Home Work

Abstract

This project misreads gingham fabric, finding within this ordinary, patterned material the possibility of making and representing architecture and the city. While architecture has in the past looked to fabric as undulating surfaces and forms, this thesis instead considers fabric as a graphic, flat, constructed material. Reading gingham using the conventions of architectural drawing, this project finds novelty in collapsing together things that we already recognize. The word fabric holds multiple meanings that collapse multiple scales relevant to architecture: the common meaning of woven textile which clothes our bodies and furnishes interiors (curtains, tablecloths, napkins, etc), the fabricated material structure of buildings (beams and columns), and the third figurative meaning for the underlying structure of things, such as urban or social fabric. Both gingham fabric and the site’s urban fabric serve as found material from which to cut, fold, flatten, and sew into a building fabric. The thesis proposes a building that stitches together live and work in New York City’s Chinatown and Lower East Side—a site where the different connotations of fabric coincided historically. In the 19th century, the American garment industry began as “home work” in the tenements but was pushed into specialized districts elsewhere when the child labor reform movement pushed to ban work in domestic spaces. The industry thrived there once again with the new wave of Latin American and Asian immigrants in 1970s-80s but has since disappeared. Returning “home work” to the neighborhood, the building proposal pleats together spaces for garment production and living within a structure which, in plan and section, reflects the site’s urban fabric. Drawing with gingham conflates the scaled down artifacts of architectural representation with the real scale artifacts of everyday utility. It imagines continuity in our inhabitation of the interior, building, and city.