Installations at the Brandery – Barcelona

These two projects were realized by the Barcelona-based practice External Reference for the IED and presented at the Brandery fashion show hosted at the Barcelona Fair during the winter and the summer of 2011.
Both projects express a similar intent: to create a minimal micro-booth to expose pieces of clothing in a creative way. Even if the logic is similar for both designs, External Reference was able to express it with different interpretations, appearances, and materials. Both projects share indeed the capability to be expressive with minimal use of gross material and with an extremely reduced construction cost, from 1,000 to 1,500 euros for each stand.

The first design, developed for the winter edition of the Brandery show, use a dense aggregation of timber joists, arranged so as to form a spatial configuration suitable as garment support. The whole structure is confined inside a regular box and, though apparently very simple, provides an intriguing visual complexity with minimal use of an inexpensive material as well as the ability to be assembled by non-specialized workers.

The second project, built for the summer edition of The Brandery, develops a similar approach but by using different materials and geometry. A single nylon thread is drawn several times back and forth between the opposite sides of a small white box and fixed through 5,000 spikes, so creating a spatial net to which the clothes can be freely suspended, recalling the idea of an out-of-scale transparent piece of fabric. Again a minimal use of humble materials leads to complexity, both visually and in terms of use.