Aporia

Abstract

This contribution is part of Fashion House, a collective architecture project that anticipates an alternative future for the fashion industry in five emerging European fashion centers in and around Berlin, Marseille, Rotterdam, Valencia, and Zurich, creating a pan-European cooperative and regulatory body that intensifies regional production and increases conscientious consumption patterns by granting product certifications, providing industry services, and offering brand consultancy.
Aporia envisions a generalized curriculum fashion atelier for students from regions without crafts heritage. This fashion atelier directly adjoins Fashion House Berlin, near Alexanderplatz, in the German capital of Berlin.
Aporia proposes a fashion atelier in Haus D of the DDR government Haus der Statistik in Berlin. This atelier offers a generalized curriculum teaching multidisciplinary skills competency. Atelier workers train in at least five of forty-four Red Thread artisanal disciplines, from wool artistry to patternmaking. These disciplines occupy enfilade studios under one roof, with minimized spatial and organizational hierarchies, altogether facilitating interdisciplinary knowledge exchange.
An increasingly regionalized fashion industry intrinsically entails the proliferation of skills and knowledge to support regional manufacturing. Regional artisanal manufacturing declined as a result of brain drains to centralized Taylorist production—which strives for peak productivity via production process atomization—emblematic of the previous fashion paradigm. Specialized workers of this previous paradigm are susceptible to economic volatility, and to a self-deceptive conflation of specialized knowledge mastery with growth.
Generalist ateliers fill that knowledge gap as centralized sites of education and knowledge exchange. Workers learn and share knowhow through collaboration and mentorship, all within shared work and evaluative spaces. Mastery is traded for inexperience each time the worker begins a new discipline, dispelling self-deceptive overvaluing of mere knowledge.
These atelier workers become professionally autonomous generalist artisans—certified “Know it All”, or proficient in at least five fashion artisanal disciplines—upholding geographically and organizationally decentralized manufacturing required for the regionalized fashion industry.