‘As technology accelerates the interface between fashion and architecture, the synergy between them could even rearrange the patters of human association and community, dislocating and dividing individuals into their own self-contained shells rather than unifying them into a single environment.’ (Quinn, 5)

‘That’s hot.’ (Paris Hilton, Tom Wiscombe)

Fabric will soon be an outdated metaphor for an infrastructure that presupposes coherence. Paris and Tom’s famous declaration is the natural result of the emerging nature of the metaphor of fabric into an idea of fashion and further. With mass housing, digital technology, late-capitalism, and the commoditization of common shelter, the means of understanding our urban fabric, even the metaphor of urban fabric, has to be as flexible as a sheet of Mongolian silk, and maybe, as Nigel Coats might argue, much thicker.

Hertzberger discusses the warp and weft of a fabric and uses the metaphor to describe an interdependent relationship between infrastructure and style, but we can see that the two-dimensionality of the metaphor allows for many other possibilities: Structure and geometry, grids and plans, cohesiveness and variation as in Habraken’s writing. The metaphor serves well for initial understanding, but it also presupposes a necessary relationship between coherence spatial continuity.

Habraken discusses fabric the least literally, and, I would argue, the most insightfully. Tracing the history of the modern American and European urban fabric, societal memory and a collective understanding, a cohesion, is shown to be critically important, even in the case of a massive planning event as shown in the example of Paris. ‘In the history of architecture, the emergence of downtown fabric as we have known it for more then a century did not come from an act of volition but from a condition thrust upon the profession.’ (Habraken, 71) This seems to imply that it is the weft of the fabric where architecture finds its agency, and the warp is an emergent phenomena. Hertzberger however argues that the warp and weft are ‘reciprocally generative’, (119) the whole informing the part and the part informing the whole.

This seems a comprehensive means to understand the notion of urban fabric. Until one realizes that given the right means, one could find a big mac on six continents within twelve hours without a map, and likely a Starbucks coffee to wash it down. Mass housing and so-called ‘junk spaces’ have rendered obsolete any notion of urban fabric without an understanding of it as also a discontinuous network.

‘[Mass housing] represented a new process broadly applied to the ongoing piecemeal transformation of the fine grained fabric. . . Fine grained transformation in response to life, itself, was effectively excluded. . . Mass housing did not evolve out of historical ways of building. Nor did it embody universal cultural understanding. . . They cannot properly be called fields.’ (Habraken, 76-77)

Mark Auge begins Non Places – the Anthropology of Supermodernity with the most familiar scene so that almost everyone reading is reading their own first person account. It is the scene of getting through an airport and into the air, from a generic commercial sector onto banal transportation, arriving at a neutral destination to stay in the same new hotel. ‘The artificiality, fragmentation and transience common to urban spaces are, paradoxically, the cohesive elements binding them together.’ (Quinn, 4) The modern global identity is by definition not bound by local conditions, but it is not undefined in its multiplicity. Instead it is often constrained (to use Hertzberger’s word) by what Koolhaas calls ‘…the architecture of junk space…[which] organizes society’s time and space in accordance with consumer agendas.’ (Quinn, 4)

So if one aims to understand the local urban fabric, it is necessary to understand the global trends and nodal relationships. Our metaphor for fabric must be at once both 600 thread count cotton and a thick net. Continuous at a local scale and nodal in nature. In effect, it must be quantum fabric. It is thus that one could argue that San Francisco and Shanghai have more in common than San Francisco and Portland.

‘But the special can also be constructed by the builders of the common house. Is spatial organization can parallel or sharply contrast the typology common to the field. In all such cases, however, we find meaning in the relation of the two, and an expression of the culture of the age.’ (78)

In most of the developed and developing world, formal and informal, it would be hard to find a newly built work that was not in some way a manifestation of a simultaneously local and global culture. In Habraken’s description of Cairo, we see an dense emerging local fabric of houses, concrete slabs upon pillars, with steel reaching out, waiting for the next floor. In my travels to Ecuador last summer, one of the most vivid scenes I can remember is looking out over the Barrios of Guayaquil, seeing these steel flagposts of optimism. A fabric slowly accumulating as societal memory dictates, but reinforced by a network of global trade and production of steel and concrete. A raw, rugged site, but filled with optimism. I, like the owners of the houses, and the reaching steel, can’t wait to see what’s next.