Dressing a building and cladding your wife is not a way to get rid of her. It is, however, bad for your city.
What’s interesting, instead, is that the German language – the vocabulary of which is richly structured around correlation and families of meaning – has a word that applies to both architecture and fashion. A correlation that’s resurfacing in contemporary architecture.
Bekleidung refers to both the act of protecting the human body with clothes and the act of covering a building in cladding.
Similarly, the words for “Wall” and “Dress” belong to the same family.
- Wall = Wand ; Dress = Gewand
This is not only true in German:
- Italian: Abitare / Abito
- French: Habiter / Habiller