Free-flowing ideas: an exhibition at LA's MOCA explores the convergence of architecture and fashion.

'For architects, fashion was once a taboo--they were guardians of reality and timelessness,' says LA architect Neil Denari, who recently designed a free-form glass tower to be built alongside the High Line in lower Manhattan. Morphosis' 10-storey Sun Tower in Seoul was designed for an international clothing manufacturer, and the folded planes of glass and aluminium mesh are folded and wrapped in a manner that evokes the sculptured garments of Issey Miyake.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

These are two of 46 innovators whose work is explored in Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, an exhibition now on show at the LA Museum of Contemporary Art, and handsomely presented in a companion book from Thames & Hudson. As MOCA curator Brooke Hodge remarks, 'I realised that clothes, like buildings, provide shelter, relate to the human body, and project an image'.

It's not a new idea. The convergence of the two disciplines and the way they influence each other are themes that have gained currency over the past three decades--ever since Frank Gehry deconstructed his Santa Monica house and the Japanese iconoclasts Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo defied the dictates of Paris with their ready-to-wear collections of tattered, shredded garments. Hodge cites a 1982 exhibition at MIT, Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design, which looked at fashion through the eyes of an architect. Skin + Bones is more ambitious, and her eclectic choices evolved from six years of discussions with architects and designers on folding, draping, pleating, weaving, printing and cantilevering.

Everyone knows that Gehry's swirling steel planes were partly inspired by sculpted draperies, and one wonders if he might detour into couture after designing body ornaments for Tiffany's. Elena Manferdini was trained in engineering in Bologna, and architecture at UCLA, but she is now designing two laser-cut dress collections a year. 'The body is a perfect small-scale exercise in spatial design,' she says, 'a testing ground for ideas and techniques to apply to buildings.' She recently did both, designing the American pavilion at the Beijing Biennale and presenting her latest clothes there.

The parallels can work better on the page than in a gallery. Fashion designers experiment by making garments; architects need enlightened clients to realise their ideas, so their concepts have to be visualised from models and renderings. Then there is the issue of scale. Most dresses are a metre or so long and though buildings can range from four to four hundred, few architectural models are more than half a metre high, so diminishing their impact when shown in a museum. The challenge for Hodge, and exhibition designers Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown, was to bring the inert to life with video footage and balance the models with mock-ups.

A star exhibit in Skin + Bones is a five-metre-high bubble wall in juicy colours that may be realised in the Venice, CA, house that Greg Lynn is planning to build for himself and his wife, Sylvia Lavin, the former chair of the architectural department at UCLA. Lynn jokes that he and Gehry are in a race of the tortoises, unable to spare time from their day jobs to put a new roof over their own heads.

Close by, in Santa Monica, Peter Testa and his partner Devyn Weiser have been experimenting with carbon fibre, a tough, lightweight material that is used in bridges and the latest generation of airliners. A large mock-up of their skeletal tower is included in the exhibition, and they've also designed the Contour Tape house, strapping together honeycomb structural panels to create a rigid shell. It's ready to go for anyone with the courage to try something new, and the materials have already been proven in cell phone towers.

For Testa, there's no barrier between architecture and fashion. 'We are all makers, operating in the same terrain, and drawing on craft and technology,' he explains. 'We develop our own tools, share software and are challenged to work with new materials.' It's common ground that comfortably accommodates Toyo Ito and Hussein Chalayan, Vivienne Westwood and Zaha Hadid, along with the other free spirits whose work is juxtaposed in this landmark show.

Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture is at LA MOCA until 5 March 2007 and then travels to Tokyo.

www.moca.org