Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Brief terminology of fabric formwork

For my doctoral dissertation, which I finally defended in July (yipee), I used or developed a number of concepts for the discussion of textile notions and 'concreteness' of fabric formed concrete 'Concreteness' is actually a term I abandon for a tendency to emphasize solely the dichotomy of fluid and solid - instead I invented my own concept, Stereogeneity. Below is summary of this and more key terms:

Concrete and cement
The term concrete is derived Lat. concrēscere, to grow together. The word cement is based on the ancient Roman definition of caementum, a mortar with a binding material for constructing walls. Béton is the term for modern concrete used in French, German and Danish. The word is derived from the Old French betum for a mass of rubbish.(1) See stereogeneity and condition.

Concreting
The procedures of pouring fresh concrete into a mold, or applying thin layers of fresh concrete
on a surface.

Condition
According to the Retrospective Object Theory posed by the Danish artist and Professor Willy Ørskov an art object and its becoming can be understood over time as a series of conditions.(2)

Fabric
A planar textile structure produced by interlacing yarns, fibers, or filaments. The word fabric is derived from Lat. fabrica, workshop, and the French fabriquer, to manufacture, and describes a  number of fabrications. The sense in English evolved via ‘manufactured material’ to ‘textile.’

Formwork tectonics
The relation and careful joining of between parts and whole of formwork structures. The formwork
tectonics of fabric formwork has the core parts: frame, form tie, and textile. Structuralformwork principles, see structure.

Stereogeneity
Word derived from the roots of Gr. stereos (solid) and ginomai (to begin to be); describes concrete as a material and a process and is a coinage of the author. The formal definition is suggested as: ‘the expressed manifestation into solid material form of a series of conditions from the construing and construction of structural formwork principles and concreting.’ See condition.

Structure and structural principles
The use of the word is influenced by the use in Danish struktur, from Lat. struere to pile up.
The word covers the linkages and relationships that exist between parts of a whole.(3) The German
architect Mies van der Rohe (1886 – 1969) defined structure in architecture as a philosophical concept: ’The whole, from top to bottom, to the last detail, with the same ideas.’(4) He saw structural order as a condition where ‘form becomes a consequence of structure and not the reason for the construction.’(5) Structural formwork principles, see formwork tectonics.

Technology and techne
The word is understood through the Greek words techne ‘art, skill, craft, method, system.’combining; and the root of legein ‘to speak’. The architectural scholar Marco Frascari refers to a dual-faced notion of technology because it unifies the tangible and the intangible of architecture.
Rhetorical, symbolic and reflective representations of technology thus refer to the techne of logos; scientific, instrumental and practical representations of technology refer to the logos of techne.(6)

Tectonics
Introduced to architectural discourse in the 19th century, several uses of the word are present in the dissertation: for practical use of tectonic thinking, see structure and formwork tectonics.
Analytical use of tectonics as the expressed manifestation of initial structural principles and the materials and processes,(7) see stereogeneity.

Textile
The term originally describes a specific mode of fabrication, to weave; from Latin: textilis, woven,
fabric, cloth. The word refers more generally to modes of construction for textiles. In the dissertation textile is used as a fabric surface, as structure as well as metaphor.

Notes
1: Peter Collins, Concrete, the Vision of a New Architecture: A Study of
Auguste Perret and his Precursors, 2nd ed. (McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2004), 21.
2: Willy Ørskov, “Objekterne - Proces og Tilstand: forslag til en objektteori,”
in Samlet : Aflæsning af objekter, Objekterne, Den åbne
Skulptur, Antology of writings. (Borgen, 1999),
3: “Struktur”, Den Store Danske (online dictionary, Denmark: Gyldendal,
2012), www.denstoredanske.dk, (Accessed 15-01-2012).
4: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Peter Carter, Mies van der Rohe at
Work, reprint (org 1974). (London: Phaidon, 1999), 9.
5: Ibid.
6: Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture (Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 1991), 116–17.
7: Sekler, Eduard, “Structure, Construction, Tectonics,” in Structure in
Art and Science, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (George Braziller, 1965), 89-95.

Please reference my dissertation: Manelius, Anne-Mette (2012) Fabric Formwork for Concrete - Investigations into Formwork Tectonics and Stereogeneity in Architectural Constructions, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, School of Architecture.

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