Mediating Space

soft geometries. textile structures. body architecture



The work of the architect Gabi Schillig engages with the space of the human body. Schillig’s wearable spatial structures mediate between private users and public spaces, provoking new relationships between bodies, clothing, and the built environment. Redefining the garment as tactile architecture, Schillig explores the potential for soft geometries and surfaces of textiles, conventionally associated with individual bodies and human scale, to generate alternative arrangements of social space and modes of interaction.



For Schillig, multiple users, desires, and urban contexts are necessary to materialize her work. Designed to be interconnected and shared, her second skins evolve as an architecture built upon the creativity of its participants. Over the course of the past years, Schillig has developed a set of textile structures with which she has conducted a series of site-specific experiments for their implementation. Made from felt, latex, and a variety of fastening devices, the structures are designed for attachment to both the individual and collective body, or to specific building surfaces and street conditions. Those textile structures are there to be improvised and appropriated for clothing, furniture, habitat, or other uses. Upon contact, they transform in geometry, texture, and color from two-dimensional and often camouflaged elements in the city to three-dimensional interfaces that sensitize and reassociate urbanbodies to environments at multiple scales.



The work that emerged in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Berlin and New York, is presented in three parts that interconnect and refer to each other – RESEARCH / PROJECTS / TEACHING – including Schillig’s experiments with documentation of her research processes and material investigations, her activities in the work with students and her interest in the work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark.





Akademie Schloss Solitude / merz & solitude

including essays by Jean-Baptiste Joly, Johan Bettum, Jessica Blaustein, Peter Cook, Susanne Hauser, Sarah Scatturo, Adi Shamir and others




English, 208 pages / FILM-DVD

October 2009




concept by Gabi Schillig & Kerstin Lauck

graphic design by Kerstin Lauck



Akademie Schloss Solitude

Kerstin Lauck