Fibre Architecture: A Soft Simultaneity Design Practice

Abstract

This paper sets out the investigation and methodological learnings of an ongoing collaborative research practice situated between architecture and textile design to show a new practice that is a fusion of the disciplines rather than a parallel set of practices. Applying textile materials to architectural form is challenging in its complexity, requiring an understanding and empathy with the textile material and technique to determine its material behaviour and structural form at an architectural scale. There is a simultaneity that happening collectively between the disciplines to ensure the success in design, fabrication and assembly. This means that structure, form, and material are considered at the same time by both disciplines. In response to these challenges, we present ‘soft simultaneity’ as a methodological approach, where the design programme – design concept, fabrication and assembly – are perceived and effectively developed simultaneously from the different vantage points of each discipline’s knowledge. Each disciplines’ contribution to the collaboration is relative to the other. While each simultaneously perceive the same event (design actions), they do so from their different frame of reference, to feedforward and feedback into the emergent design in different ways. This brings a certain elasticity to the process of the design programme. It enables the coming together of diverse knowledge sets, divergent processes, of the whole and the particular, and to accommodate differences in scale, through advanced digital architectural processes and detailed physical textile design sampling. While the textile material provides the latent potentiality for form finding and creativity, it is soft simultaneity that enables the nature of these materials, their behaviours and interactions to be revealed and realised. We identify and discuss this approach, in the context of a series of projects, and offer this as a useful example of a material-led design strategy for dealing with the complexity of interdisciplinary research.