Softbuilt (Computational Textile Architectures)

Examines the role of communication through computational textiles used to create architecture made of lightweight textiles. Computational textiles are textiles that can sense and respond to the environment with embedded electronics and sensors. This transforming sensory information communicates something to people. It shapes the environment as well as our relations to textiles (as we know them) in ways that call for examination.

The purpose of the book is to examine the role of communication through computational textiles used to create architecture made of lightweight textiles. Computational textiles are textiles that can sense and respond to the environment with embedded electronics and sensors. The term computational textile is not my term but one that has been in use for textiles others call e-textiles, electronic textiles, or smart textiles. These textile systems sense their environment via digital electronic programming through microcontrollers and sensors or are programmed using the quality of the material itself in connection with environmental cues such as humidity, temperature and light.

Textiles operate as a mode of understanding the world and they bind us humans together as a species. Textiles are used in every culture on the planet, although we may use and make this material in different ways. In architecture, textiles made of animal skins or plant fibers were probably used to make the first shelters, as both protective clothing and enclosing space. As a liminal space between the body and environment these textiles became places of exchange and communication of information between people and their communities through shelter and clothing.

With the United States currently putting money into research on smart textiles and intelligent materials, there is a quiet revolution happening in the very textiles that can make up soft structures. These sensing textiles have a primary role communicating to us as occupants and as observers. Sensing textiles permit connection to an internet of things, and the overlay of other spaces, times and events onto a physical space. If we look back to Gottfried Semper’s correlation of clothing with architecture in his treatise titled Style: The Textile Art (Semper 1989:104) then today’s wearable technology made with computational textiles provides a way to understand the emergence of a new style of architecture. This transforming sensory information communicates something to people. It shapes the environment as well as our relations to textiles (as we know them) in ways that call for examination.

The author of this book uses four methods to examine some of the ways in which computational textiles are shaping the environment. First, the author of this book will provide a framework for understanding communication through digitally programmed textiles and describe new architectural concepts these digitally programmed textiles offer. Second, the author will provide a way for architectural and textile designers and others to consider tectonics of material and a tectonics of the digital network. Third, the author will provide four methods for hands-on practical design and construction of computational textiles. Fourth, the author will provide five architectural design case studies that I discuss and show how computational textiles systems are made. Each of the case studies demonstrates a different kind of textile system and design process, different material and digital tectonic set up and different concepts of communication. These design case studies reveal how computational textiles change the spaces we live in.