On Growth and Form: textiles and the engineering of nature

About the Participants

By Rachel MacHenry, 2001

Kenneth Snelson

Sculptor Kenneth Snelson is the inventor of "tensegrity," the structural system made famous by the American engineer Buckminster Fuller. Snelson's sculpture towers and skeletons are achieved through the interplay of complementary forces; these remarkably simple yet dramatic sculptures create strength through structural systems of discontinuous compression and continuous tension. The sculptures are stabilized through the mechanical distribution of these two forces throughout their structure. Snelson's concepts have had far-reaching influence. The American engineer Buckminster Fuller employed Snelson's principle of tensegrity as the basis of his own work on universal structures. In Fuller's work, tensegrity becomes a metaphor for the construction of the universe itself. Donald Ingber bases his research on the concept of tensegrity in cell structures. For On Growth and Form, a three-dimensional weave structure has been created based on Snelson's invention, and Snelson's original models documenting the discovery of tensegrity are also shown. The art of Kenneth Snelson holds a place at the core of 20th-century sculpture. He has received numerous awards including an honorary Doctorate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York and the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.

Chuck Hoberman, Hoberman Designs, Inc.

Included in this exhibition is an expanding textile-like installation formed of Expandagon elements. This elegant new children's toy system is comprised of complex interlinking, flexible-jointed elements that expand and contract. This is a reflexive structure that makes use of kinematics - the science of mechanical movements. As Hoberman says, "They expand, like we do, as creatures. They echo the movement of the clouds." Hoberman is the inventor of a wide range of unfolding structures, graceful systems that transform dramatically in size and shape. His inventions have been developed for uses ranging from miniature surgical tools to retractable stadium roofs. Recent and ongoing projects include the design and production of emergency shelters, portable theatres, tents and toys. Hoberman holds a BFA in sculpture from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City and an MS in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. He has received numerous awards, including the 1997 Chrysler Award for Design Innovation.

Ann Richards

Highly influenced by her initial training as a biologist, much of Richards's textile practice focuses on biomechanics (the study of stresses in natural forms) and she constantly seeks to translate these principles into new textile structures. Torque applied through over-twisting builds energy into Richards's yarns, whose trapped force is released in the finishing process when spontaneous spiralling movements of the yam cause the fabric to distort dramatically. In her "second skin" textiles, she exploits oppositional torque to create buckling and tension through shrinkage; the resulting cloth may echo the pleated structure of a bat's wing or the ridged spiralling of a shell. Working with natural materials, she experiments with a variety of high-twist yarns and weave structures, pushing these variables to new levels to create contemporary textiles, which embody trapped energy and are responsive to the wearer. Richards holds technical diplomas in Woven Textiles from West Surrey College and Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Biology from the University of London and the University College of North Wales in the United Kingdom.

Donald E. Ingber

The research of Donald Ingber focuses on how living cells structure themselves so they can change shape, move and grow. He pioneered the concept that living cells and tissues mechanically structure themselves using an architectural system first described by Buckminster Fuller, known as "tensegrity." Ingber is also the founder of Tensegra Inc., a company that creates advanced medical devices with biologically inspired properties. Ingber's paper, "The Architecture of Life," which describes his contributions to fundamental research in cell structure over the past 20 years, was published as the cover article in Scientific American in January, 1998. Dr. Ingber holds BA, MA, M. Phil., MD, and PhD degrees from Yale University and is professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, senior staff member in the Departments of Surgery and Pathology at Children's Hospital in Boston and an associated member of the Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center, Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Harvard, MIT Center for Bioengineering and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology.

Apotex Research Inc.

Working on the cellular level, experimentation with biological materials and natural structures is aiding the regeneration of human skin tissue. Many new developments in this burgeoning area are based on similarities in textile and cell structures. The Toronto biotechnology firm Apotex's microscopic slurry is used to initiate the regrowth of patients' skin after wounding or injury. As opposed to other new developments in skin regeneration technology, it kick-starts the body's natural healing process enabling a wounded area to actually regrow its own cells. Most other processes depend on the body accepting a sheet of lab-grown material, which is often rejected. Apotex's slurry is composed of a textile-like matrix of collagen gel supporting allogenic cells, which are replaced by the patient's own cells about one month after introduction. The slurry is flexible and versatile, and has a broad range of applications.

Claudy Jongstra

Jongstra employs her own carefully developed layering and felt-making processes applied to silk, wool and other fibres to create highly tactile cloth that is both hirsute and diaphanous. Her practice concentrates on structural textiles based on non-recursive organic patterns incorporating images of decay and regrowth. This cloth sensually evokes the natural earth cycles of composting layers and the appearance of new life. Jongstra trained at the Academy of Arts, Utrecht and now operates her own Netherlands-based design studio called Not Tom Dick & Harry. Her textiles have been widely exhibited throughout Europe and her production work is sold across Europe and the United States. She has designed textiles for fashion designer John Galliano and her specially commissioned felt works were used in costumes for the Hollywood film production of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones.

Aniko Meszaros

In her PlantAnima installation, Meszaros proposes a textile-like optic-fibre web that supports planar algae growth in marine environments. The algae within this system ingest the light in the optic fibres. A floating, inhabitable landscape would grow from this artificial reef. In this exhibition, Meszaros includes working drawings that create parallels between organic membrane structures and textile structures. The synthetic turf of Plant Anima employs large-scale looped and knitted fabric structures and a three-dimensional model allows us to speculate on how this living textile would fit into the specific landscape of the Venice Lagoon. Meszaros is an architect working in Toronto whose research has concentrated on membrane structures. The material shown here was developed with the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, England.

Geotextiles by Terrafix Geosynthetics Inc. and Maccaferri Canada Ltd.

Coco matting interwoven with polypropylene creates a large-scale textile used for soil retention in engineering projects. Seeds and plants are set into the textile's interstices. While the organic material eventually composts, living vegetation (aided by the polypropylene web) holds the soil in place. Geotextiles prevent the loss of rainwater, thus providing a source of moisture while root systems become established. Rock gabion baskets, also used in engineering landscapes, are similar in construction to looped textiles or traditional basket structures. Once filled with rock, these baskets create retaining walls or support landslide-prone hillsides. Both of these cloth-like structures integrate into the land at a macro level in much the same way as Apotex's skin slurry integrates into the body at a micro level. They enable a natural process to take place while becoming part of a larger structure.

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada

Making Nature

By Philip Beesley, 2001

"I am not interested in policing the boundaries between nature and culture - quite the opposite, I am edified by the traffic".¹

On Growth and Form: textiles and the engineering of nature explores the extraordinary qualities of a new generation of textile materials, illuminating the science that makes them possible and the poetics they express. The phrase "On Growth and Form" refers to the 1917 text of the same title by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson. Thompson studied systems of form and structure throughout species of nature. The eloquence of his writing and the extraordinary illustrations in that text had profound effect on generations of artists and contemporary thinkers. This exhibition honours that legacy by extending Thompson's way of thinking into the new art and science hybrid materials and structures. The structures of nature are a fundamental source for this new work. Some of these fabrics employ natural processes such as flexing, responding to sensory stimuli and transforming themselves. Others take their form by imitating the organizations of microorganisms and cellular tissues. The resulting synthetic materials come from opening the boundaries between organic and artificial forms. The work of this generation of artists and scientists ultimately involves making living things. The projects speak of an uncanny plastic nature.

The works in On Growth and Form come from the disciplines of textiles, architecture and medicine, and involve scales ranging from microscopic tissues to planetary landscapes. Weaving by Ann Richards emulates skin structures such as the elastic folds of bats' wings. The beautiful yardages of textile designers Sophie Roët and Claudy Jongstra contain complex non-recursive patterns based on protoplasmic and cytoplasmic structures. Working at the scale of landscape, architect Aniko Meszaros has conceived a floating geotextile; an artificial reef populated by light-eating algae. Commercial geotextile systems by the corporations Macaferri and Terrafix demonstrate how similar constructions are in fact used every day in the engineering of civic works. Chuck Hoberman's Expandagon construction is a fabric made from a new child's toy system using reflexive mechanics, expanding and contracting in undulating movements. Kenneth Snelson's structures display the universal principle of tensegrity, a natural structural system using compression struts floating within tensile webs. Biotechnologist Dr. Donald Ingber works with human tissues, demonstrating how subtle structures of plasm within cell bodies can work as tensegrity systems. Apotex Industries presents an artificial skin replacement using a slurry of skin cells suspended in a nutrient matrix.

D'Arcy Thompson, the first biomathematician, assumed that all science and learning were one. He claimed that all animals and plants could be understood in terms of pure mathematics. Thompson said "no organic forms exist save such are in conformity with physical and mathematical laws... The form, then, of any portion of matter, whether it be living or dead, and the changes of form which are apparent in its movements and in its growth, may in all cases be described as due to the action of force. In short, the form of an object is a 'diagram of forces'.²"

Thompson went far beyond the encyclopaedic and essentially static systems of 19th-century biology. He conceived form as product of dynamic flux. He said, "Matter as such produces nothing, changes nothing, does nothing… [it] can never act as matter alone, but only as seats of energy and as centres of force.³" An astonishing optimism accompanied this work, giving a vision of the physical world as a great symphony of harmonious forces. How beautiful and moving is the universe when understood as an ethereal palpitation of waves of energy making up all things! There are numerous examples of artists and designers influenced by these words. The mid-20th-century architect Richard Neutra said "The new landscape reaches into vastnesses and smallnesses beyond the normal sensory range; above all it reaches right into our own innermost physiology, the processes within our own skin, within our organism, our nervous system. There are no boundaries in [the new] nature; membranes are permeable, gases and liquids and energy volleys penetrate and are perpetual exchange or transformation…⁴" And yet, these are nothing if universal laws had not formed them into structures perceptible to our senses and intelligence that are themselves adapted to that universal structure. With such optimism we make a world of art out of chaos, in return giving a mirror of our proper structure back to us.⁵

But optimism falters. Looking into the future, Scientific American Magazine in their "Key Technologies of the 21st Century," 150th anniversary issue, amended their usual tradition of American confidence with a mounting, anxious vertigo: "The truth is that as technologies pile on technologies at an uneven pace, it becomes impossible to predict precisely what patterns will emerge. Can anyone today truly foresee what the world will be like if, for example, genetic engineering matures rapidly to its full potential? If organisms can be tailored to serve any function (even becoming living spaceships…), can anyone guess what a 21st-century factory will look like?⁶"

What does happen when nature is replaced? The projects of this exhibition offer new qualities. One kind of result is durable, borne of patient study and craft. The subtle qualities in those works emulate the nature that preceded them. For example, Ann Richards says:

On the other hand, another kind of result is radical and almost deliberately unstable - Kenneth Snelson's constructions, for example, are like this. Buckminster Fuller, the engineer and 20th-century prophet of American progress, took Kenneth Snelson's invention of tensegrity⁸ and presented it as an optimum technology. In Fuller's hands, tensegrity seemed like a universal structural solution that could be used for harnessing and coordinating the earth's energy in order to build a greater human empire. However the tensile forces that accumulate from the compounds of stretched cables in tensegrity structures are enormous. Along with working as stable, efficient structures, the huge proportion of embodied energy in these constructions tends to makes them work as catalysts, reacting and encouraging counter-reactions. They hover; tensed, quivering at the slightest touch. Snelson's constructions invoke dissolution. They are agents of change.

In their various natures these materials change our world - from plastic meshes to microscopic cell slurries, from durable and permanent synthetics to unstable catalysts. The consequences of introducing hybrids into the environment are fundamental. A web of reactions and counter-reactions accompany each new ingredient. We can think of every material as a kind of replicator, the centre of a field of influence on the world at large. Causal influence radiates out from the material, but its power does not decay with distance. It travels wherever it can, along the avenues of cultural imagination, of industrial production, of bodily form and biotechnology. It radiates out beyond the individual form to touch and inflect inorganic objects and living organisms through the world.⁹

An artificial human skin, a gabion-reinforced landscape, and cloth that flexes along with the movements of its wearer are all ingredients of a transformed world. The interwoven bodies that result are complex and the process of making them involves deep uncertainty. The anxiety, even vertigo that results may be an all-too-familiar emotion to us, but the works of this exhibition represent the thinking of generations that has moved beyond simple anxiety about the loss of the natural world. The works of this exhibition speak of creative and poignant involvement with technology - making new nature.

Notes:

1. Haraway. D. J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, The Reinvention of Nature. Free Association Books, p.180. Haraway says, "We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us… Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The Machine is not an 'it' to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us…"
2. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form. Cambridge Press, 1942, p.11.
3. Ibid., p.14
4. Richard Neutra, "Inner and Outer Landscapes," in Gyorgy Kepes, editor, The New Landscape, MlT 1956, Paul Theobald + Co., p.83.
5. Paraphrasing Amadée Ozenfant, in Foundations of Modern Art, John Rodker, 1931, p.285, a wide-flung manifesto which itself expanded upon Thompson'a text.
6. Key Technologies for the 21st Century: Scientific American - A Special Issue, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1995, p.xiii.
7. Ann Richards, correspondence with the curators, August 2000.
8. Kenneth Snelson's large-scale constructs demonstrate tensegrity, the construction system in which compression members provide rigidity while remaining separate, not touching one another, held in stasis only by means of tensed cables. By means of discontinuous compression and continuous tension, Snelson's multi-story towers and large scale amorphous exoskeletons of wire and steel give visible expression to the idea that tension and compression are the eternally complementary elements in any structure. In Buckminster Fuller's synergetics, tensegrity becomes a metaphor for how the universe itself is constructed.
9. Adapting Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, p.237-8. Dawkins describes how complex living systems are transformed by dynamic exchanges of inanimate materials.

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada