Smart Materials:
Wearable Architecture

Jennifer Siegal, Author

As post-utopian architects and futurists who have inherited these fashions, this competition challenges you to blur the boundaries between architecture and clothing. The project "Smart Materials: Wearable Architecture" poses the question of how does the architect mediate within the collision of smart materials and the design of architecture? Is architecture a multi-disciplinary profession that incorporates multiple trades; fashion, structure, product, graphic and computation?

This project requires you to design a wearable architecture that is self-sufficient, inhabitable by a single individual or used to create larger environments when colonized. The design should be of a system that moves and can move with you. The program asks you to define the habitat, using your body as the tool for inspiration and form generation. The Smart Materials, listed below, are to be used as your material palette for designing. While you are not limited to only using the listed Smart Materials, you must at least employ one of the ten.