The Textile Space

Textile has within the last decade increasingly been regarded as an architectural material. Many new textiles have been developed and this has increased its applications in architecture. But how do textile and space meet and which spatial qualities can arise in this meeting?

The paper describes a series of practical studies of the spatial qualities that can be established through the design of three very different fabrics. The topic is part of an ongoing Ph.D. project at The Danish Design School in Copenhagen. The main theme of the Ph.D. is the inter-play between textile, space and sound.

Space, established with textile, differs in several ways from rooms built of conventional building materials. Textiles are flexible - it can both be folded and moved, it can be translucent and simultaneously provide a visual barrier, it is lightweight and at the same time very strong, it is sound absorbing and it has a special poetry which is not to be found in any other material. Which spatial qualities can be obtained with these textile properties?

Contemporary conception of space in architecture can be said still to rely on the modernist conception. In practical experiments it is investigated how the textiles can be given shape in relation to modernist theories of space conception. In these theories a number of specific parameters which determine the formation of space are defined. Some of these parameters are the creation of distance between objects, structuring of the space in relation to platonic solids, transparency of materials and dissolution of space boundaries.