Rebekah Enns

Advisor: Lancelot Coar

Architectural thesis poster titled 'Beyond Dressing' by Rebekah Enns, explores fashion and architecture intersection.
A modern architectural building features crisscrossing wooden designs, lush greenery, and curved white structures, under a clear blue sky, exuding tranquility.
Building renders
Collage of urban residential scenes with brick and wooden houses under clear blue skies. A few cars and bare trees add a peaceful tone.
Site photos
Abstract city map in grayscale with two orange-highlighted areas denoting key locations. Lush greenery at the bottom adds a vibrant contrast.
Site map
Bright architectural rendering of a modern building with a glass cube facade, people mingling, lush plants, and trees, under a clear sky. Tranquil and open.
Building section
Modern garden scene with people engaging in leisure activities. A parent and child walk, another person tends plants, while a woman reads. Serene, sunny atmosphere.
Rooftop garden
Architectural design layout with a detailed floor plan on the left and four building elevations on the right. Natural textures and modern structures blend with lush greenery.
Site plan and sections
Blueprint of a multi-level medical facility, including clinics, lounges, and staff areas. Features outdoor gardens and a roof terrace, surrounded by greenery.
Floor plans
Illustration of a woman stretching inside an abstract, organic-shaped structure with a grid overlay. Background features vertical tan lines, suggesting movement.
Vessel collage 1
Cross-section of a pool showing a person relaxing on the edge of a cutaway section above the water. The pool surface is calm and bright with ripples.
Vessel collage 2

Beyond Dressing: Fashioning Story Embodied Architecture   

Design Research began with an intuition that Fashion and Architecture might be related.  This research took a few different routes, at their literal surface level each is a cladding for our bodies, providing protection against the elements. Similarity can be found between façade expressions in pleating and louvers, how both utilize various methods of screening to create texture, in the unit construction of beading and brickwork.  In how a façade can be hung from structure, be that of a loom holding fabric or that of the curtain wall system.  Traditions of repair surfaced in each practice, offering routes related to adaptive reuse.

Beyond the surface level, fashion has uniquely become a tool of personal expression due to its proximity to our bodies.  It has become a way in which we tell others about ourselves, about our own personas by utilizing these methods of fabrication.  Fashion designers have been leveraging this concept, that the specific materiality of clothing, the way in which it has been manipulated and the garment crafted, to tell specific stories with their collections.  

To apply this practice of fashioning to that of architecture, the narrative rich program of a Midwife lead Maternity and Birth Centre was chosen.  One persona, that of the client, along with representatives of her pregnancy and birth journey were defined.   Their narratives and their needs are overlapping in nature, and so their material expressions need to be intertwined with their narrative throughline of support and community, of protection and ownership over their birth journeys.  As needs along this journey amplify, like in the moments of birth, the material expression was allowed to amplify along with it and take the necessary space to serve it.

The legibility of the building was found in the woven community, it provided legibility to the core values of the midwife’s practice, a woven network of support.  

The structuring of the building became that network, timber columns and beams lace like a basket, holding the vessel like sanctuary spaces of the birth rooms.  A framed wall solidifies the boundary between the public street, and holds a secondary screening, creating density, and privacy to the body of the building and the vessels for the private moments of the clients labouring within.