Anika Thorsten

Unfolding Architecture: Exploring the Impact of Garment Construction on Spatial Experience

This thesis explores the intersection of fashion and architecture through their shared embrace of indeterminacy.¹ Drawing inspiration from avant-garde fashion designers like Martin Margiela, Issey Miyake, and Yohji Yamamoto, who use techniques such as pleats, darts, and tucks to distort and obscure form, the research investigates how garment construction methods can inform architectural design.² The concept of perceiving architecture as a pattern allows for creation of layered and dynamic spaces that challenge modernist approaches to spatial programming. By incorporating garment-inspired space-generating techniques into moments of programmatic tension in architecture, the thesis aims to enhance user experience through the indeterminate moments these interventions generate, and their corresponding intrigue. Pleats, darts, and tucks create spatial depth in fashion. Similarly, leaving space between program (body) and envelope (cloth), or allowing that space to emerge through the overlap of two disparate programs, produces interactions between opposing elements such as public and private, interior and exterior, visceral and tender. These interactions generate spaces that are haptic, ambiguous, and evocative.

In the first semester, a house de- and re-construction was completed to test the thesis. The project employs garment techniques to dissolve rigid spatial divisions and challenge binary oppositions common in domestic spaces, such as private versus public, static versus dynamic, or enclosed versus open. Derridean deconstruction provided a framework to create an interstitial zone, transforming the house into an unconventional space where indoor and outdoor blend together, through a third space introduced.³ The third space creates an environment that promotes reinterpretation and spatial ambiguity.

Building on this work, the second semester explores these ideas at an urban scale. Salt and Stitch is a small-batch cod saltery and textile house located on the harbour in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The region’s inherent contrasts, fog and rock, tenderness and brutality, compression of rowhouses and openness of the coast, supported the thesis, which is grounded in moments of tension. The programming draws from Newfoundland’s cultural heritage: cod fishing, once halted by a 1992 moratorium and reinstated in 2024, and textile practices like rug hooking, knitting, and quilting, whose preservation remains essential.⁴

At Salt and Stitch, the interstitial becomes the visitor realm. Two angular volumes, fishery and textile house, intersect to reveal moments of exchange. An undulating path guides visitors through zones of making, exposing processes such as cod gutting, wool dyeing, and slipper knitting. The interstitial rhythm, stretching and cinching, mirrors the logics of each program, while their overlaps allow layered, visceral experiences. Like folds in a garment, these intersections alter the spatial silhouette and enrich the project’s narrative complexity.

Through the lens of garment construction, this thesis positions interstitial space as a critical tool for rethinking architectural experience. By translating techniques rooted in fashion into architectural design, the work challenges conventional spatial hierarchies and proposes a new mode of engagement, one defined by ambiguity, layering, and transformation. Salt and Stitch serves as a culmination of these investigations, demonstrating how interstitiality can mediate between conflicting programs, evoke cultural memory, and deepen narrative resonance. In doing so, the thesis contributes to a broader discourse on how architecture can become more responsive, tactile, and experientially rich by embracing the indeterminate.

¹ Cambridge Dictionary, s.v. “indeterminacy,” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/indeterminacy
² Bonnie English, “Introduction,” in Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, 1st ed, (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 3.
³ Encyclopedia Brittanica, s.v. “Jacques Derrida,” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacques-Derrida.
⁴ Canada, Fisheries and Oceans, “The Government of Canada Announces the Historic Return of the Commercial Northern Cod Fishery in Newfoundland,” Canada.ca, June 26, 2024. https://www.canada.ca/en/fisheries-oceans/news/2024/06/the-government-of-canada-announces-the-historic-return-of-the-commercial-northern-cod-fishery-in-newfoundland-and-labrador.html ; Gerald L. Pocius, Textile Traditions of Eastern Newfoundland, (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1979), 66

Image Sources: 
All Images are my own authentic work unless otherwise stated.

Image 1: 
Nakamichi, Tomoko. “Crushed Can.” Sewing Pattern. Pattern Magic: Stretch Fabrics. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2012. Page 47.

Nakamichi, Tomoko. “Full Moon.” Sewing Pattern. Pattern Magic: Stretch Fabrics. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2012. Page 36-37.

Image 5:
Hoyt, Samantha. “A Quilting Bee...” A Gathering of Stitches, January 13, 2014. https://www.agatheringofstitches.com/blog/2014/1/13/a-quilting-bee.

YouTube. “Millions of Codfish Fishing Vessel - Salted Cod Processing in Factory - Catch Hundreds Tons Cod Fish.” Accessed February 20, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsPxgPrBTcA. 2:46