houses from around the globe have set up shop in elegant Aoyama.

The fashion of Alexander McQueen is one of provocation that evokes a deliberately aggressive emotion through the deployment of different materials and forms.

Different systems of aesthetics are layered together, overlapping and penetrating one another, so that elements of his dresses are constantly in tension and conflict which offers a unique compositional style to Haute Couture.

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The capacity for architecture to employ surfaces and volumes to create an effect that can only be achieved when they are bundled, bunched, and propagated excessively in a controlled tension sets up the argument for an architectural logic based on formal redundancy.

This logic manifests itself in the management of articulated surfaces that undergo a characteristic change in order to accomplish different architectural goals.

The densification, tightening, relaxing and unfurling of layers combines structural necessity, space-making and ornament into a system of packed surfaces.

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