5. How Sewing Enters Architecture
6. Growing up in New Brunswick
As a professor I give a survey to incoming students about what inspires them to study architecture. Many cite drafting, computer modeling and industrial arts teachers; a roughly equal number are inspired by art teachers. As in the Renaissance, the school of architecture in the twenty-first century still idealizes architecture as a discipline which combines art and technology. It has never occurred to me to include sewing teachers among the answer choices in the survey. And sewing has never been mentioned by the students under ‘other reasons/interests which led me to pursue architecture’. Some of the women students, even in the late nineties, still had to take sewing in home economics classes as a gender-based, no option alternative to drafting or industrial arts. “I made a pair of boxer shorts” one woman laughed, “but I don’t think that that has anything to do with architecture.”
I learned to sew from my grandmother, Marion McGowan Bambury, a career psychiatric nurse who served with the British Nursing Sisters in the Canadian Army in South Africa during the Korean War. Because she was, heroically, a career woman, I was not sure at the time where she had learned to sew. Because I was interested, she taught me. What I learned about sewing from her bridges almost one hundred years in my memory alone. Clearly, she was taught at an early age by women in her family. It was part of her education separate from her professional life. She taught me to make slipcovers and do upholstery out of beautiful elegant linens, velvets, damasks. By Grade 6 I knew how to take measurements, to estimate the quantities of material required and then to sew everything up. I was inspired. Inspiration was flattened in Grade 8. During the 1970 classes were divided by gender on two days of the week: girls studied home-economics (sewing and cooking), boys did shop (drafting and woodworking). I failed sewing. We had to make rudimentary articles of clothing— the almost obsolete apron and a skort (a skirt and shorts combo) out of polyester, marketed by the teacher because it was inexpensive and needed no ironing.12 I continued to sew throughout high school and undergraduate school and didn’t think about it explicitly until I was in architecture school. At TUNS (now Dalhousie) in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, women were a minority. There was a radical air about the place with student strikes and much discussion about the quality of our education. Most of the women in my class sewed their own clothes. We were like students at the Bauhaus making costumes; ours were highly geometric minimalist pieces, sketched out on paper like our architectural drawings, without even thinking it was unusual. Even at Cambridge I carried a rented sewing machine on a rickety English bicycle back to my college so that I could make my ballgown. A male student once suggested that women were probably better than men at doing working drawings because we knew how to sew. While this may have been true, it offended our feminist sensibilities. What was happening here? Was this true?
The space of both architectural and garment production — sketch books, drafting board, computer, pencils, pens and sewing machine.
Exceptionally, our particular class at TUNS was very close to the best of sewing when it comes to architecture. Our first design professor, Mark Fisher, visiting the school from England, knew how to sew. At that time he was most famous for having built (sewn) inflatable fabric structures used in Pink Floyd concerts. He recently activated Richard Roger’s Greenwich Millennium Dome in an event starring Peter Gabriel.13 One of our class, Scott MacNeil, followed Fisher to the UK and interned with him, later working with Frei Otto in his pneumatic and tensile structures studio at MIT. I would guess though, in its general outlines, that women’s architecture drawings were informed by sewing was partially correct. When I sewed clothes, they were drawn as ideas, quickly cut out and ripped through the sewing machine — much more like working sketches than anything detailed. It may actually be the case that early education in sewing has inspired and informed inventive works of architecture by women. If true, the influence of sewing has definitely not been acknowledged. I am compelled here to say that my mother, Frances Belyea Bambury sewed almost all of my clothes until I was in junior high. As I have two younger brothers, born very close, most of the sewing happened at night, when the kids had gone to bed. 15 Mark Fisher, Staged Architecture. Chichester, West Sussex : Wiley-Academy, 2000. 13
The space of mending garments: tailor’s shop, via Leutari, Rome, 2001
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On Site review
Sewing Issue 8 2002
The space of caring for garments, dry cleaners, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 2002