agenda.

Relating “new diagrammatic techniques for handling programmes and spatial adjacencies” and “resonance with a material system” in a design for a new fashion school along Northbank. Drawing from our previous research and experimental work, we were drawing on ideas of Fever, Fashion and Tension Membranes.

In terms of applying Tension Membrane as an architectural design element, the question is what can we do with it? Is it only purely structural? Or is it only purely formal? Or is it confined to neither but is rather a culmination or synthesis of both applications? What can we use it for? How, as a building element, will it enhance the architecture, design and usage of the building as a fashion school?

How can we look for these answers? Is it in the further testing of what the system can do for us – in physical model testing as well as digital model animation? What is special and unique about the tension membrane system? What can it do for the architecture that other conventional building systems cannot do?

So far we have struggled to push for what else Tension Membranes can be. Maybe it is about time we just let the material system be as it is and choose to expand on what it is as it is. And from there, we take what it is onboard to develop and enhance our programmatic analysis and understanding of a fashion school.

Perhaps our final outcome may be a series of fabric tension membranes that frames and separates activities and functions throughout the building. It might be that we choose instead to simulate the carved spaces of the tension membranes with thin concrete instead. Whatever we end up with, the step to first take is to allow the system to be as it is and not be too ambitious in having it look like something never seen before. In doing that, (hopefully) we will end up with an architecture that has never been seen before.