The design of woven and knitted structures can be compared with the formation of buildings’ facades and constructions. However, textile designers do not generally participate when the exterior structure and facades of a building take shape, but rather when textiles and materials for the indoor environment are chosen, often with the intention of enhancing the acoustic qualities of spaces. In this research project, two architects and a textile designer collaborate, the latter focusing particularly on sound design. Incorporating textile designers in the early stages of building projects can lead to benefits of exploring and improving sound landscapes in outdoor environments. In order to search for and develop new approaches, methods and techniques in the field described as textile architecture, textile facade modules were designed and produced, and the design process was examined and evaluated from the points of departure of the two design fields. Questions such as ‘who is actually prototyping?’ arose, as well as the search for finding common references and concepts, both historical and contemporary, to strengthen the collaborative work. A practice-based experimental approach was important for the project and the merger of the two design fields, not least to put different textile techniques and materials to the test to examine how they can affect the sound landscape and experiences of space. The key activities in the laboratory work were technique, method, perception, stage-setting and context, which connected both to textile design and architecture. The different textile materials were chosen to comply with the requirements of external climate impact and rough outdoor environments. In groups of demarcated design experiments, the textile techniques of weaving and hand tufting were explored, and the modules were tested acoustically.

See digital folder in Swedish and English. The curtain and the carpet are used as metaphors and the interior and exterior change place. Facades are dressed by textile modules, and are based on architect Gottfried Semper’s principle of “dressing” (bekleidung) from the 19th century, but also on Japanese architecture where spaces are formed through layers that interact. The modules contribute to the absorption of sound in noisy urban environments. In the project, maps of “soundscapes” were made to find the sonic identity of a place, which then was analysed through the use of a number of sonic effects. This is to identify which sounds and sound frequencies that are desirable to dampen. Today, building facades are often designed to be perfect, and facade materials are replaced prematurely, even though the materials have a longer life. We want to change the approach to facade materials, and also demonstrate sustainable alternatives. The woven and hand tufted facade modules can temporarily patch facades during building renovations or become parts of new facades. Using textiles outdoors in facades is unexpected and evokes wonder – can a textile facade module resist outdoor climate? A starting point in the project has been to design textile “disturbances” in the urban landscape, which can give rise to positive experiences of something “non-perfect”. Here, the project connects to aesthetic approaches in the Japanese tea culture. The “incomplete” tea bowls, used in the Japanese tea ceremony, evoke wonder through the unsymmetrical form and the crackled glazing. In this way, bridges can be built between consciousness and objects. The exhibition also raises the question of what textile architecture is and can be. A slide show with various interpretations from both textile design and architecture is shown, for example projects by the design studio Inside Outside | Petra Blaisse and the architectural office Kengo Kuma and Associates.

This paper presents experiences from a two-day teaching workshop where first year students in architecture meet with first year students in textile design for an assignment on building structures with textile, soil and plants designing for indoor gardening with the aim of inspiring for more sustainable lifestyles. The background is a research project on textile architecture with the objective of exploring this new field and to establish a platform for long-term collaboration between the disciplines of architecture and textile design. The paper addresses pedagogical challenges in the meeting between first-years students of different disciplines and traditions, but also in the meeting between research and undergraduate teaching. The students produced creative results but had difficulties in exploring the full complexity of the task. An evaluative discussion is based on observations, photo documentation, notes during group discussions, follow-up questionnaires among the students and reflections among involved researchers.

Today in Swedish building production, materials are often used to give the impression of plain and perfect surfaces and volumes. For several contemporary Japanese architects, among others Kengo Kuma and Toyo Ito, the building materials play a role in the stage-setting of incomplete and unexpected experiences and perceptions that instead evoke wonder. In this way, the materials acquire additional meanings as intermediary links, to bridge between human being, building and landscape, preventing buildings from being experienced merely as objects. This 2012 pilot project was developed into a new research project “Urban Materiality: Towards New Collaborations in Textile and Architectural Design”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR), Artistic Research. In that project, the formation of “textile disturbances” creates latitude for new processes of renewal in urban environments, where aesthetic ideals of perfection often result in current materials and building envelopes today being replaced prematurely with inferior materials in existing environments.

The Japanese architects Kengo Kuma and Toyo Ito work with the formation of mental processes, which include spatial perceptions, but also haptic experiences. In this regard, they both connect to the Japanese architectural tradition. Therefore, it is interesting to compare their work, especially since visually the architecture of these two architects differs. However, through staged, unexpected and changeable experiences of materiality and spatial organisation – interacting in dynamic flow with the surroundings – similar mental processes are evoked when conceiving and perceiving their architecture that are an integral part of the ongoing processes to transform their architecture into ‘abstractions’. The point of departure for being involved in these similar, processual stage-settings is the creation of uncompleted experiences of wonder; a void, which is recognised from the traditional Japanese expressions for beauty – shibui and yugen – and described by Soetsu Yanagi as a hidden, subjective beauty. This in turn leads to a new subjectivity in connection with traditional Japanese conceptions of space, where space is a subjective perception and a changeable process in the mind of the beholder, and not an outside object. The references to the architectural tradition include the villa and the garden of Katsura and the architect Kazuo Shinohara, who opposed and criticised Western Modernism with the basis in his own Japanese tradition.

In different traditional Japanese works of art “the Void” [ku], which is connected to Zen Buddhism, is central. The void is given a changeable shape in the Noh theatre, ink paintings, landscape gardening and architecture, among other things. In crafts, for example, the glazing of the tea bowls in ceramics used in the Japanese tea ceremony has crackled and the shape is often asymmetrical, non-perfect. Here a “hidden beauty” is expressed, something incomplete, and the observer is involved, fills in himself and completes the form. The incomplete evokes a subjective experience of beauty, and the phenomenon has created several Japanese aesthetic notions and concepts of beauty, such as shibui and yugen. This “non-perfect” creates a relation to materials – the involvement of a perceiving subject forms a link between subject and object that dissolves the borders between them and this link is the material and the materiality. Several contemporary Japanese architects are influenced by these ideas from tradition, among others Kengo Kuma and Toyo Ito. Kuma stretches and examines the boundaries for the materiality of materials to create new contexts in unexpected applications of materials, which causes surprising, haptic experiences. Through the stage-setting of this experience of ”non-perfection”, a mental process is started, which connects to the way in Japanese tradition to conceive space as a procedural, changeable experience connected to a perceiving subject – a subjective sense of space. Space is a mental experience, not an object, and in several articles and publications, Kengo Kuma has expressed his aim of forming what he calls “anti-objects”. He has started the Kengo Kuma Laboratory in the University of Tokyo, Department of Architecture, and in the studio, students, doctoral students, researchers and practitioners meet to experiment with materials and evaluate the results of research. In the work of Toyo Ito, architecture and engineering meet. Ito wants to create another relation to materiality than in Modernism. He challenges the materiality of materials in a similar way like Kengo Kuma by designing buildings in collaboration with engineers, among others Mutsuro Sasaki. He experiments with materials, their load and span capacity and structurally. Ito wants to liberate buildings from rigid grids and modular systems and inject materiality to form spatial flow and enhance the physical experience of space and the sensuous connections to material and materiality. Visually, Ito’s and Kuma’s architecture differ by the choice of materials; Ito chooses materials like concrete and glass which is associated with industrial production and Kuma prefers materials connected to craft. However, the point of departure is the same, to use stage-setting as a tool in the design work. Unexpected, incomplete experiences and perceptions are evoked through the materials and links are created between human being and building and this starts a procedural experience of space and materiality. Ito, as well as Kuma, connects to the Japanese tradition where space is a mental, changeable process, and the point of departure for changeability is that there is something incomplete, a void, enclosed in the experience.