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Books, books, books, books!

It’s that time of year when many publications review the year’s most interesting books, and Fabric Architecture is no exception. Here are four books worth reading that recently came across my...

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Money talks

No matter how you say it, the cost of something always plays a big role in the total scheme of things. Our January 2011 issue theme, how to estimate the cost of awnings and canopies (“Show me the...

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Its time to lighten up

Out of frustration with the local (Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, USA) NFL sports franchise — the Minnesota Vikings football team and its owners — for their persistent and annual demands of tax...

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Japanese architect Shigeru Ban comes to aid of people

Design materials genius Shigeru Ban has developed disaster aid shelters in the past using inexpensive materials like cardboard tubes and fabric. He’s doing it again to help families and victims of the...

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The future is now!

Get your votes for your favorite prediction in before tomorrow arrives. How many times have you read headlines that shout at you that the future has arrived sooner than we thought? It wouldn’t have...

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Tents are from Mars, caves are from

Why is it that people cannot get past the concept of fabric structures as permanent or durable structures? Why is it that when NASA or another space exploration-focused design group proposes inflatable...

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Space! The next frontier?

Who would guess that spacesuits and architecture have anything in common? You could not be faulted if the above headline caused some confusion. After all, architecture is a technology of ground...

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Here today, gone tomorrow?

I have often written about the advantages of temporary structures in Fabric Architecture magazine, and several recent announcements about new designs only serve to underscore this notion. In May, the...

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The opposite of transparent

Internationally acclaimed Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s design for the annual summer Serpentine Pavilion is now complete, and it could not be farther from the usual lightness and folly-inspired...

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Yes, but is it fabric?

Look closely at the picture; the mesh is made of stainless steel. Would you normally consider this a fabric? Some in our industry would not because the base “fiber” is not one of the traditionally...

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Kapoor and Isozaki = red mobile concert hall

When it comes to art installations by British artist Anish Kapoor, you can be sure that it will be created in his signature blood-red color. True enough, a recent collaboration between Kapoor and...

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On regenerative landscapes

Can specialty fabrics really help heal the earth? There’s a lot of hype these days about saving the environment, promoting species diversity and slowing global warming. “Regenerative” or “restorative”...

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Innovative from the start

A team of students from SCI-Arc and Caltech push the envelope (literally) for a solar house prototype In the interest of driving innovation toward highly efficient housing designs, the U.S. Department...

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Green grows the optimization

Concepts like net-zero building or low carbon footprint are leading design today, so it was only a matter of time before the Olympic Games jumped on the bandwagon. Given the number of post-Olympics...

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New for 2012

Updating the magazine is the chance to rethink, improve The design and editorial direction of Fabric Architecture magazine has remained consistent—with minor tweaks and updates—for more than 10 years....

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The Serpent(ine) in the Garden

Internationally acclaimed architects Herzog & de Meuron and equally distinguished Chinese artist Ai Weiwei have been chosen as the design team for the 2012 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion. The annual...

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Get smart!

Designing intelligent (dynamic) architecture. When I was a teen, the hippest show on television was “Get Smart,” a parody of the secret agent genre starring the inimitable Don Adams as Maxwell Smart....

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Go team!

For fabric architecture, the architect-fabricator dynamic can make a huge difference in outcome. Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, working together is success. –Henry Ford...

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Triple-X: The London 2012 Olympics fabric structures under the microscope

While the world directs its attention to the athletes that are competing in the Games of the XXX Olympiad occurring right now in London, for the past four years fabric structure architects and...

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The worth of a sun, water

“When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.” —Benjamin Franklin With six months’ of higher than average temperatures this year and a 10-year record drought in many parts of North America,...

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Parametric Kreod Pavilion, London

It is pleasing to see that more and more architects and designers are discovering the aesthetic pleasure and practicality of fabric as a building material. But I do wish they would acknowledge how...

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Its a material world after all

Recent studies have shown that people are rediscovering craft and handmade things. When it comes to choosing between a million-made manufactured object versus a one-off (or short run) object, people...

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Inner workings

Still waters run deep, the saying goes. There’s more beneath the surface than meets the eye, goes another. Any way you look at it, designing tensioned fabric interiors is no simple matter, and the...

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Blue, Wendy blue

Last year, FA reported on the fabric-based pavilion design by HWKN for the Museum of Modern Arts’ (MoMA) annual invitational Young Architects Program. The New York, N.Y.-based designers’ project,...

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Digitals origins in textiles

We’ve come full circle. Some of the earliest evidence of human technology is of woven cloth, dating from more than 100,000 years ago. According to archaeologists, the first human-made structures were...

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