Intersections: Roksanda Ilinčić and David Adjaye
Roksanda Ilinčić and David Adjaye and discuss collaboration (image: Max Creasy)
For Disegno’s 10th anniversary, we’re republishing 29 stories, one from each of the journal’s back issues, selected by our founder Joahnna Agerman Ross. From Disegno #12, Sabrina Shim brings together fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčić and architect David Adjaye to discuss the connections between their respective disciplines.
The architect David Adjaye and fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčić are longstanding collaborators. They first worked together in 2004 and their most recent joint project was the flagship store for Iliničić’s brand Roksanda, which opened on Mount Street, London, in 2014. Such collaborations between architecture and fashion are now common. In the last 20 years architecture has become recognised as one of the most powerful tools for expressing corporate and creative identity within the fashion system, and collaborations are rife. So why aren’t these partnerships being considered more closely in critical discourse?
Consider the case studies. OMA created the Prada store in New York, Zaha Hadid devised Seoul and Hong Kong stores for Neil Barrett, and David Chipperfield designed Valentino flagships in Milan and London. Yet in spite of the calibre of these collaborations, they are often rashly dismissed as purely commercial transactions. The few projects that do seek to offer serious commentary on the intersections – such as MOCA in LA’s 2007 exhibition Skin & Bones, theorist Kazys Varnelis’s essay ‘Architecture After Couture’ and OMA’s The Harvard Guide to Shopping – are notable as exceptions to the rule. That architecture and fashion are capable of enhancing each other’s value is undoubted, yet discussion of that interplay is undermined by ambiguities or laziness in language; garments are frequently described as “architectural”, but what this actually means is notoriously hard to pin down.
Roksanda Ilinčić.
In an effort to untangle the relationship, Disegno invited Adjaye and Ilinčić to meet and discuss the connections between their fields. The resultant conversation is a first-hand account of interdisciplinary design between practitioners. While theory in this area may lag behind, the designers themselves feel the links between architecture and fashion keenly. The discussion between Adjaye and Ilinčić, reproduced in the pages that follow, is testament to this. Over the course of their meeting, the two discussed their distinctive approaches to design, the importance of diverse practice, the value of fashion design and architecture as independent disciplines, and the purpose behind encouraging dialogue between their fields. It is a conversation between two creators who are curious about the work of their contemporaries, no matter which area they may operate in.
Adjaye established his practice in 2000 and now has offices in London, New York and Accra. The practice works across typologies that span public buildings, social housing, retail spaces, temporary pavilions and private residences. This month, Adjaye will unveil his most important work to date – the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC. Uniting all of Adjaye’s projects is a sensitivity towards materiality and colour, as well as a thirst for embedding cultural discourse in built environments – a tendency likely to reach its zenith with the NMAAHC, the ornamental bronze facade of which references the metal balustrades and screens produced in towns such as New Orleans by freed African-American slaves. Alongside his work in architecture, Adjaye has collaborated with artists Chris Ofili and Olafur Eliasson, as well as working across music, furniture design and television.
David Adjaye
Ilinčić is similarly multidisciplinary. Born in Belgrade, Serbia, she initially studied architecture and applied arts at the city’s University of the Arts, before moving to London to attend the MA course in fashion design at Central Saint Martins. After graduating, Ilinčić showed her nascent womenswear label at London Fashion Week in 2005, quickly becoming known for her sophisticated silhouettes, use of opposing fabrics on the front and back of garments, and striking colour blocking. Her eponymous brand now has stockists in more than 40 countries and has branched out into jewellery and handbags, as well as ceramics executed in collaboration with the Swiss company Linck Keramik. Throughout Ilinčić’s career, her design work has been led by art and architecture – her pieces frequently allude to the creations of 20th-century modernists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers, Lygia Clark, Niki de Saint Phalle and Oscar Niemeyer. Yet in spite of Ilinčić’s pool of references and her architectural training, her garments are rarely described as “architectural” in the way that those of other designers are. Instead, her voluminous constructions and fluid shapes are typically discussed solely in terms of their femininity, sometimes at the cost of recognising their tailoring and materiality.
Adjaye and Ilinčić first met when she invited him to convert a warehouse delivery yard in King’s Cross, London, into a home. The result, the Lost House, was completed in 2004. Built around a black reception room illuminated by three light wells, the house features two hallmarks of Adjaye’s design: a barely perceptible entrance and a complex interplay between interior and exterior. At the time of the Lost House, both designers were at formative phases in their careers. Adjaye was in the middle of his first largescale international projects, while Ilinčić was about to launch her label. When reunited for the Mount Street store project 10 years later, they were both riding high.
“Architecture for me is a psychic dress, a psychic frame. It is something that is really outside of the body’s periphery, but which is still very much related to the body”
Completed in eight months, the store brings alive Adjaye’s fascination with contrasting surfaces, as well as Ilinčić’s striking sense of colour. A herringbone, monochromatic marble floor and angular brass racks zigzag across the Grade II-listed Georgian building, while tiers of pebbled cement cover the interior walls. Floating shelves in brass or blush pink jut out seemingly at random, while mirrors bounce natural light from the windows in front to frame the lush courtyard garden at the back. Downstairs, the same pink as upstairs is mixed with burgundy, aubergine and chartreuse to form the plush carpeting and felted walls of a salon and fitting rooms. It is a warm and intimate space, and an environment that embodies the connections between architecture and fashion design that its creators advocate. The store has not been designed to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of critical discourse, but rather as a space in which consumers can experience the interplay between architecture and fashion in the context of the everyday. It is a place in which the collaboration can play out in real time. It was in this space that Disegno invited Adjaye and Ilinčić to meet.
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Architecture and fashion are united by their physical sensitivity to what people do and experience within a space. How is that achieved while working at very different scales and how do you express that within the work you have created together?
Roksanda Ilinčić It is very important how garments make the person who is wearing them feel. That’s probably the most important element in my work. Of course, you also have to think about how the garments feel, how they’re structured, how they are constructed, what types of new technologies in terms of design and materials are incorporated within a certain garment, but I’m always quite aware of what women want to wear. Being a woman and designing for women brings a certain benefit in that you can test things yourself and quickly become aware if things are working or not working.
Draped fabrics in the studio of Roksanda Ilincic.
David Adjaye In architecture, physical sensitivity is a different thing because it’s not as implicated in the body and it’s not as fabulous as what you do. Architecture for me is a psychic dress, a psychic frame. It is something that is really outside of the body’s periphery, but which is still very much related to the body. It’s interesting listening to you because the same things apply to my practice: I listen to my clients, I’m looking at what their influences are and thinking about what things are around them in their world. But I’m also thinking about a certain set of elements that have a kind of universal quality, and which say something about the place they’re in and what they’re intended for. That kind of tuning is something I enjoy and which changes between projects. So I like the idea of universal architecture, but I don’t think it’s a reality. The universal is actually a postscript we apply to something after we have enjoyed it and when it’s kind of finished. It’s a ruin of something that has become something else, having vacated its programme or purpose. Everything has a specificity and searching for that specificity is the joy of creating work that has a sensitivity to human beings.
“Both architecture and clothes are there to shelter us. That is an important connection between the two disciplines”
Roksanda Both architecture and clothes are there to shelter us, albeit in quite different ways, and that is an important connection between the two disciplines. People respond quite differently to garments depending on their culture, education and personal preferences. What’s interesting for us is that we have customers from around the world, so you get quite different reactions to the same collection. You get different emotions and questions from people when they see the clothing.
Stacked material samples in the London office of Adjaye Associates.
David This idea of how people react to environments is a hot button for me. The things that we make have codes embedded in them, so the question is what happens when new people have to read those codes. Do they have to have the same background to be able to understand what the original codes were? The most beautiful thing about the way the world is, and what keeps it from being insanely boring, is that the codes and the people who read them are mismatched all the time. So designers need to keep remaking to refit new groups and the same thing happens with architecture. There are a series of orbits and we keep retooling things so that new groups come along and forget about the old codes – why lapels might have been big or why bow ties were fat, for instance. Within architecture, that’s about why a building is made out of a particular material, why something is thick or thin and so on. All these things come into play, which is where you begin to get layers upon layers. So a city like London, which is thousands of years old, has what I call hyper-information: layers in which people can culturally surf in a really sophisticated way. When I am making things, I’m always thinking about the references: what am I referring to and what are people going to understand from that information? I am interested in the notion of the metropole, for instance, by which I mean something that is more than the city – it’s the place where the global condensing of people into civic life is mutually respectful and somehow elevating. The information is not literature, but it is a kind of literature – how do you continually remake information so that people realise what a government building is, what a house is, what a market is, what a park is? It may sound obvious, but it’s not.
Roksanda I think the hardest part is to make people comfortable with what you do. You can get into over-designing or over-intellectualising certain things, which people may find slightly intimidating. For me, it is important to make people feel happy with your work.
A model for Adjaye’s Hallmark House in Johannesburg, South Africa. The project is an ongoing redevelopment of a 1970s mixed-use tower block and will reopen in 2017.
David The idea of emotion is interesting. When I talk about emotion, I don’t mean in terms of being happy or sad, but rather emotion as a philosophical construction – an idea of a state of being. So the state of being is the emotion; the emotion is simply the way in which you feel balance, which is what I am interested in within architecture. The emotional state of architecture is its having a cognitive impact, but not being overbearing, over-questioning you, or making you feel that you’re in the wrong place or the right place. Emotional imbalance happens when you are out of sync with that system or you don’t understand what that system is. So it’s when you start to think, “Oh, I don’t know if I should step here,” or “I don’t know if I should walk here,” within a space. When a building is really working, it puts you in balance. I love the way that children use my buildings, for instance. They go into them with no script and seem able to read the beauty without the baggage. They read the information as it is and that is profound.
Roksanda For me, emotion is almost like falling in love with an object, which is quite a big deal. People come to a fashion show and they’re surrounded by the clothes and the music – the whole story. They see the garment and fall in love, such that they want and need to have it immediately, and they can’t wait the six months for it to arrive in the stores. It’s this notion of desire, which is about returning to the idea of something that feels comfortable and which doesn’t intimate you. It’s something that feels so precious that you have to have it, which is probably the most important element designers have to achieve.
David How do you start working?
The flagship Roksanda store on Mount Street was designed as a collaboration between Adjaye and Ilincic. Based within a Grade II-listed Georgian building, the design introduced concrete walls, marble floors and blush pink shelving units.
Roksanda Well, I think you design constantly; I don’t think there is necessarily a time when you can say, “Now! I’m starting now.” You get inspired all the time and everything you do is, in a way, a design process. What is important, however, is that when you’re working on a certain collection you focus on that, because there are always so many different directions that you could take it in. So for me it is important to focus on one particular story and to develop that as much as I can. Very often I start a story, but the journey is so long and there are many different levels that you can change all the way up to the show, thanks to elements like the styling, the set and the music. Sometimes I don’t even know what is going to be at the catwalk until it actually happens, which is exciting. I love this idea that you can create and create all the way to the end. The process is crazy because it never stops, but that’s the beauty of it – it’s what drives anyone who is creative.
David It’s the muse. It never, ever stops, but there are definitely different speeds, which is nice. There is a kind of ambient speed – where you are on holiday, perhaps, but you are still ticking away. Maybe it’s a time when you’re incubating something in your mind. I really like this idea that you are always designing, but you don’t actually have anything specific. Your mind is just constantly clarifying things, and then there comes a moment when suddenly there is a problem or a project. You jump onto that and begin work with your team – the problem being that your poor team don’t have this same freedom in the process. So you come in with an idea and have to try and take people on a journey during which they are catching up with you. But as a designer there isn’t an on/off switch and there isn’t a process of thinking, “OK, I need to design, let me start looking at pictures.” If I think of someone who does that, then I’m not sure what to call that person. I’m not trying to be catty, but that’s a very different process, whereas it should just flow out of you. Artists are permanently in a state of work, which makes for very weird characters. You have to really like a designer or an architect to be with them as they are always in a zone.
A brass display unit in the Mount Street store.
Roksanda When my Mount Street store came up, I was desperate for you to take on the project, because I wanted to create a space that was unusual for a fashion retail store. I wanted to create something that felt like sculpture, which was always something that had fascinated me about your work, in which there is a very thin line between art and a functional building. Another thing I love about your work is that you create architecture that doesn’t need much in terms of furnishings because it’s so beautiful on its own.
David I’m always interested in this idea of disarming people such that they can discover things. What are the tools stopping people feeling like they shouldn’t do something? Within my buildings I want people to do things, so everything from the way in which their first view of the space is set up is really critical. This store, for instance, is not formulaic. You enter from the corner and the space then opens itself up and invites you to engage. I always tend to think of my plans as gardens. They’re not like French gardens in terms of being set pieces, it’s just that they offer you a way to discover them – the way in which they invite you in, create vistas and pull you through. But I actually choose to work across many scales now because I am frustrated by the speed at which architecture produces. I work a lot in furniture and installations because that allows me different speeds and different operations. I am a junkie for doing things and my worst fear is boredom. If I don’t have something to do, I will start photographing or drawing. The works have to happen because there is a constant need to express.
A vase developed by Ilincic with Linck Keramik.
Roksanda Fashion has become too quick for my liking lately, because sometimes you don’t have the time to reflect on what you have done – what was good, what maybe wasn’t so great. You are constantly, constantly chasing the following season. And it is not even just about the seasons – there are many collections that are done in between seasons, as well as external collaborations. So I hope that the pace will slow down and I think that there are strong tendencies in fashion to give us a little more breathing space. I do love the constant design process, however, and how it doesn’t allow you to stop. I think design is very much about expressing yourself through different mediums. In my case, it is not just clothing but also lifestyle, which is something that lends itself to fashion. Recently I have been doing quite a few ceramic projects; I am interested in furniture and I love collaborating with artists. These projects always feel like some kind of interception, which then pushes me further into fashion. It is good to do those collaborations, as I then feel fresh coming back to fashion.
David Working in a multidisciplinary way can take you to a new science that you can’t touch in your own practice. It maybe offers a new way of seeing something, which refreshes your core practice, whatever that may be. There is a way within that such that things get pounded and folded over, which is a method for revitalising the creative process. As a designer, you can get very quickly into a system of doing things, so the number one trick is to disrupt your flow because that forces a different perspective. You let your range and vision be disturbed for a bit, and then input something else.
A model of Adjaye’s 70-73 Piccadilly, a proposed mixed-use redevelopment of a block of disused postwar buildings in Mayfair, London.
Roksanda I don’t know if it is good or bad to talk about it in this way, but you do have certain elements that apply in architecture and which also apply to my dresses. Above all, it is a culture of shapes and the way that things are constructed. I call my dresses fluid architecture – they have never had a corset or any type of restrictive construction that doesn’t feel comfortable for the body. I have always felt aware of dresses that are absolutely beautiful, but which are not so pleasant to wear. I prefer to have something like invisible strings inside the construction, which you could see as equivalent to an architecture without walls. So I can see a parallel there, although I don’t know whether that is a good or bad parallel to make.
“Architecture is a construction. It’s an abstraction, it’s an artifice and it’s not real. It is the conscious construction of an idea”
David It depends if it’s helpful to the end goal. When we talk about seeing things through an architectural lens, what do we mean by that? I don’t think we literally mean the implicit nature of architecture, but we do mean the fundamentals of architecture – the way in which it can embody certain Platonic systems. For me it is about a certain clarity. Architecture with a capital “A” has a kind of clarity of being in the world – it is what it is. You can name a million structures that have a singularity. Your work, for instance, has an immediate power. I think that the word “architecture” is slightly esoteric, however, as a lot of people who use it don’t actually know what the hell they are talking about. I like to ask people what exactly they mean by “architecture”, and then they will go off into their bit. And I’m like: “Interesting. Hmmn, that’s not what I would call architecture...”
Garments from the Roksanda pre-fall 2016 collection, embellished with airy spheres of carefully constructed lilac fabric.
Roksanda But couldn’t you say that everything that surrounds us is architecture?
David See, I would disagree with that. That’s talking about it in a purer sense and elevating it to Nirvana. But back on earth – no. Architecture is a construction. It’s an abstraction, it’s an artifice and it’s not real. It has its reality, but it is the conscious construction of an idea in the world. Nature is beautiful, but it’s not architecture; a vernacular building is beautiful, but it’s not architecture even though it fulfils a very primary need. It may have architectural qualities, but architecture is the construction of an idea, such as, “I’m going to make a church or a tomb.” Which is completely weird if you think about it. Imagine landing as an alien: “Why are you making a church and a tomb? You don’t need to – if you die, you can just go straight into the ground.” Architecture is the construction that we use as human beings to say we’re human beings and that we live in the world. It may be very powerful and very beautiful, but it’s not tangible in that sense. The medieval village was not architecture until someone said that they were going to build a Renaissance facade in the village and everyone was going to look at it.
Both Adjaye and Ilincic have studios in London, but as their practises have grown so too have their travel schedules.
Roksanda Apart from sheltering us physically, garments are sheltering us mentally. Fashion is almost like some kind of armour – you put a dress on and it makes you feel really good or really unpleasant. When you wear something to protect yourself from the outside world, you are saying a lot. You can show where you come from, what your culture is, what your needs are, your beliefs. It is a very, very powerful tool. Which is why I think it is important to feel comfortable in what you are wearing because if you’re not that will show. Very often people wear things that are not them and you can feel that juxtaposition.
David My notion of separation between the interior and exterior within architecture is a device to help reconnection. I celebrate exteriors because there is so much permeability between them and interiors at the moment. We have become so accustomed to the idea that somehow the home and the city are interconnected and woven into each other that we have forgotten where the outside ends and the inside begins – except when it snows. It’s like how if you take kids to the countryside and they’re like, “Oh my god, there are stars up there.” I find that fundamentally problematic. I want artifice but I also want you to know where you are, so my notion of separation is to reconnect you back to the fundamentals. I want you to see light as a powerful, visceral element, not just a light bulb; I want you to feel the rain when it comes in. I think we are in an amazing time when we should be able to have both. We’re not in a dumb technological age in which you just have to shield yourself from it – you can actually be in nature and also outside of nature at the same time. So my game is intensifying our relationship with the natural world, but also intensifying the interconnectedness of the artificial world.
Ilincic develops her collections from her studio in east London. It is here that her early material experimentation takes place.
Roksanda Which is what you did with the Lost House project – our first collaboration. My husband and I were lucky enough to discover this incredible old poppy factory in King’s Cross and I wanted to find someone who had a special sensibility to convert it. I absolutely fell in love when I saw your work. We ended up with this incredible, very dark space on the ground floor of the building. You couldn’t feel what was happening outside apart from by looking at the three light wells that were embedded within that space. When it rained or snowed it was like looking at the most beautiful art installation within these wells, with snow and rain almost swirling around you. In the case of the Mount Street store, I wanted something very welcoming and different from a classic retail environment. Every detail is properly thought through because there’s this idea of creating a perfect environment for my dresses to live in. It’s telling a story that is not just about the clothes, but about the lifestyle, the woman, the freedom and the quality of everything I am trying to do with my design.
David Generally, I think creative collaborations are really tough as they require a kind of sympathy between people, but we had that instantly. Normally when you collaborate you are very careful to try and guide and listen at the same time, but in this case there was trust. I always wanted to bring in your ideas because it’s your flagship store and I wanted it to reflect whatever energy you felt it needed to have. But this is a listed building, so realistically you can’t do anything with it except paint it. So we had to set up a strategy where we were building a building within a building, which was the only way we could get round the conservation issues. You don’t want to fight against a Georgian interior – which is magnificent, amazing, perfect and architectural – so we had to bring in our own language. But I felt that language had to be counter-cultural because, although your stuff is really luxurious, there is always a wonderful little slap to it. The work may be lush, but it also makes you do something that you would not have thought about otherwise: a certain colour combination that you have put on, modernity that you have taken on board, even if you didn’t realise you were doing it. We had to have that surprise, which is where we brought in the concrete, the marble and the colours. This store is a Roksanda dress.
Words and interview Sabrina Shim
Photographs Max Creasy
This article was originally published in Disegno #12. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.