Textile Tectonics

I great while ago I was fortunately invited to lecture at the Borås University, Swedish School of Textiles. The focus of my talk was obviously to be upon the textile aspects of research into fabric formwork for concrete structures.

It's no secret that most ongoing research into fabric forming deal with the forming principles and not so much developing textiles. - but, wow, was a visit to the 'machine park' at the university was overwhelming. It brings layers and layers upon the potentials of Textile Performance into fabric formwork. I'm sorry not to dwell into those aspects and share with you - for now, I'll share some images of machines.

Scroll through the images to get to a little treat of machine poetics:

[Weave]

[3d Knitting machine]

[A computer is aligned with each thread to go into the knit]

[Metal knits at Borås School of Textiles]

[Tube of metal knit at Borås School of Textiles]

[Knit at Borås School of Textiles]

['Section' of knit at Borås School of Textiles]

[Spatial knitting at Borås School of Textiles]

Since you made it here, it's time for a little treat - a movie the depicts the machine poetics of weaving. Thanks to the blogger at textilesmithing who did a post about fabric formwork - and for posting the link to the video...

[Valsa das Máquinas, Paramount Têxteis from grafikonstruct on Vimeo.]

  

I was invited to Borås by Anna Valgårda who has her background in computer science and did her  PhD project about the computer as a material. - as a post-doc at Borås she's also the head of the research school in practice based textile research. I've dedicated a post to introduce Anna here.