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SO – IL creates 3D knit textile passage for Bruges Triennial 2024

2024-04-22T11:39:00-04:00

SO – IL has completed a passage of 3D knit textiles as part of the 2024 Bruges Triennial in Belgium.

Titled 'Common Thread,' the passage is inspired by the medieval city’s lace-making tradition, using an innovative woven fabric to create what the team calls an “intricate spatial experience in a wave-like tunnel.”

Image credit: Iwan Baan

The installation is set within a passageway that connects the secluded courtyard of a 19th-century monastery with the wider city. In collaboration with a team from TU Delft, the team explored how Common Thread could marry the tradition of the bobbin lace with modern technologies and new geometric possibilities.

Image credit: Iwan Baan

The resulting fabric is knit in varying ratios, with individual threads combining and diverging in ever-changing patterns. The installation’s form and structural framework were further guided by computational simulations and material samples.

Image credit: Iwan Baan

Image cre...

The experimental nature of Murray Music House, a single family home designed by Carazo Arquitectura

2017-05-11T14:03:00-04:00

Blending elements of brutalism and pronounced geometric framing, the Murray Music House designed by Carazo Arquitectura is technically a single family home, designed for two parents and three children. The fundamental concept underlying its design is "Living Through the Experimentation," which helps to explain the use of changeable elements like ceiling-suspended fabric chairs and mesh netting in the hallways. By placing malleable objects into the solid frame of the home, the architects hope to constantly engage the occupants in creating new uses for spaces such as the bedroom, kitchen, and the hallway. "Experiencing a home like Murray Music includes exploration, giving another meaning and other use to spaces that normally have specific functions," as the architects explain. But these elements are not the only method of inspiring experimentation.

The rather severe geometry, which includes a black rectilinear frame hovering over the kitchen and a vertical slanted skylight with unabas...

Gettin' fleshy with it: "Skin" sculpture is both critique and kinda creepy

2016-10-27T13:12:00-04:00

Oh, functionalism: enough already with the developer-driven efficiency that puts dollars ahead of human livability. Or so goes the critique that underlies the sculpture by NEON known as "Skin," a six-sided grid strung with 1800 pairs of skin-colored tights.

Inadvertently reminiscent of films like "Cube" and "Hellraiser," "Skin" is intended to start conversations about the human dimension in architecture. As a press release elucidates:

"From within the sculpture also imitates the aesthetic of human flesh to create a feeling of immersion with the inhabitant losing all sense of where their body ends and architecture begins. It is intended that this approach will create a strong physical and emotional connection between the inhabitant and the architectural space. This sense of being physically and emotionally present is particularly important in a world where technologies continue to erode our sense of personal space."

For more on innovative fabric-based architecture:

A wrap-up of Vancouver...

A wrap-up of Vancouver's "City Fabric"

2015-10-01T19:00:00-04:00

Construction safety netting may not sound like the stuff which picturesque cityscapes are made of, and yet: Vancouver, B.C. was host to an art installation known as "City Fabric" this past August and September which produced more gorgeous visuals (and sly references to real estate speculation) than your typical netting.

Designed by artist Rebecca Bayer and architect Matthew Soules, the installation hung beneath the south side of Burrard Street Bridge between concrete piers as a kind of celebration of the ephemeral, specifically "the temporary permanence of construction debris netting; beautiful, impoverished for its utilitarian use, yet profoundly normal."

The installation, which was sponsored by 221A and The Burred Arts Foundation, officially closed on September 30th and consisted of 800 lineal feet of the netting.