Floppy Logic

Experimenting in the Territory between Architecture, Fashion and Textile
Leanne Zilka

Floppy Logic is an exploration into the ‘architecture’ of fashion and textiles, and how the concepts, aesthetics, techniques and construction of this architecture might be understood and used to design and fabricate objects and space differently. These seemingly diverse disciplines can be used to traverse from the scale of material and garment to that of rooms and buildings. By working with fashion and textile techniques on form and material simultaneously, ideas for architecture can also be revealed opening new ways of approaching the design and fabrication of architecture.
A key concept here is the Floppy, defined as a quality in material that requires extraneous support to produce architecture. Floppy generally refers to fabric but can also refer to any material that fails when there is not enough support, as is the case with sheet materials when the span between supports exceeds a certain length. Floppy Logic uses a material palette that has been selected for its aesthetic and tactile nature. These materials are typically used superficially and do not have structural qualities to allow them to be applied to the scale of buildings.
By exploring form through material play, as fashion designers do with draping fabric over a body, this book expands on approaches to architecture that consider form, structure, skin and enclosure as separate steps. Here, rather than taking a condition to the material, this approach looks for the condition in the material.

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