Textile Technology and Design

From Interior Space to Outer Space

Deborah Schneiderman, Alexa Griffith Winton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474261968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Materials Science
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Textile Technology and Design addresses the critical role of the interior at the intersection of design and technology, with a range of interdisciplinary arguments by a wide range of contributors: from design practitioners to researchers and scholars to aerospace engineers. Chapters examine the way in which textiles and technology – while seemingly distinct – continually inform each other through their persistent overlapping of interests, and eventually coalesce in the practice of interior design. Covering all kinds of interiors from domestic (prefabricated kitchens and 3D wallpaper) to extreme (underwater habitats and space stations), it features a variety of critical aspects including pattern and ornament, domestic technologies, craft and the imperfect, gender issues, sound and smart textiles. This book is essential reading for students of textile technology, textile design and interior design.

Part One

Textile: Pliable Planes, Interior Applications, and Fabrications

1

Interstitial Threads: The Body, Textiles, and Interiority in Contemporary Interior Design

Alexa Griffith Winton

Textiles function, critically and materially, to connect such chasms as between language and space or words and architecture. They do this with dual reference to an interiority and exteriority in which concept and substance are not so much interwoven as twisted together in in the initial formation and preparation of thread.

(Mitchell 2006)

There are numerous examples of the melding of space, body, and textile in the history of the interior, perhaps most dramatically in Art Nouveau gesamtkunstwerk interiors where garments and interiors were tightly coordinated, rendering the (female) physical body completely defined by its spatial envelope (Ogata 2001; Kinney 1999: 472–81). This ambiguity between dress and structural surface in the interior, and the corresponding description of the interior as fashion—personified by Walter Benjamin as an inconstant, volatile “creature of moods” (Benjamin 2002: 216)—is today transformed, particularly with emergent design technologies and fabrication methods of designers such as Mette Ramsgard Thomsen, the collective Numen/For Use, and Loop.pH, each of whom employ textiles or textile techniques in the realization of their project. While the material and tectonic possibilities of the work of these designers are clear, the larger theoretical questions surrounding such systems have yet to be addressed, particularly in the context of the relationship between body and constructed space in the post-human environment. As textile theorist Victoria Mitchell has argued, “The opening-out-from-within of the materiality of textiles continues to reveal hidden trajectories of knowledge” (Mitchell 2006: 340). This chapter investigates the evolving role of textiles as an interstitial interface—mediating space and the body—in the context of the interior, particularly in relation to issues of technology, domesticity, and the relationship of the interior realm to the exterior. This issue has particular resonance in contemporary design practice, in which advanced computational and fabrication technologies combine to create textiles capable of both reacting to their surrounding environs and responding to their inhabitants.

New and rapidly developing fabrication and computation technologies are changing the way textiles, objects, and buildings are designed, facilitating new ways of addressing the human body at every scale, from nano-objects to large-scale buildings. Designers and artists are making use of this technology in provocative ways and consequently envisioning new means of connecting humans to our built environment. The issue now is not how are interior space and tectonic structure connected through textile, but what are the implications for the interior when textile can literally fuse the two, or even make conventional structure redundant? It is in these explorations that the boundaries between technology and textile are challenged, questioning traditional definitions of inside and outside, craft and industry, craft and biology, as well as the implications of designing and creating both textiles and buildings in a world of ever-diminishing resources. This chapter investigates recent work that involves both textiles and the constructed environment, and challenges conventional assumptions about both. If architecture can no longer be solely understood as a constructive regime that organizes both space and people, what, then, is it? The interior, a place defined by patterns of behavior as much as containment, offers an ideal testing ground for this decentralized relationship between space and user.

Metaphors, codes, and signs

There are strong parallels between the types of patterns and mathematical logic inherent in both computer and textile design, and it is these similarities that designers attempt to exploit through the combination of the two. Within both the design of computer code and the design of textiles exist codes, patterns, repetitions, and the potential for infinite variations. The French weaver Joseph Maria Jacquard’s 1801 unveiling of what is now known as the jacquard loom, capable of producing its patterns via wooden punch cards, inspired the English mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage to create the first mechanical computer in the mid-nineteenth century, leading eventually to the highly complex computational design programs used by architects and designers today, including Rhino and Grasshopper (see, for example, Eisinger 2004). Just as Jacquard’s innovation made it possible to create a seemingly endless array of woven patterns on the loom, designers now can visualize a future designed via the limitless possibilities of parametric design.

Beyond the notion of mathematical coding, there are numerous examples of textiles, or the making of textiles, employed to encode symbols and hidden messages, reinforcing the powerful imprint of textiles on the cultural imagination. The three Greek Fates determined the length of each person’s life in a choreographed performance: Clotho spun the metaphorical thread of life, Lachesis measured it, and Atropos severed it with her terrible shears. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela communicates the story of her brutal rape by weaving it into a tapestry, despite her attacker Tereus having cut out her tongue to silence her. Charles Dickens’ villainous Madame de Farge, a professional knitter and devoted revolutionary spy, calmly encodes within her knitting the names of the future victims of the Terror. Rozsika Parker’s Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine explores both the history and transgressive possibilities of embroidery, claiming that “to know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women” (Parker 2010: ix). All of this suggests textiles have direct communicative and symbolic powers. If we consider that, far from being trivial, these deeply held and ancient associations with fabric and its making now embody meaning not only metaphorically but spatially, we begin to apprehend the profound implications for the future of interior design. Design theorist and critic Susan Yelavich has argued that a textile-based design can potentially embody a more empathetic approach, that “textiles and textile-based technologies are never separate from the values and bodily experiences that have accrued to textiles themselves” (Susan Yelavich in Yelavich and Adams 2014: 69).

Transformative textiles

Thinking of architecture as live, as motile, and as self-sustaining, challenges both the object and the process of architectural making. (Thomsen and Bech 2012b: 85–96)

Architect and computer scientist Mette Ramsgard Thomsen combines parametric computations and handwork in the realization of her projects. Thomsen directs the Center for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) at the Royal Danish School of Architecture in Copenhagen. In her work, Thomsen merges textile handwork such as weaving and knitting with armatures and actuating elements, resulting in work that she has termed “digital crafting.” Through this fusion of architectonic structures and the endlessly repeatable patterns found in weaving drafts or knitting patterns, Thomsen seeks to understand the logic of materials as well as to explore both the physical and digital dimensions of space. She questions the conventional assumptions of architectural practice, proposing instead a “new material practice that includes the active and the changing into material design” (Peters 2009: 200–4). This practice, informed by the material properties of textile and their relationship with interactive sensor technologies, posits a new understanding of spatial experience, one that is deeply engaged with time and motion and embraces the potential of instability. In Thomsen’s design propositions, new technologies are used to challenge the normative role of textiles in the interior to pose questions about the very nature of interiority. She employs digital crafting to design speculative environments, and handcrafting techniques to assemble them, asking “how a tectonic logic affects and changes material culture, and how in turn this forms our spatial imagination” (Thomsen and Bech 2012b: 85–96). Thomsen’s provocations have direct relevance to the interior, as it is understood as a mutable space, constantly shifting and defined by the ways in which it is used. She has said of the relationship between architectural object and human subject that: “The inhabitant therefore enters the installation at the same level as the computational system … there is no distinction between system interaction and user interaction” (Thomsen and Bech 2012a: 287). In this way, the interior is much closer to Benjamin’s “creature of moods,” acting and reacting to external stimuli.

Thomsen’s practice-led research projects are often collaborative in nature, joining together researchers, students, and textile experts in order to explore the questions that drive her work. The interior often figures prominently in her investigations. “Strange Metabolisms,” a 2007 research collaboration with textile designer Toni Hicks of the University of Brighton, envisions an urban environment that knits itself via computer plots. In this project, distinctions (and ambiguities) between inside and outside, public and private, materialize in the form of layers, slits, folds, and other surface variations. The surfaces of this city, whether interior or exterior, are knit in the round, which implies a seamless construction technique, yet one that can unravel if the fiber from which it is knit is pulled or damaged.

“Shadow Play,” a 2012 installation created in collaboration with Karin Bech for the Architecture House in Copenhagen, uses strips of pine veneer looped together to create a structure that behaves like a “fabric” but at an architectural scale. “Textiles are interesting structural models because they are strong, lightweight, adaptable, and enable great formal freedom” (Mette Thomsen in Yelavich and Adams 2014: 60). Of “Shadow Play,” Thomsen has written that its material behavior was learned from textiles, proposing “a non-hierarchical, densely stranded model existing somewhere between structure and the making of a new material” (Mette Thomsen in Yelavich and Adams 2014: 65).

Thomsen has argued that these installations are meant to fundamentally change our relationship to architecture, transforming “the original percept of the building as subservient to its user … its occupant changes from ‘user’ to participant” (Thomsen and Bech 2011: 37). While these experiments currently exist only as relatively small-scale and temporary installations, they clearly point to a post-human condition in which the human being must share not only time and space with cybernetic objects (including architecture), but agency as well.

Lines and threads

Textile theorist Victoria Mitchell has observed that to truly understand the relationship between textiles and architecture, we must look beyond weaving, to the raw materials, in order to “examine the components and interstices of the weave and the detailed preparatory actions necessary in order for the weaving to begin.” In her article, “Drawing Threads from Sight to Site,” Mitchell posits a much deeper relationship between architectural space and human experience than the common textile metaphors in architecture allow. She looks to the thread, and the act of spinning it, as critical to understanding the relationship between textiles and architecture. As Mitchell notes, thread is both object and tool in this context, a concept embraced by the Vienna-based design collective Numen/For Use. Numen experiments with textiles and textile techniques to challenge conventional understandings of the interior. They use soft materials such as fabric, thread, and even sticky tape to create site-specific installations at the human scale. In a series titled “Tape,” Numen fuses thousands of strands of tape to create a felt-like membrane capable of supporting the human body while resisting the conventions of orthogonal space. In “Tape Paris,” an installation created for the 2014 exhibition “Interior,” which explored the idea of the interior across many disciplines and media, Numen used this felted sticky tape to create a parasitic structure that stretched throughout a large room in the Palais de Tokyo (Plate 1). The installation was anchored to interior columns, with no connection to either floor or ceiling. The resulting experience is an interior environment that hovers over the floor, stretching out in multiple directions, following no conventional tectonic logic. Bodies move through the translucent tubes and eddies removed from the experience of conventional architecture, experiencing instead a kind of hyper-interiority. The collective describes this installation as exploring “both physical and psychological interiority, thermalizing immersion, introspection and probing of the depths of self” (Numen/For Use 2014). “Tape Paris” is the latest in a series of installations in which Numen explored the performative, material...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Susan Yelavich
• Introduction Alexa Griffith Winton and Deborah Schneiderman
• PART ONE TEXTILE: PLIABLE PLANES, INTERIOR APPLICATIONS, AND FABRICATIONS
• 1 Interstitial Threads: The Body, Textiles, and Interiority in Contemporary Interior Design Alexa Griffith Winton
• 2 Soft Spaces: From the Textile-clad Interior to Modern Interior Design Anca I. Lasc
• 3 Felt and the Emerging Interior Helene Renard
• 4 Tailoring Second and Third Skins Lois Weinthal
• 5 Interview with Carol Bove Deborah Schneiderman and Alexa Griffith Winton
• PART TWO Mechanical and Digital Innovation in the Interior Realm
• 6 Ulterior Motives Sarah Strauss
• 7 Topically Embedded: Surface as Graphic Material Igor Siddiqui
• 8 Materializing the Digital Realm: Textile of the Modern Age Jonathon Anderson and Laura Schoenthaler
• 9 Bespoke: Tailoring the Mass-produced Prefabricated Interior Deborah Schneiderman
• 10 Sensorial Space: Responsive Interiors through Smart Textiles Margarita Benitez
• 11 Self-actuated Textiles, Interconnectivity, and the Design of the Home as a More Sustainable Timescape Aurélie Mossé
• 12 Interview with Charlie Morrow: Sound Environment Design Deborah Schneiderman and Alexa Griffith Winton
• PART THREE Extreme Environments and Outer Space
• 13 Design for Extreme Environments Project [DEEP]: A Case Study of Innovations in Mediating Adverse Conditions on the Human Body Brian F. Davies
• 14 Design for Confinement: The Art and Science of Sensory Deprivation in Space Evan Twyford
• 15 Fabrics for Space Travel Evelyne Orndoff
• 16 The Role of Soft Materials in the Design of Extreme Interior Environments for Space Exploration Larry Toups, Matthew Simon, Robert Howard, and A. Scott Howe
• 17 Interview with Charles Camarda Deborah Schneiderman and Alexa Griffith Winton
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright