In-depth inquiries of fabrication practices outside of architecture are worth closer examination by architects and designers. By scaling down, architects can engage in specific material experiments, spatial discoveries, and form-finding processes, unbound by the scale and cost of more typical architectural materials. Fabric manipulation is at once graphic and formal, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, structural and ornamental. Sewing is a specific fabrication technique that offers connection, transition, structure, and ornament between and upon material surfaces. Stitches and seams have the capacity to both organize and express the relationship between material components. Fabric is architectural.

Fabric is architectural.

I found myself gravitating toward the sewing machine in my design work for a variety of reasons. Fabric is inexpensive, forgiving, pliable, useful, and almost infinitely re-workable. It is a material practice that requires the human hand. While the sewing machine does most of the grunt work of assembly, there must be a human operator. Sewing is one of the few industrial processes that has been notoriously difficult to automate. There certainly has been major progress towards automation—robots provide useful assistance in printing textiles, cutting patterns, and preparing textile goods for shipping—but the act of pushing fabric through a machine is too unpredictable for robotic automation. There must be constant communication between the machine and the operator to prevent bunching fabric, slow down and speed up stitches where necessary, and keep proper tension on the layers of material. The number of sensors required for a robot to complete this kind of work successfully keeps sewing most efficiently in the realm of the adaptive human hand. The interaction between material and maker must be constantly re-negotiated. In this way, sewing is truly a practice.

The formal and technical properties of fabric manipulation are quite specific to architectural investigation. Textiles have the potential to produce double curvature through tensioning and/or discretization and patterning. Many other materials require expensive, single-use molds to produce doubly curved surfaces. Fabrics are also able to provide structure, turning a two-dimensional sheet material into a three-dimensional framework using folds, cuts, and stitches. These structural frameworks can then be infused or coated with various rigid materials (concrete, resin, etc) to produce lightweight structures and enclosures. Taut Table, a project I worked on at DCS (David Costanza Studio) utilizes tensile double curvature and textile as structure. The work is a result of extensive research exploring the potentials of using tensile surface morphologies to define the geometry of a vacuum-assisted, resin-infused, textile-composite structure.

Textile assembly methods are also sites for graphic investigations. Stitches are ornamentation through connection/material joinery. Graphics are records of process—seams, patterning, cuts, folds, etc —and become a kind of drawing both applied to and shaping the textile surface. My work explores graphics that are at once functional and ornamental through the design and making of bags. Bags are interactive, soft containers that enable the direct, isolated exploration of architectural issues: enclosure, organization, program, representation, site, and structure.

Bag_01’s design foregrounds spatial organization (the interiority of bags) through the assembly of self-similar material components. In draft_01, a single fabric enclosure was defined and produced to contain a specific set of physical objects: mangoes. In draft_02, the single enclosure developed in draft_01 was refined and aggregated. This bag focuses on the specificity of physical objects, spatial complexity, and combination of enclosures. Draft_02 has a variety of configurations, from an entirely closed bundle to open, linear pockets.

Draft 01 images:

Draft 02 images:

The second bag is a 15” x 12” x 6” boxy bag constructed using a designed graphic textile (in this case, a linear stripe). The superimposition of graphic on the surface of the bag is used to amplify, modify, and transform the representational and spatial objectives asserted by the bag’s type. In other words, the patterning influences the bag’s organization and construction. The stripe textile was created through a series of layering operations, creating a rather subdued, regular, two-dimensional exterior surface of the bag. The reverse side of the textile reveals an extravagant excess of material and translates the graphic surface into an active, three-dimensional spatial exploration. The dual nature of the graphic textile and rigorous construction in relation to original size constraints allows for two distinct readings. In one orientation, the exterior of the bag is rectangular, regular, and ordered while the interior is filled with excess textile. When turned “inside out,” the bag expresses dynamism and excess while the resultant interior is open and more traditionally usable.

Second bag:

It’s important to note that sewing, quilting, patterning, and other fabric-oriented practices have a charged, gendered history. Historically and today, sewing was seen as “women’s work” and was a key aspect of the role of a homemaker. Sewing represented the home, a woman’s role of caring for her family, and was associated with the household economy. The aesthetics of textiles still carry this context and cultural meaning. By leveraging the aesthetics of domesticity, I hope to exploit and subvert gender constructs by elevating sewing as a highly skilled, highly complex, highly nuanced process (one that even a robot can’t master) in my work. Today, architectural fabric manipulation employs contemporary manufacturing techniques —laser cutting used to cut complex patterns, 3d printing used to provide complex structures/frameworks, vacuum infusion used to make flimsy fabric rigid, digital modeling used to assist in the production of complex, multi-curved surfaces —along with the traditional aesthetics of textiles and the domestic, producing objects with rich cultural and social meaning.

Fabric manipulation practices enable the direct, isolated exploration of architectural topics and challenge preconceived notions of gender and architectural production. Sewing scales down the act of making and allows the investigation of architectural issues as a digestible, low-stakes, accessible, inexpensive scale in a way other methods of making cannot. Textiles foreground color, graphics, order of operations, layering, and assembly not — unlike the design of a building. By looking towards fabrication practices outside of capital-A Architecture, designers might discover new material assemblies, explore issues of enclosure, learn about the spatial effects of patterning, become more in tune with the maker-machine relationship, and have a bit of fun along the way.