A free space is a well woven space
Weaving Architecture, an installation presented at La Biennale di Venezia, summarises a way of thinking stemming from Benedetta Tagliabue and EMBT’s experimental work through the years, starting with the wicker Spanish Pavilion of Expo 2010 Shanghai.
Progressing now in Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil (in the outskirts of Paris) with the design of a metro station (part of the Grand Paris Express), a marketplace, an urban renewal, which will be built with fibers, a delicate material resistant through time and climate.
Weaving Architecture, here in La Biennale, deals with the concept of weaving at different scales: weaving the city through its metro, weaving activities of people in the public space, weaving the structure of the canopy to dress it with fiber fabrics.
The canopy provides protection and shade, creating a comfortable, semi-open space for various communal activities. Its colourful nature expresses the spirit of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil by recalling patterns of African traditional clothing as well as local graffiti – an artwork owned by the people. This architecture, like the infrastructure it represents, links territories and builds a sense of social inclusion by manifesting architecture’s social role.
Poetic woven architecture features sustainable red oak
The poetic structure presented in Venice is composed by various elements intertwined in two levels. The higher level is built with American red oak modules and the lower one with steel modules; and both are woven with fibre glass thread of different colours, which softens the visual effect and blurs the boundaries created by
the structure.
“Red oak not only has a minimal carbon footprint but is also truly sustainable”, explained AHEC’s European Director, David Venables. ‘The American hardwood forest, which occupies about 120 million hectares of the United States, has been well managed by successive generations of small landowners.”
Future engineering on a real scale
The project, which consists of a long and deeper research on the pattern, refers to the signs and the iconographies of Africa through a mix of plots, twists and natural and artificial colours, overlying lights, shadows and radiances.
The use of non-flammable and long lasting fibers, as identifying and iconic matrix, gives a primary role to the black of the carbon, the white of the glass, the radiance of the basalt, the orange of the coloured Kevlar.
I-MESH – multifaceted, multifunctional thread that becomes a texture, a new material, a technical fabric that is fluid, tactile, versatile – confirms itself as art object and project, architecture, design – able to decipher the shape, the consciousness and the
meaning of the public space.
A material which has been borrowed from the performance world and reconverted, able to adapt its language to the different expressive needs – in one moment linked to minimalism and in another to decorum – to develop the contemporary infinity contained in a thread. Source by Benedetta Tagliabue – Miralles Tagliabue EMBT.
- Location: Le Corderie dell’Arsenale di Venezia Space 1.47, Italy
- Architect: Benedetta Tagliabue – Miralles Tagliabue EMBT
- EMBT collaborators: Elena Nedelcu, Nazaret Busto Rodríguez, Ana Otelea, Arturo Mc Clean, Lin Lap, Giorgia Mazzeo, Vanessa Mingozzi, Andrea Grigoletto, Lluc Miralles, Paola Buselli
- Year: 2018
- Photographs: Lluc Miralles, Courtesy of Benedetta Tagliabue – Miralles Tagliabue EMBT
