BOOK SOFT SHELLS / POROUS & DEPLOYABLE ARCHITECTURAL SCREENS / SOPHIA VYZOVITI

Soft Shells: Porous and Deployable Architectural Screens comprises an anthology of form generation experiments which employ the continuous surface, its aggregates, and its subdivisions as a tool. Conducted primarily in analogue media, in a low-tech, high-concept fashion, experiments confront the geometry of surface transformations with material effects, incorporating factors such as gravity, time, and human participation.

Four processes of surface transformations organise research findings, thus structuring the chapters of this book: ‘cut’, ‘pleat’, ‘tile’ and ‘weave’. They operate on two conceptual levels. As techniques, they are associated with the craft of textiles. As vehicles of architectural thinking, they evoke the textile as a retro-novel paradigm for architectural design. According to Gottfried Semper, the textile precedes, informs, and later becomes consolidated into architecture. In the first volume of ‘Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; Or, Practical Aesthetics’, the textile is exemplified as the earliest artistic technique, comprising in essence “a system of material units whose attributes are pliability, suppleness, and toughness” whose basic objectives are “to string and to bind” as well as “to cover, to protect, to enclose”. Within this framework, surface transformations, aggregates and subdivisions are investigated as a proto-tectonic condition where structural and ornamental characteristics of architecture may originate.

The textile is employed as a relativistic device which encompasses both surface and ornament, generates patterns, and alludes to the performative as a responsive system. In this sense, the softness of architectural shells resides not only in their material substance – which is certainly flexible, malleable, and elastic – but also in their transient establishments, their inscriptions in performances and short-term architectural applications, as well as their weak or unstable forms. Furthermore, softness relates to their morphogenetic processes which oscillate in the dipole between artefact and representation, intuitive and computational, analogue and digital, individual and collective. Research has been developed in the academic studio – in courses and workshops – as well as within professional practice. Applications of the morphogenetic experiments presented include exhibition installations, interior design, architectural models, and detailing prototypes.

Soft Shells is a follow-up title to Sophia Vyzoviti’s bestselling books, Folding Architecture and Supersurfaces. Where Folding Architecture explored folding as a design method in architecture, and Supersurfaces showed experiments in a fusion design field between product design, fashion and architecture, the new Soft Shells investigates textile as a retro-novel architectural device which is porous and deployable.


You can order Soft Shells from BIS Publishers (http://www.bispublishers.nl/bookpage.php?id=191)

Architect Sophia Vyzoviti is assistant professor of architectural design methodology at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly, Greece. Her research focuses on design tool development, exploring how form generation processes mediate between social groups and artefacts to transform conditions of spatial interaction. Vyzoviti’s goal is to enhance community cohesion through collective creativity employing design principles from an interdisciplinary field between architecture, urban sociology, anthropology, and artificial intelligence. Areas of application include architectural and urban design, as well as interiors and installations.

Source: www.sophiavyzoviti.com
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