Threading Architecture: Towards a More Open and Evolving Architectural Practice
A lecture organised by Michelle Howard and Adam Hudec as part of the Erasmus+ project Ignored Technology.
How can knitting as a mode of structuring offer a more open and transformative approach to architectural thinking and making? Drawing on Unraveling: New Spaces, presented at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, this lecture explores knitting as a form of architectural knowledge production rooted in transformation, adaptation and metamorphosis.
Through an interactive kinetic wool structure, Unraveling demonstrates how a continuous thread can be interwoven into structure, form and space, while the same process can be reversed to generate new configurations. This approach challenges the idea of architecture as a fixed form and opens up possibilities for understanding architectural practice through cycles of composition and decomposition, material transformation and temporality.
The lecture situates knitting within an interdisciplinary, embodied and collective practice that brings together manual dexterity, material intelligence and experimentation. It considers how craft-based knowledge can contribute to a more open and evolving architectural practice, and how such approaches might foster greater sensitivity to the complex ecological systems of the living world.