PARADE – Publication and Research in Art, Architectures, Design and Environments, seeks to explore the relationships between the built environment and the following disciplines:
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FASHION
Fashion design, promotion and production are complex and integrally woven into other disciplines, including the built environment. The design of clothing is a formal construction in body space that directly echoes the work of architects while the design of retail spaces is expressly linked to the clothing being sold. The global centres of fashion are iconic cities in and of themselves, the production of clothing in industrial cities across the developed and developing world links the fashion industry to not only the environment but to the politics and society behind it. We welcome engagements with all these issues.
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TEXTILE DESIGN
Historically, textile design and manufacture not only influenced the built environment it actually created major parts of it. The industrial revolution textile mills were the heartbeat of towns across the North of England. They were also sources of pollution. Today the geography has changed but issues of environmental sustainability remain an issue. From a design and cultural perspective, the use of CAD in textiles mirrors its use in other fields such as architecture which it is normally associated with through the surface products of interior design. How these issues are overlaid and how these relationships have morphed through time makes textiles an important component of this programme.
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SET & EXHIBITION DESIGN
Exhibition and set design are fascinating combinations of spatial practice, graphic design, audio visual environments and storytelling. Placed inside or outside buildings it forms part of the built environment in several registers and is an ideal medium through which to tell the story of the built environment itself. Almost all the important developments in the fields of architecture, interiors, urbanism and landscape have all found themselves, manifested, promoted and critiqued through exhibitions. The critique may be premised on content but it can be based on form, turning the exhibition into a spatial installation on terms comparable to architecture in quite literal ways. Set design is even more ‘literally’ architecture, functioning as a context for action and a commentary on it in equal measure. Exploring these disciplines as divergent and cohesive in their engagement with the built environment is of the utmost interest to this programme.
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GRAPHIC DESIGN
Graphics are visible in every environment we move through. Streets, buildings, interiors and their representations through maps and mobile devices involve graphic design in integral ways. We cannot and do not inhabit spaces without a concomitant interaction with graphic design and the information it confers. However, the relationship between graphic design and the built environment is not just one of inhabitation. The economies of cities are often tied into it in sometimes fundamental ways. For example, the industry is large enough to support sections of a city and help attract new business when used in place branding; it has been linked to some of the most visible urban regeneration projects in the world: “I love New York” being credited to overhauling the image of the city as a site of danger in the 1970s to a city on the top of the ‘must see’ list for affluent tourists in the 1980s. Such links have not been fully explored. They should be.