ADS12: Sight/Seeing
Divya Patel
With an overarching interest in contemporary social culture and how it challenges traditional systems within architecture, my work this year looks as the hyper-feminine world of beauty. Centring on the intersection between beauty ideals and the architectural conditions that facilitate the over-production of beauty in our increasingly visual culture.
Alongside this I am part of the critical design collective +44 formed with several other designers at the RCA.
The premise behind Fake Deep beauty is to unpack contemporary homogenous beauty ideals. Ideals are fleeting trends and are reactive to the seasons and to sociocultural attitudes. They are more dominant in the digital age and it is vital to our contemporary visual and virtual culture to construct a sense of self through an individual’s online presence.
The beauty industry is one of the most lucrative in the world, it is evident that beauty is not just unnecessary inconvenience it in fact defines value. With such an emphasis on the surface, the project aims to unmask the black box of beauty trends, by defining a micro-seasonal reality and through fashion, theories of proportionality and geography to create a building that explains the spatial organisational systems that unravel the secrets behind the beautiful image.
The project manifests as a building that looks at the existing programmatic functions in the industry at varying scales, and how they globally contribute to the production of beauty. And how from design to distribution, image production plays a vital role at every scale. The building localises the spatial organisational components and like the actual beauty industry reacts to the changing seasons, from the product of beauty at the personal scale all the way up to industrial scale.
It does this by re-defining the reality of the seasons we are currently operating under and how beauty trends and ideals should react to them. With the increasingly accelerated seasons, and the constant production and reproduction of beauty, the current model of beauty-production is unsustainable and over demanding. By localising and decentralising this well-oiled machine, we can begin to understand its harmful nature and visualise what parts of the model must change, and why we need to reimagine it.
It is time we forget about concepts of narrowing beauty ideals and mimicking nature’s seasonality, to create a more inclusive beauty that is both ecologically and ethically responsible.
