Textile Tectonics

Textile tectonics" reveals how natural, ornamental and folkloristic patterns - from the veins of leaves to Gothic rose windows, from foam formations to traditional styles of hair braiding and from Celtic knotwork to knitting patterns - can be digitally elaborated into breathtaking, programmable and architecturally viable structures. Internationally renowned architect and researcher Lars Spuybroek has been investigating the relationships between art, architecture and information technology. His students in the Georgia Institute of Technolgy, School of Architecture have contributed their projects in this second book in research and design.

The approach of "Informing Architecture by Materiality" opens the way to an innovative use of materials in the design professions. Taking material qualities and properties such as texture, elasticity, transparency and fluidity as a point of departure, the concept described and employed here transcends the conventional definitions of building materials. Instead, the focus is on a multitude of material operations, like folding and bending, carving and cutting, weaving and knitting, mirroring and screening. The featured design strategies and methods address established and "new" materials alike. They are applied both to the scale of the detail and the entire building. The examples comprise prototype structures as well as large building projects. Eight chapters deal with surfaces and layers, joints and juctions, weaving and texturing, nanoscale transformations, responsiveness, the integration of ephemeral factors like wind and light as well as material collections providing professional resources. Written by renowned experts in this field, the book features many examples from international contemporary architecture. The introductory part provides the conceptual background, while a final chapter describes consequences for pressing issues of today, like sustainability or life cycle assessment.

The enduring influence of the architect Gottfried Semper (1803-1879) derives primarily from his monumental theoretical foray Der Stil in der technischen und tektonischen Künsten (1860-62), here translated into English for the first time. A richly illustrated survey of the technical arts (textiles, ceramics, carpentry, masonry), Semper's analysis of the preconditions of style forever changed the interpretative context for aesthetics, architecture, and art history. Style, Semper believed, should be governed by historical function, cultural affinities, creative free will, and the innate properties of each medium. Thus, in an ambitious attempt to turn nineteenth-century artistic discussion away from historicism, aestheticism, and materialism, Semper developed in Der Stil a complex picture of stylistic change based on scrutiny of specific objects and a remarkable grasp of cultural variety. Harry Francis Mallgrave's introductory essay offers an account of Semper's life and work, a survey of Der Stil, and a fresh consideration of Semper's landmark study and its lasting significance.

This book investigates the interconnections between textile and architecture via a variety of case studies from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and from diverse geographic contexts. Among the oldest human technologies, building and weaving have intertwined histories. Textile structures go back to Palaeolithic times and are still in use today and textile furnishings have long been used in interiors. Beyond its use as a material, textile has offered a captivating model and metaphor for architecture through its ability to enclose, tie together, weave, communicate, and adorn. Recently, architects have shown a renewed interest in the textile medium due to the use of computer-aided design, digital fabrication, and innovative materials and engineering. The essays edited and compiled here, work across disciplines to provide new insights into the enduring relationship between textiles and architecture. The contributors critically explore the spatial and material qualities of textiles as well as cultural and political significance of textile artifacts, patterns, and metaphors in architecture. Textile in Architecture is organized into three sections: “Ritual Spaces,” which examines the role of textiles in the formation and performance of socio-political, religious, and civic rituals; “Public and Private Interiors” explores how textiles transformed interiors corresponding to changing aesthetics, cultural values, and material practices; and “Materiality and Material Translations,” which considers textile as metaphor and model in the materiality of built environment. Including cases from Morocco, Samoa, France, India, the UK, Spain, the Ancient Andes and the Ottoman Empire, this is essential reading for any student or researcher interested in textiles in architecture through the ages.

Through the theoretical lenses of dress studies, gender, science, and visual studies, this volume analyses the impact John Ruskin has had on architecture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores Ruskin’s different ideologies, such as the adorned wall veil, which were instrumental in bringing focus to structures that were previously unconsidered. John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture examines the ways in which Ruskin perceives the evolution of architecture through the idea that architecture is surface. The creative act in architecture, analogous to the divine act of creation, was viewed as a form of dressing. By adding highly aesthetic features to designs, taking inspiration from the 'veil' of women’s clothing, Ruskin believed that buildings could be transformed into meaningful architecture. This volume discusses the importance of Ruskin’s surface theory and the myth of feminine architecture, and additionally presents a competing theory of textile analogy in architecture based on morality and gender to counter Gottfried Semper’s historicist perspective. This book would be beneficial to students and academics of architectural history and theory, gender studies and visual studies who wish to delve into Ruskin’s theories and to further understand his capacity for thinking beyond the historical methods. The book will also be of interest to architectural practitioners, particularly Ruskin’s theory of surface architecture.

"That buildings are made of elements doesn't mean that architecture should be based on elementarism; on the contrary, we should strive for an architecture of continuity that fuses tectonics with textile, abstraction with empathy, and matter with expressivity." This is the crux of the argument Lars Spuybroek makes in this book, the first fully theoretical account of his innovative work. The state of contemporary architecture is the product of a 150-year battle between the Polytechnique and Beaux-Arts schools of design, which has forced us into a stalemate between the radically opposed positions of high-tech and sculpturism. Spuybroek aims to do no less than mend this rift through rethinking technology as an extension of our feeling senses, materiality as the realm of activity and agency, and structure as the result of genesis. Building on Gottfried Semper's materialist theory of architecture, he takes us from a philosophy of technology to a surprisingly historical argumentation that constantly revives the words of John Ruskin, William Hogarth and Wilhelm Worringer. Alongside a number of essays, the book contains extensive conversations in which we witness him refining and sharpening his arguments ("We will see a merging of Art Nouveau and Bauhaus, where empathy has been liberated from manual labor and machines have been liberated from uniform repetition"). In a period of theoretical tranquility in architecture, this book takes a refreshing turn back to the basics, one in which tools, methodology and architectural aesthetics are recalibrated.

It is well-known that the topic of composite mate- rials affects many engineering fields, such as civil, mechanical, aerospace, automotive and chemical. In the last decades, in fact, a huge number of scientific papers concerning these peculiar constituents has been published. Analogously, the industrial progress has been extremely noticeable. The study of composite materials, in general, is a challenging activity since the advancements both in the academia and in the industry provide continually new sparks to develop innovative ideas and applications. The communication, the sharing and the exchange of views can surely help the works of many researchers. This aspect represents the main purpose of this Conference, which aims to collect high-level contributions on the development and the application of composite materials. The establishment of this 21st edition of International Conference on Composite Structures has appeared appropriate to continue what has been begun during the previous editions. ICCS wants to be an occasion for many researchers from each part of the globe to meet and discuss about the recent advancements regarding the use of composite structures, sandwich panels, nanotechnology, bio-composites, delamination and fracture, experimental methods, manufacturing and other countless topics that have filled many sessions during this conference. As a proof of this event, which has taken place in Bologna (Italy), selected plenary and key-note lectures have been collected in the present book.

D_TEX presents itself as a starting point at a crossroads of ideas and debates around the complex universe of Textile Design in all its forms, manifestations and dimensions. The textile universe, allied to mankind since its beginnings, is increasingly far from being an area of exhausted possibilities, each moment proposing important innovations that need a presentation, discussion and maturation space that is comprehensive and above all inter- and transdisciplinary. Presently, the disciplinary areas where the textile area is present are increasing and important, such as fashion, home textiles, technical clothing and accessories, but also construction and health, among others, and can provide new possibilities and different disciplinary areas and allowing the production of new knowledge. D_TEX proposes to join the thinking of design, with technologies, tradition, techniques, and related areas, in a single space where ideas are combined with the technique and with the projectual and research capacity, thus providing for the creation of concepts, opinions, associations of ideas, links and connections that allow the conception of ideas, products and services. The interdisciplinary nature of design is a reality that fully reaches the textile material in its essence and its practical application, through the synergy and contamination by the different interventions that make up the multidisciplinary teams of research. The generic theme of D_TEX Textile Design Conference 2017, held at Lisbon School of Architecture of the University of Lisbon, Portugal on November 2-4, 2017, is Design the Future, starting from the crossroads of ideas and debates, a new starting point for the exploration of textile materials, their identities and innovations in all their dimensions.