In the Bikini Zone…

Studio project at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Matthew Gillis, 2013

In this set of drawings, a formal analysis occurs of a package for a lady’s razor. Using plans and sections, the packaging is reconstructed retroactively in order to decompose its spatial properties.

Of utmost importance in this project was the understanding of a host of methods for the reproduction and the comprehension of formal relationships. Plans and sections were explored, but, additionally, the mathematical and geometrical principles behind the axonometric were revealed. Through projective methods, these different portals through which we might gaze onto this packaging were encountered. No work was done in 3D, but rather, though on a digital platform, in ways reminiscent of how architects would have worked thirty years ago.

Following this, a dialogue with the packaging was developed, exploring the ways by which the physical being and metaphysical significance might overlap in our material world.

The following is the dialogue established within the “Bikini Zone”.

Welcome to the bikini zone, where things get a little geometrical, where we learn that true beauty might just be right in front of our eyes...in a ladies’ razor’s packaging. This slicing savior of our eyes has existed since the Bronze Age, freeing us from unsightly body hair and untrimmed mustaches for a little more than six-thousand years.

Of particular importance for us is the bikini zone razor. While we might be inclined to dismiss this as a hygienic one-liner, it might be better discussed as a formal representation of a particular foible in our society. To perceive pragmatically this effect, we must first contemplate the precise purpose and advertised application a razor faces in contemporaneity.

That is to say, no matter whereabouts you might be going with it, hair is hair. A razor is a razor. And a tool is a means to an end. For what purpose precisely have we come to create such an array of products for every single need. Sure, one might argue the efficiency of a specialized razor, but, in the end, the functionality of any razor aligns fairly familiarly to its contemporaries. Without entrenching ourselves in some overly weighted deconstruction of the exact socioeconomic or societal conditions which pretense the specialization of a shaver for such an area, it might benefit us to simply contemplate the banality which we have reached.

Imagine you are newcomer to modernity. You have somehow emerged for the past, and you find yourself before a CVS. You walk in, and curiously you find on the counter this petite plastic blob you have never encountered in your foregone world. How do you this? Whatever we might find therein, we can rest assured that some person thousands of years from now will take great engrossment in trivializing our creation of a razor specifically for the lands down under.