Zoirotia

Zoirotia is a large scale textile installation with a kinematic substructure. It consists of 88 customized CNC knitted patches of an average dimension of 1.8 m x 5 m and covers an area of 568 m² extending 25 m × 27 m and 15 m in height. Built for the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM) the project explores textiles as a material for a soft space. In this framework soft includes ideas of the mutable and changing. Zoirotia is animated. Incorporating a series of steered pistons, it is animated by a continual kinetic movement.

Materials
Architectural structure and computational knit: serafil (continuous polyester filament), bending active rods: glasfibre, ropes and wires: polyester, stainless steel, compression rods, details: steel



KUV Reflection
Zoirotia (derived from the Greek word for vividness) explores the making of a new textile architecture creating a soft immersive space. Knitted in vivid colours, the installation creates a new sense of tactility and connection between visitors and the exhibition space as people are enveloped in a constantly transforming colour-scape. And, Zoirotia moves. Flexing and unflexing across deep timeframes, the structure moves in a slow rhythm, recomposing the structural forces of its form-found figure. Like in nature, the structure is dynamic and changing – vivid, with lifelike behaviour.

Zoirotia asks how architecture can gain its own movement language. If architecture is traditionally understood as unchanging in time; consolidated by the compressive logics of static structures and idealised material permanence, Zoirotia pushes towards other boundaries. Here, the structural system is understood as a continual act of balancing – a negotiation of tensile and compressive stresses animated in time.
Zoirotia is made as a bending active structure supported by bespoke knitted membranes. Here, bent glass fibre rods are braced by a pre-tensioned knitted membrane. As such, Zoirotia exists as a balance between forces. The knitted membranes are graded creating a differentiation in their three-dimensionality, colour intensity and translucency. They are machine knitted in a bespoke manner meaning that each membrane is different in its shape, colour and performance. The yarns are spun from high performance polyester sourced from the furniture industry enabling the strength ratios needed for architectural application while at the same time allowing us to work with a broad palette of colours. In Zoirotia, this colour opportunity is expressed through two tempers; on the façade of the entrance light yard of the exhibition a slow grading shifting between whites, greys and blues lifts the gaze of the visitors up into the space, while in the cave a denser colour space with more abrupt transitions envelops its inhabitants in deep turquoise and yellow tones.
Although the installation changes across the façade, into the cave and through to the second light yard, it is made from repeating units. Each unit consists of four attached membranes rotating around a central axis. By variegating the scale, geometry and colour of each membrane and by turning the units horizontally a unified language is gained. This allows the curation of a spatial experience that flows from the façade to the the cave and in to the second installation space.
Zoirotia is light-weight and resilient. The material system operates through measures of redundancy. It can absorb energy and shape change in response. Actuated by a series of hydraulic motors mounted up over the main façade structure, the structure slowly changes recalibrating its embedded balance. The pulse of this movement is set below our immediate perception. Instead, the movement is perceived as a continual resonance with a material change.
A central part of the creation of Zoirotia has been the building of new workflows between architectural design and textile production from which a new bespoke material practice emerges. Zoirotia is knitted using a continual grading between to stitch types; double jacquard – normally used for garments – and an open jacquard in which the stitch is allowed to unravel in a controlled manner and stretch the fabric to create the three dimensional protrusions that form a structural bow-shape unit. The interfaces enable the informing of the membranes in stitch-by-stitch manner. This allows control the geometry of the individual membranes and tune them to their structural performance. The graded control of the unraveling creates a situated translucency that continually shifts in intensity across the installation.
Context
Zoirotia follows previous interdisciplinary collaborations of CITA with textile design and structural engineering, which resulted in large scale textile and CNC-knit structures, such as Vivisection (2006), Hybrid Tower (2015 and 2016) and Isoropia (2018). These works examine new workflows that enable the integration of simulation and form-finding as well as fabrication data for CNC knitting production.