Architecture and fashion: an exhibition and a book to mark twenty years of gmp in China

“Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions” said Coco Chanel, and for Hamburger Architektur Sommer gmp presented an exhibition entitled “Architecture x Fashion — A Dialogue”, seeking and establishing a bond between architecture and fashion, at the Barlach Halle K art gallery. The exhibition focuses on images of buildings designed by gmp in China, shown alongside fashion photographs by the ICICLE Fashion Group blown up out of proportion with respect to the buildings.
The exhibition was first presented in Shanghai in 2018. The outfits and textiles appearing alongside gmp’s buildings are by well-known Shanghai fashion brand ICICLE. The exhibition is in Germany to celebrate twenty years of von Gerkan, Marg and Partners’ work in China, on the occasion of the launch of a new book: "Industrial Buildings in an Urban Context", bringing together more than forty projects, primarily industrial buildings constructed by the German architectural studio in Chinese cities.

In twenty years gmp has completed more than 130 projects in China, including office buildings, shopping malls, corporate headquarters, cultural buildings such as opera theatres and more. The new volume "Industrial Buildings in an Urban Context" offers an in-depth overview of the commercial buildings designed by von Gerkan, Marg and Partners, for it is the studio’s commercial projects that attracted the interest of fashion brand Icicle, which used gmp’s buildings as a source of inspiration for one of its collections.
“Architecture is how the person places herself in the space. Fashion is about how you place the object on the person” (Zaha Hadid). A big wall at the entrance to the exhibition gallery collected quotes from famous architects and stylists offering interesting food for thought and introducing the theme of comparison of “architecture and fashion” which is the subject of the exhibition. Photography and inversion of proportion are used to compare gmp’s buildings with Icicle’s new fashion collection. The buildings are reduced in scale while the clothes are blown up, throwing off the viewer and permitting appreciation of the visual elements shared by the two different types of design. Samples of cladding materials used on the façades of the buildings photographed and fabrics used in the fashion creations were exhibited alongside the photographs to add a tactile dimension to the experience.

The volume presented on the occasion of the exhibition, Industrial Buildings in an Urban Context, represents more than forty of gmp’s projects in China in 480 pages. Accompanied by scientific texts by professor Zhi Wenjun of Tongji University and architecture critic Nina Rappaport, editor-in-chief of the publishing house of Yale School of Architecture, the book includes numerous images illustrating the positive impact of gmp’s industrial buildings on China’s big cities.

(Agnese Bifulco)

Book Title: Industrial Buildings in an Urban Context
Authors: Meinhard von Gerkan, Nikolaus Goetze (Eds.)
Editor: Tongji University Press, Shanghai 2018
Language: English / Chinese

www.gmp-architekten.com

Images courtesy of gmp:
images BARCODE © Marcus Bredt | © ICICLE
Book cover © gmp Architekten
Opening's images © Andres Jana

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