Philip Beesley and Sean Hanna
A new generation of giant-scale textiles is at the
core of a revolution in architecture. Soft “textile” foundations
are fundamentally changing the way we think about architecture.
Textile-based building concepts range from flexible skeletons and
meshwork skins to buildings that move and respond to their occupants.
These structures replace traditional views of solid, gravity-bound
building with an interwoven, floating new world.
Karl Marx predicted a transformed world with the evocative
phrase in his Second Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts
into air.” A host of novel visions for architecture accompanied
this view. In a 1913 drawing by Harvey Wiley Corbett, published
in Scientific American magazine, we see the kind of city that Marx
might have imagined.
