The dry campus: fabric shades help battle the heat

September 1, 2012  |  Case Studies, Exteriors, Features

In the arid climate of Arizona, a university battles the heat with fabric shades and a phalanx of sustainable design solutions. By Mason Riddle Given the record-breaking temperatures blanketing the United States over the past year, dismissing global warming as simply a cyclical climatological event …
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Let it rain: saving the rain with fabric

September 1, 2012  |  Case Studies, Features

Rainwater harvesting and fabric structures. By Samuel J. Armijos Fabric structures are often designed to protect one from harmful UV rays; however, they are more often designed to protect one from inclement weather (rain, wind and snow). Fully enclosed fabric roofs are used in Northern climates to i…
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Optimizing wind and water: cooling tricks in Beirut

September 1, 2012  |  Case Studies, Features, Interiors

The Charles Hostler Student Center at the American University of Beirut. By Frank Edgerton Martin In arid climate cities, the way people use architecture and urban space changes with the time of day. Fabrics for shading, screening and evaporative cooling can be part of sustainable strategies to make…
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Collecting their dews with an innovative fabric tower

September 1, 2012  |  Case Studies, Features

Architecture and Vision’s WarkaWater tower harvests H2O from thin air. By Judy Grover In the northern mountainous regions of Ethiopia, where there is very little rainfall, access to water requires several hours of walking to remote sources and hauling containers back to villages, with women an…
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Bries beach memoirs

September 1, 2012  |  Exteriors, Features

A seasonal Dutch club shows how to pack it up. By Mark Zeh Recently a new type of trendy nightclub/restaurant has appeared on the coast of Holland: the beach club. The words beach club normally evoke thoughts of summer heat, light dress and casual eating fare, so it seems anomalous to imagine such c…
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Riding on the cloud of innovation

September 1, 2012  |  Exteriors, Features

Interview with Enric Ruiz-Geli of Cloud9 Architects By Marie O’Mahony Architect Enric Ruiz-Geli is a busy man. His highly acclaimed Media-TIC building in Barcelona’s 22@Barcelona district was given the World Architecture Festival’s World’s Best Building of the Year award in 2…
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Fabric cones mark the entrance

September 1, 2012  |  Exteriors

A trio of tensioned fabric cones marks the entrance of a New Delhi shopping mall. Women and children to the right, please; men to the left. Although the threat of terrorist attacks in public spaces is rare in the aggregate, over time enough have occurred that no country today can afford to ignore th…
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Florida dreamin’ with custom cabanas

September 1, 2012  |  Exteriors

Keeping cool at the side of the pool is easy with these custom, yet simple, cabanas. Even the wealthy are watching their budgets these days; shorter “staycations” substitute for longer vacations and the international jaunt to exotic locales is replaced by back-road journeys to forgotten …
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Fabric roof lets the light into school courtyard

September 1, 2012  |  Interiors

It “takes a village to raise a child,” and the school design selected by Coopers Edge Primary in Gloucester, England, included a Village Square for children to play and the greater community to assemble. The plan called for a covered courtyard that would “inspire and enable people,…
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Designing with folded fabric pyramids

July 19, 2012  |  Interiors

Students at Parsons The New School for Design in New York spent a semester investigating the properties of textiles as “soft structures.” They wanted to work with Xorel, a paper-backed woven textile created by Carnegie Fabrics, Rockville Center, N.Y., to develop an exhibit for the Intern…
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