“Weaving House of the Muses”
Textile practices as an architectural method
The project is exhibited as part of “This is Practice”, a collective exhibition on expanding spatial design, by BK Public Programs at the Architecture Faculty, TU Delft.
During my studies, I experimented with different approaches to thinking through the making of architecture. For my MSc graduation project, entitled House of the Muses: Proposing feminist alternatives to the traditional (art) museum, I engaged with my knowledge of textiles, passed down to me by my grandmother, as a method for design.
Textile and architectural design are more connected than we often realise. For example, the Latin word texere means both weaving and building, and many vernacular buildings are based on these processes and principles. However, for centuries, textiles have been considered a secondary craft due to their gendered nature. Yet they are common to every culture, a universal language based on tradition and intergenerational exchange.
In my project, I embraced the qualities of cloth and thread to resist rigid monuments and promote transformation and repair, encouraging interdependency and collaboration.
To inform and guide my design, I worked with four practices of making cloth: spinning, the initial act of making thread by twisting shorter fibres together; weaving, a primary method of making cloth by interlacing yarns or vertical and horizontal threads on a loom; stitching, which joins different pieces of cloth together for functional or decorative purposes; and natural dyeing, which uses local and global resources to create colour and shed light on material agencies and histories.