https://vimeo.com/145365730

“Think not of form, but of the act of forming.”
                                                                    - Paul Klee
Digital materiality changes the way architecture is thought about and designed, it creates a contradictory dialog between the man and the machine where the result becomes an experimental process of the material interaction. Unpredictability is a very nature related property which in architecture has only started to take its place.
Transformative possibilities of the material set limits to the architectural outcome, however to the certain degree of control of the machine it is possible to achieve structural qualities of the elements, where the limits of flexibility remain unpredictable. The unpredictability of the behavior of the material creates a more open-minded approach towards design, meanwhile a more nature related design.
Architects were always interested in employing elements of nature not merely into the process of generating architecture but also into the interdisciplinary design methods, one of which is fashion. Fashion and architecture has strong interconnection which can be explored with the techniques and material properties. The architect needs to allow to lose control over the details and allow a dynamic exchange between the matter and the materiality.
In this project, our interest was to combine knitting techniques with the properties of an architectural element, such as a column.

One of the important observations during the process was, that the design cannot be fully controlled, it needs to allow a high degree of variation. It means, to allow the autonomous process to take the lead and ‘fix’ the design as it building up. With the same factors applied during the prototyping process, a ‘failure’ will become a repetitive element of design.
In order to create a pattern, that would fit our expectation, and at the same time bring new properties to the column we were intended to create, a look into nature, became almost unavoidable. Using the method of the natural arrangement, phyllotaxis, which is dominated by intriguing mathematical relationships, allowed us to combine the traditional qualities of the columns with nature-based mechanisms.