Those of us who like buildings obsess over the character and qualities of their surfaces. When we don’t want buildings to dissolve or disappear but instead to have physical presence and visual interest (“firmness” and “delight” as the ancients put it), we are challenged by how to account for openings in them -- light and view into and out --while also satisfactorily enclothing them in surfaces with substance. We are further challenged when we are bound by our commitment to simplicity: buildings whose shapes are-- unless circumstances otherwise dictate-- predominantly parallelopipeds (shoe boxes).
Clothing designers are similarly obsessed. Techniques that designers employ to enclothe a body typically include some form of draping and wrapping and often in combination. To drape, designers will pin the fabric in strategic places to let gravity give it shape. To wrap, designers will bind the fabric in place with straps, bands, belts, wires, ribbons, and lace. We get taught planes, geometric shapes, billowing curves, crinkly scrunches, sharp creases, and soft folds.
Some designers have relied more on draping, others more on wrapping but they all have mixed approaches and have shown that the possibilities are endless. Even within (loosening but still) tightly bounded societal constraints (women in dresses, men in pants) we nevertheless witness infinite variation and ever-accelerating innovation through which our dress continually finds new expression. Over the course of a century, we have experienced both gender-bound continuity and plenty of disruption.
Analogously speaking, we might suggest that Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is draped, Herzog and de Meuron’s Olympic Stadium in Beijing wrapped but otherwise examples are few mainly because few are interested in the expressive potential, the discipline, and the effort required to render simple volumes in expressive shapes using simple materials. We either ignore the expressive potential of surfaces altogether, emphasizing instead elaborately shaped and cut-up volumes, or we fetishize them with novel textures, shimmering visual effects, and fussy assembly details. This comes not without a price, for the analogy goes only so far: buildings are not people and streets are not runways. Where extremes and eccentricity might be valued as an expression of individuality in clothing design (the “signature statement”), it can come across as anti-social behavior in building design.
Constrained by bearing wall construction and motivated to animate the resulting plain, mostly opaque surfaces Florentines of the 15th and 16th centuries adopted the Greco Roman language of architecture (columns, pilasters, entablatures, and cornices) while Venetians absorbed eastern (Ottoman) influences at once more abstract and decorative. For the Venetians, the effort was more sensual in intent, for the Florentines more intellectual. In Venice, buildings are draped in (embroidered) lace and feel fluid in character. In Florence, they are rectilinear--wrapped in straps and bands—and more austere in character. Both were bound and bounded by the tight constraints of simple underlying volumes.
The Florentines’ game became the dominant one in the 500 years that followed (even a few decades well into the 20th century after steel frame construction had replaced bearing wall construction) although the Venetian proclivity for the elaborately floral remerged here and there. Michelangelo (as always) challenged and violated the rules of the game (Capitoline Hill), Louis Sullivan extended it to very tall buildings (Wainwright Building), and subsequent Art Nouveau and Art Deco achievements both abstracted and exoticized it by appropriating Egyptian, Mayan, East Indian, and other motifs.
We don’t build bearing wall buildings for the most part anymore and we don’t have scores of stonemasons or capable craftsmen standing ready to chisel out reliefs of stone to animate buildings’ surfaces. But for those of us who remain interested in the game, we still have at hand our imagination and techniques at our disposal. Our tools are simple. Even now with steel tubes, light metal framing, applied sheathing, plaster, stone, and metal tiles, it remains fully within our grasp to yield in limitless variation physical presence and visual interest through the animation of surfaces in relatively shallow relief, in ways analogous to draping and wrapping like, but different from what has been around in the west for more than half a millennium.