CITA Behaving Architecture

Thaw
Thaw investigates how to use textile concepts of tension and friction for tectonic structures of architectural scale. As a wall membrane, Thaw explores the making of a woven structure made of ash slats braced together by steel joints. Where most architectural structures work through principles of compression, Thaw is a tensile structure. As such Thaw is soft: it moves the forces through its woven field though frictive interconnectivity.


Exploring the ideal of soft constructions, Thaw is animated. A pulley system draws Thaw in at a pulsing rhythm. The structure expands and contracts, inhales and exhales, resonating with its own material performance.


A second skin lines the structure. As a pleated manifold the membrane is tied to the surface responding to the movement and incorporating its rhythm.


http://cita.karch.dk/Menu/Projects/Behaving+Architectures+(selection)

Slow Furl 
Slow Furl is the making of a room size textile installation that acts and reacts on its inhabitation. The installation exists as a soft and pliable skin that lines the Lighthouse space. The skin shifts. As guests enter and move within the foyer, the skin moves imperceptibly at deep timeframes, creating new cavities and spaces, revealing slits and apertures.


Slow Furl is playful environment that engages the physical presence of its guests. Users are invited to touch or sit within its soft skins. As they do they feel the slow pulse of it’s movements. As a landscape, a cloud formation or an ice wall, it forms and reforms around the body of its user.


http://cita.karch.dk/Menu/Projects/Behaving+Architectures+(selection)/Slow+Furl+(2008)



Strange Metabolisms
The project is the making of a city. Imagined as Manhattan like plots, the city exists in its own durational times coming alive through stop frame animation. The skins posit shifts between interiors and exteriors through their folds, protrusions, slits and layerings. Knitting together multiple fibre types, embedding armatures and small electronic circuitries allowing light and heat, the city is suggested through the complex performances of its skins.


http://cita.karch.dk/Menu/Projects/Behaving+Architectures+(selection)/Strange+Metabolisms+(2007)


Breathing Room
Breathing Room is an interactive installation that shapes it contours and depths through the actions of the user. Invited to pull threads of fishing weights, the user can change and move the spaces it envelops. Breathing Room responds by a slight inhalation, increase of pulse. The membrane breathes; opens itself and closes according to its own internal rhythms. These gentle oscillation are counteracted, shaped and changed through the users adjustments.


http://cita.karch.dk/Menu/Projects/Behaving+Architectures+(selection)/Breathing+Room+(2007)



Vivisection
Vivisection is an experiment in spatial formation within architecture and design based on the idea of a robotic membrane. Vivisection is the making of a live section, a sensing skin that acts and reacts on its inhabitation. As a spatial experiment it is the thinking of how a techtonic surface can embed a capacity for sensing and actuation. The fabric, a weave of silk and steel, is conductive thereby allowing us to pass electronic signals through it. By using antenna based sensor chips the fabric itself becomes a sensor, which feels the presence of its audience. The sensors inform a network of distributed micro-computers, that in turn control the fans, inflating and deflating internal bladders in the structure.


http://cita.karch.dk/Menu/Projects/Behaving+Architectures+(selection)/Vivisection+(2006)





The Persistent Model
Persistent Model #1 considers the site of indeterminacy as the fabric of the construct itself. Free-form metal inflation provides a conceptually congruent material veil to these concerns. It is a procedure through which outcomes deviate from initialising representations with greater or lesser degrees of predictability – a result of a sensitive dependency established between material behaviour and the nature of the imposed geometry


http://cita.karch.dk/Menu/Projects/Behaving+Architectures+(selection)/Persistent+Model+%231+(2010)



Listener CNC Knitting 
Listener explores the idea of a textile membrane that has an inherent capacity to sense and react to its surrounding. Collapsing the idea of the controlled and the controlling, Listener is the making of a material that has its own, autonomous, relationship to its environment. The textile is treated as a composite material that through its inherent conductivity allows for the passing of computational signals, but also through its exceptional structural strength, and through its treatment, gains new properties.


http://cita.karch.dk/Menu/Projects/Behaving+Architectures+(selection)/Cad+Cam+Knitting+(2010)