Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Textile Revolution

[Image of 'textile mats' courtesy and via ]

In an image search for specific images of geotextile, I stumpled upon a post about Drone Landscapes, Intelligent Geotextiles, Geographic Countermeasures on the always interesting BLDBLOG 

This headline may sound far from the present concrete scene. But textiles are of course a big part of the field of fabric forming. Furthermore, an explosive development of advanced technical textiles influences the construction of concrete.
In fabric formwork alone, full-scale prototypes and buildings in fabric formed concrete uses different types of woven polypropylene, also known as geotextiles.
This is the use of flat sheets of fabrics. Another overlapping field is the tectonics of textile structures, and then there is the 'textile', which refers to symbolic aspects and behavior. Such as the image below - definitely 'textile'.

['Textile concrete': A photo by Toshio Shibata via]

I may have posted an image like the above image of a Japanese retaining wall before, but it is definitely a case of 'textile' concrete, (thanks again Josh for that)
Enough talking  - go read the post about computational geotextiles and get back to me if the influence of  really-smart textiles as concrete formwork makes sense. A 'tiny' problem of this concept of course is that much of the smartness is cast in concrete if used as formwork.

Concrete landscape car park

Photo by Claudia Luperto via

Car parks tend to be among the rare examples of fully exposed concrete structures - and, regrettably they are most often so ugly - well, not this one in the Swiss town Herdern by Peter Kunz Architektur back in 1998. I may consider purchasing a car if I could get a parking lot (and car) like this.

I wonder if car owners who park in more beautiful spaces are also better behaved in traffic causing better karma in the streets in general - and fewer accidents? I am certain they are - and this effect alone calls for more ambitious architectural solutions for the enormous amounts of volumes or junkspace constructed for cars in cities...
Photo by Dominique Marc Wehrli via