When Does Clothing Become Textile Architecture? Creating Dynamic Qualities in Architecture through the Power of Embodied Ideation Techniques

Abstract

Textile architecture bridges two distinct design practices that operate at different scales. The challenge of designing a soft and dynamic architecture has been widely addressed by architects and researchers. However, few of these projects adopt a textile design perspective. By proposing an embodied approach to textile architecture, this paper aims to contribute to new ways of designing textile architecture by means of transdisciplinary collaboration. Through a case study, we explore how the dynamic qualities of textiles in relation to body movement can inform new textile architectural design processes. The results show that the transformative nature of textiles, as a material that is adaptive, soft and dynamic, fosters a new understanding of textile architecture when coupled with the body. An embodied approach such as this addresses a perspective of power relations that is distributed across a relational network of agents and their capacity to perform as enablers and disablers, allowing architects and textile designers to work at the same level regardless of scale.