2026-11-15 01:40:58
A white plastic house of rounded shells raised on a single pedestal, among autumn trees.
I published the House board this week with four hundred and eight images and one apt quote from Le Corbusier: “A house is a machine for living in.”
Like Garment before it, the board doesn’t explain itself. That’s by design — it’s a thing to be looked at and thought about. What follows here are the notes on the back of the sleeve: what I was looking for; what the images turned out to have in common; the stories behind a few of them.
House is the second board in a series I’ve been thinking of as “what we’ll … in the future.” Garment was the first; food, getting around, and work are still to come. The concept for this one is where we’ll live in the future, which sounded simple to me until I started doing the research.
I had actually started dropping images into the folder long before I’d decided what the board was for, so the first real edit was a matter of throwing out houses that were merely interesting to me. A house didn’t qualify simply by being curious, unique, innovative, or beautiful. What qualified an image was a claim. Each one had to show an idea about how the house will change: a proposal, a prototype, an experiment, a new material or technology, or a new way of living together. And, as before, no film sets — with a couple of exceptions I’ll explain later.
The research behind it went deep. It started with Socrates explaining why a house should face south and ends on Mars, and in between it covered design, location, materials, who lives in a house, what happens there, what features it has, and the technology inside it. That net caught about a hundred and fifty distinct ideas, many of which were entirely new to me.
Also as before, I didn’t start with themes. I just started with a folder. The themes showed up once I saw the whole thing together and began to make choices about what would comprise the board.
Here are the three themes that stand out to me.
Le Corbusier meant something specific by his sentence. In 1923, the machine was the model of efficiency — standardized, mass-produced, stripped of whatever didn’t serve its purpose — and a house built the same way would be cheaper and better, the way an ocean liner or a car was. Plenty of the board takes him at his word.
What struck me, looking at all of it together, is how many other kinds of machine the house turns out to be.
The first is the environmental machine, and the Earthship is the purest example of it. Its design treats natural processes as the house’s working parts: earth for thermal mass, a greenhouse for heat, planters for filtering water. (More on it below.)
At the far end of the same line is the autonomous house, which makes self-sufficiency the entire point. Brenda and Robert Vale wrote the book on it in 1975 and later built one in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, an ordinary-looking house that collects its own water and makes its own power. Michael Jantzen built an Autonomous Dwelling in the late 1970s that ran on the sun, a small wind turbine, and rain stored in bladders under the floor, and that folded up for travel. Even the corporate house of the future got there early. The 1967 Philco-Ford house that Walter Cronkite toured for CBS recirculated its own water and drew all of its electricity from its own fuel cell.
I’m particularly partial to this idea. Autonomy has always been one of my prime values.
The third kind of machine doesn’t produce anything at all; it has a different set of functions in mind that align with adaptation. Gary Chang has rebuilt the tiny Hong Kong apartment he grew up in several times, and in its 2007 version, walls slide along tracks in the ceiling and turn one small room into twenty-four. It works like a Swiss Army knife. The house is a machine for the functions of living, and the thing being managed is space itself. Joe Colombo’s Total Furnishing Unit and the rooms on castors in Shigeru Ban’s Naked House come at the same idea from different directions.
Of course the promises of the house-as-machine appeal to me greatly — the efficiency, the self-sufficiency, the ecological harmony, the endurance — but I must also admit that what interests me most about this idea is how often it stops short in application. I think the autonomous house is one of the most important ideas to human culture — not just on the board. In our own time it has been reframed as the “off-grid” house. People want to be free of municipal services, and not only because it’s efficient. Somewhere along the way we stopped trusting the grid, not just because it’s old and crumbling, but because we’ve experienced the decay of the systems beneath it. The agreements and ordering of society are social, and they serve as the foundation of physical systems, like the grid. “Off Grid,” then, means more than just functional autonomy, and it is very much in the zeitgeist.
Yet with a few exceptions, the projects on the board don’t fully reckon with what living off the grid would require. Some have solar panels. One has its own wind turbine. Very few take water as seriously as the Earthship does.
I’ve always wondered what a fully autonomous house would be. Not just a house that generates its own power, but one that is a fully closed system. Imagine every house being issued a fixed allowance of water, once, which it then recycled indefinitely. A hundred percent is probably impossible — water becomes vapor, and something is always lost — but perhaps the vapor could be caught, too. I haven’t found anyone who has imagined or built that house. But the Earthship gets closer than anything else on the board.
I read E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” for the first time last year. It was published in 1909, and it imagines a humanity living underground, each person alone in an identical cell. Food, baths, music, and contact with thousands of friends all arrive at the press of a button, so nobody ever has to leave, and almost nobody does. People meet through screens. It is the darkest version of the house that delivers everything. It was an extreme for 1909. It isn’t so far from where many of us are now.
The BBC adapted it for television in 1966, as the first episode of the second series of Out of the Unknown, and its cells could have come out of the same molds as half the plastic houses on the board.
I had assumed that the visions of the future house mostly hadn’t seen this coming. That turned out to be only half right. Working from home was forecast early and often. In the 1967 CBS broadcast, Cronkite stands in a home office lined with screens for the news, the weather, and stocks, with a videophone beside them, and suggests that in the twenty-first century we may not go to work at all, because “the work would come to us.” Jack Nilles coined the word “telecommuting” in 1973, and he worried about loneliness from the start. Alvin Toffler’s “electronic cottage” arrived in 1980. Even earlier, in 1966, Jim Sutherland had built ECHO IV, a home computer made from surplus industrial parts that ran his family’s accounts, shopping lists, and thermostat from four cabinets in their Pittsburgh house.
What none of them pictured was what all of that would do to the house.
I can speak to that personally. In 2018, the company I work for gave up its headquarters; most of us worked from home and came into a WeWork part-time. When the pandemic hit, we went fully distributed, and we never went back. My house has been my office ever since, and my wife’s, too. She goes into her office a few days a week, but our home office is built for both of us now.
At first, that space was improvised. We had a home office, but it was never set up to be used all day, every day, and it turns out that asks things of a house I hadn’t thought about. It needed better furniture, a better power setup, better lighting, and better connectivity. We didn’t have a fiber connection then; we do now. It also needed acoustic treatment, because most of my working day happens through microphones and cameras. Working from home changed how we use this 12-by-13-foot room, which takes up about 8 percent of the house; working in this space changed how we think about it. A space you broadcast from is projected outward, into other people’s screens, and you begin to design it for them as much as for yourself.
And then there’s the wear. We moved into our house in 2013, and it’s about eighty years old. The pandemic arrived roughly halfway through our time here, and the wear we’ve put on the house since 2020 radically exceeds what we put on it in the seven years before. A house that’s inhabited around the clock ages differently than most architects would have expected of the average home. The forecasts for working from home were all about the equipment. None of the ones I found considered what living with the equipment all day would do to the space around it.
As an admitted neat-freak, I think about this constantly: the future of the house as determined by its maintenance. There’s an image on the board of an imagined robotic vacuum from the mid twentieth century; we got that. But the house itself is a filter — for sun, air, water, even sound. Again, the Earthship gets close to designing it as one, but it could go further. I’ve imagined a house that uses its HVAC system to vacuum the house, not just push and filter air. What if a house maintained a distributed water reservoir for hydration, hygiene, and heating/cooling? What if windows were solar panels? All possible, but not common.
The board has its own literal versions of the house you never leave. Biosphere 2 sealed eight people into a glass world in the Arizona desert in 1991, for two years. NASA’s Mars Dune Alpha, a house printed inside a building at Johnson Space Center, has now held two crews for more than a year each (more on it below). And the board has the inverse, too: Toyo Ito’s Pao for the Tokyo nomad woman, from 1985, in which the city does the house’s work. Convenience stores, coin laundries, and cafés take over its functions, and the house shrinks to a translucent tent around three pieces of furniture.
In the Garment notes, I wrote about clothes as containers for bodies. A house is a container for people, and architects think about the next layer in: if a house contains people, it also contains what they do. The board is full of that thinking.
Much of it is about the kitchen, which has been the testing ground for the future house for as long as there has been one. Catharine Beecher redrew it in 1869 as a workstation, with everything in reach. The 1893 Chicago fair showed it running on electricity. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen of 1926 made it a small, efficient laboratory, and in 1959, Nixon and Khrushchev argued capitalism against socialism in a model American kitchen in Moscow. Ten years after that, the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue offered a Honeywell computer for storing recipes, for $10,600, and there’s no evidence anyone bought one.
The other half of that thinking is about who shares what. Jean-Baptiste Godin, a stove manufacturer, built the Familistère at Guise for his workers between 1859 and 1884, with apartments on galleries around glass-roofed courts where children could play in any weather. In Stockholm in 1935, Sven Markelius and Alva Myrdal built a collective house with a central kitchen and a staffed nursery, so the tenants wouldn’t have to do housework at all. In Denmark, Sættedammen opened in 1972 as the first modern cohousing community, five years after Bodil Graae argued in a newspaper that children should have a hundred parents. Each of them starts from what people do all day and builds the house around it.
Then there are the houses that were staged rather than lived in. Alison and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future, built for the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition in 1956, had no roof. Visitors looked down into it from a raised platform while actors went about the life of 1980 below. These houses were less about architecture than about the experience of being inside them, and the broadcasts go further in the same direction, because they could show the activities themselves. Two of them are among the samples below.
What they share is the assumption that the computer would be part of the building, built into desks and counters and walls. That was a reasonable guess about a technology that filled rooms. It’s strange to think about now. I recorded my first thoughts for these notes on a phone that can do more than any of those houses could.
Michael Reynolds started building houses out of cans and bottles near Taos, New Mexico, in the early 1970s. The first true Earthship dates to 1987, and the Greater World community, on 633 acres held in common, to 1994.
The walls are old tires rammed with earth, each up to three hundred pounds once packed, plastered over and set with bottles that let the light through. The house is partly buried for thermal mass, and its south face is a greenhouse that gathers heat and holds it. The rule for water, in the builders’ own words, is to “use each drop four times.” Rain and snow are caught on the roof and filtered for drinking and washing. The greywater from sinks and showers then runs through planters inside the greenhouse, where the plants clean it, and it’s pumped back up to flush the toilet. What leaves the toilet goes to a planter outside, and the land finishes the job.
It is the most organic-looking house on the board, and it is a machine through and through. The look comes from what it’s made of, which is mostly what everyone else threw away.
Gary Chang grew up in this Hong Kong apartment. It’s thirty-two square meters, about 344 square feet; his family moved in in 1976, and he has rebuilt it several times since.
In the 2007 version, the walls hang from tracks in the ceiling and slide past one another, and the one room becomes twenty-four: a kitchen, a library, a home cinema, and so on, depending on what the moment calls for. The apartment was later recreated at M+. The diagram on the board, which shows every configuration at once, is my favorite image of the house as a machine, because the only thing being rearranged is space.
In 1967, Philco-Ford built a mock-up of the home of the future, designed by Paul McCobb, and used it twice. So, another not-quite-built home, but very worthy of the board. CBS borrowed the set for “At Home, 2001,” Walter Cronkite’s episode of The 21st Century, which aired on March 12, 1967. Philco-Ford also made its own film in it, 1999 A.D., directed by Lee Madden and starring a young Wink Martindale.
The film gets a remarkable amount right. The mother shops from a console in the kitchen, browsing clothes on a screen; the father pays from his own console, and the narrator explains the arrangement without a trace of irony. A screen tells her she’s four hundred calories over her suggested lunch and recommends cold roast beef, a green salad, and a no-cal beer. The son goes to school in an education room and plays chess against the living room wall. The news comes off a printer.
The film also overlooked some pretty important things. The actual miniaturization of computing is an obvious miss, as is the makeup of the family, and its roles. The roles are exactly as fixed as they were in 1967, and the house of tomorrow is wrapped tightly around them. It’s a good illustration of how a forecast can get the activities right and the people wrong.
Twenty-two years later, on December 12, 1989, the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World built a house of 2020 in its studio. Judith Hann and Howard Stableford presented it with the futurist Christine MacNulty, who had started a home-of-the-future project, and David Button, a researcher in glass.
Most of what they predicted was about making the technology disappear: lights that switch on as you walk between rooms and learn how bright you like them, power drawn from pads on the wall instead of plugs, heating that learns your routine and warms only the rooms you’ll use. Button’s glass was the centerpiece. With thin coatings, he said, a window could be diffused for privacy or tuned against glare; a glass tabletop could become a display; and on command, a window could become a wall you could decorate, or a television, or a computer screen.
A good deal of that arrived, as products, if not as houses built around them. But the program’s best prediction was its last one: that there would be “no single home of the future,” but millions of different ones.
NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, CHAPEA, lives in Mars Dune Alpha: a 1,700-square-foot house printed by ICON inside a building at Johnson Space Center, with private sleeping quarters, a kitchen, and a place to grow food.
The first crew of four lived there from June 2023 to July 2024. The second went in on October 19, 2025, and came out on October 31 of this year, after 378 days. It’s the most extreme version of the house you never leave on the board, and it tests all three themes at once: a machine that has to supply everything, a house its occupants can’t leave, and a container for every activity four people will have for a year.
Early in the CBS broadcast, before the tour of the house, Cronkite talks with Philip Johnson about the future of the single-family home, and Johnson isn’t optimistic. Little houses scattered across tracts are, he says, a waste of land: a bit of lawn on four sides, no privacy, no garden of your own, all built alike by developers rather than architects. And it can’t last, because “the cost of servicing the house is growing by such leaps and bounds” that the taxes on it can’t pay for the water, sewers, and roads the town has to supply. The program follows him with a projection that ninety percent of Americans will live in urban areas by the twenty-first century, and then goes to Montreal to look at Habitat 67 as a possible answer.
He was right and wrong. The arithmetic he described is real, and the density came, but not in the form he expected. Suburbia didn’t end. It grew, and it kept growing, and the sprawl around cities became a kind of city of its own. What changed was the proportion. Lots got smaller (the median lot for a new single-family house in the United States hit a record low of 8,177 square feet in 2019) while the houses on them got bigger, until the average new house peaked at 2,689 square feet in 2015. The houses moved closer together, and in the space between the apartment building and the house, the townhouse filled in.
And then there’s my house, which I don’t think anyone on the board would have predicted. It’s an eighty-year-old, four-bedroom house of about two thousand square feet, on a double lot in an old neighborhood on the edge of downtown Durham, five minutes’ walk from the center of the city. Because of that extra land, we keep chickens and some permaculture going. The house is surrounded by rain barrels, and we have a solar array. Inside, there’s an office built for two people who work from home all day. It’s a mid-century city house that touches nearly every theme on this board, assembled in a combination none of the forecasts describe.
That’s what fascinates me about trying to predict the future. It ends up a synthesis of the things we can forecast, intermixed with surprise. In our case, the surprises were a pocket of disuniformity (a little house near the center of a city with more land than you’d expect, and room for a way of life you wouldn’t imagine there) and a pandemic that hurtled a lot of people into working from home years before they would have chosen it. Johnson was sure the individual house was finished, and Philco-Ford was sure it knew who would live in it. The BBC got closer than either, by declining to choose.
2026-11-13 02:31:23
Some monks thought the hermits had it too easy.
That’s the detail that resonated most as I read from Jamie Kreiner’s The Wandering Mind. A man goes off to a cave to escape the distractions of the world, which sounds like the harder path, and his colleagues back at the monastery raise an eyebrow. Why? Because out there, nobody sees him. Nobody shares his purpose closely enough to tell him when he’s drifting — and with one instrument, there’s no way to tell drift from progress. Solitude, for a social animal, may be painful, but it also affords the bliss of ignorance. The monks who chose to live together were not choosing the pleasure of conviviality, but the accountability of others.
Living with twelve others was the harder practice. Not because of what they shared, but because of what they were submitting to: the watchful eye of their brother. The correction they obliged themselves to hear and share. The commune was withdrawal from society, yes. But withdrawal from exposure? No. The monastery was a machine for staying accountable while staying apart.
I’ve been reading that alongside a novel.
In John Crowley’s Engine Summer, published in 1979, a woman whose role is to carry the oral history of her village explains to a young man how the world before the collapse came apart. Among the culprits: phones. They let people speak to one another without being near one another, and what that permitted was a kind of carelessness. You could say a thing and not stand there while it landed.
Crowley was writing about household landlines. He had no internet to extrapolate from. And the passage still reads like a description of the device in my pocket, which is the part that fascinates me. Forty-seven years of engineering between his object and mine, and the complaint hasn’t changed.
The familiar form of that complaint is about cruelty — anonymity lowers inhibition, people behave in comment threads as they never would in a room. All true, and thoroughly established. But I think the more precise loss is duration. In a room you have to stay. You watch what you put out there land on a face, and then you keep standing there. Hanging up, closing a tab, leaving a thread — all of these are escapes from the obligation to witness.
The monks had two positions and knew the price of each. Isolation cost you correction. Immersion cost you protection from a culture that didn’t share your values. Every point on that spectrum charged something.
What the phone introduced is a position that appears to charge nothing. The trappings of isolation, in that you’re spared the friction of other people. The trappings of immersion, in that you can speak into the world at any hour. Expression without experience. You get to send; you don’t have to receive.
This is the hermit’s cave with better lighting — the same missing second reading, the same inability to tell connection from performance. But there is one critical difference: the hermit knew he was alone. He built a wall and paid for it knowingly. The phone hides the bill.
So why do we keep choosing it, twenty years into knowing better?
I have a colleague in Eastern Europe whose work matters enormously to me and whom I have never been in a room with. That relationship does not exist without the mediation. It isn’t a consolation prize, or a thinner version of a real thing. It’s load-bearing in my life, and no amount of monastic wisdom makes it otherwise. Three years ago, he joined a long list of people I know and care about but would never have met without the internet.
That’s the mechanism. The benefits are undeniable, which is what makes them such a good alibi. Tell someone they’re on their phone too much and they’ll tell you about their friend in Warsaw, and they won’t be lying. Every indictment meets a true exception. An appetite with no justification gets corrected eventually. An appetite that can always point at something good goes on indefinitely.
I was early to social media and early out of it. The friendships I made there — real ones, a few of them fifteen years old now — came from Twitter when Twitter was polite text and argument, and from the comment sections of blogs. Not one came from the platforms built to model relationships. Friendster and Facebook — that whole genre — assumed you arrived with your people and merely needed somewhere to keep them.
A social graph is a filter before it is anything else. It admits who you already chose. What produced the friendships was the opposite: encountering a stranger on the strength of something they’d said, with no prior claim on my attention. That’s something close to walking into a room full of strangers.
I may not be on much social media, but I still publish, and the publishing offers the same thing. I don’t choose who reads, and people write back. By every measure those platforms were optimized for, a personal website is the inferior instrument. It is also the one still introducing me to new people.
I’m still left with other questions.
We regulate appetite. Not perfectly, and not everyone — there’s a spectrum, with real suffering at both ends — but most people, most days, know when they’re hungry and when they’ve had enough, without deliberating about it. It’s close to autonomic. I’d like to think we get there with digital technology, that moderating mediation becomes something a person simply does, the way they put down a fork.
But the comparison turns on me the moment I lean on it any harder. Satiety is an ancient signal working in an environment we constantly redesign and rebuild to defeat it. We engineer flavors to stimulate more hunger, we increase portions, we sell candy as if it’s nutrition. Availability is made constant. Our regulators didn’t fail. They’ve been met by active opposition.
This is the same story a third time. A monk’s correction, defeated by a cave that feels like progress. Accountability, counterfeited by approval that costs the sender nothing. Fullness, counterfeited by food built to outrun it.
Whenever I consider the balances of modern life — of solitude and being together, of input and output, of the organic and the digital — I’ve always assumed the question was whether we can learn to moderate. Whether we have the wherewithal to choose the right things. But I’m not sure now. The question may be whether anything we’ve built a countermeasure against stays readable.
2026-11-11 02:37:19
Dava Newman seated in the MIT BioSuit, a close-fitting grey suit laced with red tensioning lines, wearing a bubble helmet, against a radial corrugated backdrop.
I published a mood board called Garment on Sunday. It contains six hundred and ninety images and no explanation at all, aside from a textual aperitif courtesy of Virginia Woolf: “They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”
A mood board is wordless by design. I want a board to be looked at before it’s read, and a caption under every picture would turn looking into reading. But the silence costs something. Months of hunting go into one of these, and almost none of that work survives into the thing you actually see. Somebody finds an image of a dress made of glass and has no way to learn that it is, in fact, a dress made of glass.
Liner notes solve this. You put the record on first. Then, somewhere in the second or third listen, you turn the sleeve over and find out who played the bass. So here are mine.
The folder is called “Garment,” which is about as wide a container as I could have chosen. I’ve written before about naming the collection first and letting the name do its own work. What the name doesn’t do is explain the imagined or final form of the board, because that is the result of a concept I begin with and rubric I use to keep the board in focus.
For this one, the concept was garments of the future.
The initial rubric was simple, mostly defined by what I didn’t have in mind: Not costume, and not fiction. (By the way, I keep a separate board for design fiction.) What qualified them was a claim: each one proposes something about what clothing could be, and most of them propose it in a way you can see without being told. These garments had to be real; they had to be made, worn, and photographed.
That’s the whole rubric; general, yes, but narrower than it sounds. It excludes nearly all of fashion, which is enormously inventive about silhouette and almost never inventive about what a garment is for.
As I gathered imagery and researched the history of garment futurism, the rubric took on a bit more detail: material innovation, clothing as protection, new functional purposes, technological integration, environmental interactions. The more I learned, the more fuel I had for discovery.
I never begin with themes in mind. One of the purposes of a board like Garment is to communicate themes and ideas visually without being didactic. This is meant to work for the viewer and for me. I want to be able to immerse myself in a board and discover what it presents — what a gathering of images around an idea can teach. And so themes are emergent; they show up afterward.
The first is the most immediate: the material is mostly not organic, and it shows.
A garment qualifies when the synthetic nature of the thing is the first fact you read off the picture. Libbey’s spun-glass gown. Rabanne’s plastic discs joined with metal rings. Chalayan’s Tyvek envelope. The Vollebak graphene jacket. Suzanne Lee’s bacterial cellulose reads as neither woven nor knitted, which is the point. Jen Keane’s shoe upper is grown around a yarn scaffold. On’s LightSpray, a filament sprayed around a body in about three minutes.
None of these are trying to blend in. They wear their innovation on their sleeve, pun fully intended.
What makes this theme argue itself is that its opposite is also on the board. Nylon stockings, the Dacron suit, the Qiana coat — all synthetics, all engineered to pass for organics like silk, wool, and cotton. Two chemical industries, same decades, opposite ambitions. One wants you to notice, the other wants you not to. The proof is in what the board does best: juxtaposition. Put the Libbey fabric close-up next to the stockings and the whole point is right there without a word under either one.
The second theme was the one that surprised me most, and will probably stick with me the longest.
So much of clothing history is containment. The body is pushed into a shape the garment has already decided on, and the person’s job is to fit. We’ve always approximated a body in our designs, no matter how unaccommodating our materials. A suit of armor is, by design, an inflexible weight welded into a body shape to protect what squeezes inside. A corset goes the opposite route, designed to reshape the body within. Our history is riddled with garments we accommodate or endure.
But what I kept noticing on this board is the reverse: garments where the material advance was motivated by its yielding to us. They are more flexible, more durable, more forgiving of a body in motion.
Thayaht’s Tuta, for example, is one piece, few seams, and free; its patterns given away in a newspaper. Stepanova’s production suit was made for an artist who intended to work in it. The Bloomer costume stands out, too, with the measure of the norm it broke how hard it was mocked at the time. Petit Pli is a contemporary example, engineered to expand in several directions so a child keeps wearing the same garment through a growth spurt. Miyake and Fujiwara’s A-POC is an entire wardrobe inside a continuous knitted tube that the wearer cuts out themselves.
And then I stumbled upon a cluster I didn’t know existed and had a name: adaptive clothing. A school uniform polo whose buttons are decoration over a velcro placket. A teal blouse that snaps open along the entire shoulder so it can be put on someone lying down. A hoodie with a one-handed hood, magnets where the buttons would be, and cuffs that adjust rather than pull over. Children’s sweatpants that open the full length of the side seam so they go on without raising the legs, and that clear a cast.
These complete the theme. Accommodation stops being a design value and becomes the entire function. They also sit at the far end of the board’s price range, which turns out to matter.
The third theme is the most obvious idea.
Yes, the job dictates the shape. Hard suits, flight suits, flame-resistant Nomex, Kevlar. But what makes those futuristic rather than merely practical is the ambition underneath them. These are garments that let a person occupy somewhere they cannot otherwise survive. Vacuum. Fire. Pressure. Depth. The suit is the condition of entry and expands the occupiable world.
Lucy Orta’s Refuge Wear is the purest version on the board, because it refuses to stop at the body — a garment that converts into shelter, which is the same idea taken one step further out.
Then dial it back toward ordinary life and the same logic works. Athletic clothing that lets a body do a thing it couldn’t otherwise do, and keeps doing it after repeated stretching and washing. Workwear customized down to a very specific gesture — the hammer loop being the obvious case, though the board has plenty of garments imagining work nobody does yet.
The boundary between this theme and the second one is porous, and I’ve stopped trying to seal it. A spacesuit accommodates the body in the most literal possible way. It’s armor against the crush of pressure, not the mace — armor of off-world exploration. A velcro placket is much more mundane, simply a function the form obeys. The themes have blurred edges, but I think they remain distinct points, and the blur is always where the interesting things are.
The Libbey Glass Company wove glass fibre together with silk and made a gown for the Chicago World’s Fair. A surviving skirt is at the Deutsches Museum.
The board has a full shot and a fabric close-up, and the close-up is the better image, because it shows the fibre. It is the oldest thing in the collection and still among the strangest, and it was made for a world’s fair, which tells you exactly what it was for.
I’d assumed this was a styling editorial. It isn’t. Vogue commissioned nine industrial designers — not fashion designers — to dress the woman of tomorrow, timed to the opening of the New York World’s Fair. Cooper Hewitt holds preparatory drawings.
The ensemble I kept is trousers for evening, gathered at the ankle, billowing at the hip and the knee. The accommodation is visible in the silhouette. It hugs where a body is stable and leaves room where a body bends. You could dance in it. Someone thought about that, in 1939, while being asked to imagine the future, and what they imagined was room to move.
Not the Tuta itself. The cutting plate.
The garment is interesting — one piece, minimal waste, designed to erase the distinction a tailored suit depends on. But the plate is the more radical object, because it’s the distribution mechanism. A newspaper pattern anyone could cut is a different species of futurism than a couture object, and it’s the kind that actually changes what people wear.
The MIT BioSuit applies mechanical counter-pressure directly to the skin instead of pressurizing a volume of gas around it. The board has a sleeve close-up with the MIT patch and a shot of Dava Newman wearing the full suit.
The visible lines on it are tensioning elements, and they’re routed along the body’s lines of non-extension — the paths on your limbs that don’t lengthen when you move. Find those, and the suit can squeeze without fighting you. The function isn’t merely the form here. The body’s own geometry is the pattern.
The newest thing on the board is Laura Civetti’s Adaptive System, and it landed there by a coincidence I only really noticed at the end.
Civetti’s method reads body curvature, perspiration zones and solar exposure off a wearer and varies the textile’s thickness, density and porosity across the body in response, the way biological tissue does — thicker here, more porous there. Adaptive, in the sense of a material that adapts.
Elsewhere on the same board are ten garments that are adaptive in the completely unrelated sense the clothing industry means: designed for bodies that the rest of the industry didn’t design for. Same word. No shared lineage. And they sit in the same collection, where the only thing holding them together is a word neither of them chose.
That’s the vibration I build these things for, and I didn’t put it there.
The board shows. These notes tell. I’m not convinced the telling improves the showing — if anything it domesticates it slightly, turns some of the vibration into information.
But the research happened, and it was most of the work, and it was going to evaporate otherwise. So it goes here, behind the board rather than on top of it.
