ArchiTextile Conference 2011
The Textile Medium in Architecture, Past to Present
The conference explores the textile medium, technology, material and metaphor in the history and theory of architecture from antiquity to the present. Contemporary experiments and phenomena in the architectural discourse open new perspectives onto the history and theory of architecture. Textile surfaces create architectural, social and topological spaces and are essential to the built space. Their qualities such as elasticity, foldability, plasticity, opacity and transparency are an important part of architectural language, but have not yet been studied systematically. The tension between the textile and the tectonic generates notions such as building as clothing and myths of the textile origins of architecture, and the ornamental grammar of textures connects building structures to the textus, the textual weaving. The textile medium connecting a variety of fields of human activity is equally open to historical, sociological, psychological, technological and aesthetic enquiries as it addresses issues of veiling and revealing and phenomena such as the fold, the fleece, the membrane, the curtain, the interface or the network.Historians and theorists of architecture are invited to reflect on the textility in architecture from a broad thematic and historical perspective as to contributing to a history of the textile medium.
19th May 2011
9.30-10.45
Sonja Hildebrand (Zürich) – Gottfried Sempers architektonischer Raum als Bühne
Bernard Cache (Paris) – Gottfried Semper, lecteur de Platon?
11.15-12.30
Bettina Köhler (Basel) – Architektur und Zelt. Das Zeltzimmer von Schinkel bis Panton
Spyros Papapetros (Princeton Univ.) – Animated Textiles: Direction and Agency in Fabrics
13.30-14.45
Fabio Barry (St Andrews) – Weaving the Universe: Cosmic Textiles in Ancient Art and Literature
Franziska Bark Hagen (Zürich) – Die Stiftshütte: Ephemere Architektur und materialisierter Dialog
15.15-16.30
Ashley Dimmig (Istanbul) – The Fabric of Architecture: Imperial Ottoman Tents
Avinoam Shalem (München / Florenz) – Soft Spolies. The Aesthetics of Reusing Ottoman Textiles on Thora Curtains
16.45-17.20
Michael Gnehm (Zürich) – Orientalism in a Tent
20th May 2011
9.00-10:15
Reinhold Martin (Columbia, NY) – Cold War and Curtain Walls
Georges Teyssot (Quebec) – The Membrane’s Folds
10.45-12.00
Achim Menges (Stuttgart) – Material Computation. Integrative Computational Design for Complex Textile Morphologies
Jürgen Mayer H. (Berlin) – pre.text / vor.wand
13.00-15.00
Erik Wegerhoff (München) - Das Kolosseum, flatterhaft
Sabina de Cavi (Brussels) – City-Draping in Seventeenth Century Naples: the Role of Cloth and Color in the Luminarie for the Annual Feast of S. Gennaro (1661-1719)
Ralph-Miklas Dobler (Rom) – Die Fahne als raumbildendes Medium im Faschismus
15.30-16.45
Maarten Delbeke (Ghent) – Trees in Fancy Dresses. Textile and the Origins of Miracle Shrines in the 17th and 18th Century
Alina A. Payne (Harvard Univ.) – The Paragone Sculpture/Textile in the Architecture of the Italian Renaissance