Johan Bettum
The difficult relation between fibrous-composite systems and architecture can be illustrated by the metaphor of the Butterfly Effect which, derived from chaos theory, suggests that small causes in one realm may have enormous effects in another. That is to say, how do the material geometry and geometrical inter-relations of fibers on scales down to 10-3 produce effects on the scale of buildings? For three-quarters of a century architects have anticipated these effects, even described them as revolutionary. Yet, as far as buildings and construction go, there is little to deny that the visionary qualities of the first generation of fibrous-composite projects (early 1950s to 1973) have eclipsed most subsequent work with these material systems. There are at least two major reasons why working with fibrous-composite systems is so difficult. One is that these systems are not materials in the classical sense but designed concoctions of various material sub-systems. This means that fibrous-composite systems evade existing material epistemology and categorization as well as much of our expertise
and assessment standards. The typical version for architectural use consists of one or another fibrous composition as reinforcement embedded in a polymer matrix that guarantees cohesion and surface continuity. The fibrous reinforcement is also a material system and thus given by inter-relations between parts where the fibrous unit is defined by its aspect ratio, that is, the geometrically given ratio between the cross section and length of the fiber. Since these material and geometrical variables are given on minuscule scales and co-dependent on neighbouring variables, the architectural design task becomes vast, staggeringly multifaceted, and complex. The other major reason why the use of these material systems date have not engendered a unique expression and possible new forms of architecture is that the vastness of the problem has led to false assumptions about what is at stake and excruciating simplifications of the problem at hand. For instance, the minute and difficult inter-relational dynamics of fibrous geometry has become replaced by a quasi-textile appearance of material composition on a
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What is the Question?
2015 Research Project Soft Design: Behavioral Form Finding by Marysol Rivas Brito, Gavin Ruedisueli.