Fabric: Woven vs Surface

Fabric: Woven vs Surface
The idea of fabric seems to go only skin deep in Nigel Coates article skin/weave/pattern. He presents a proposal for the Rainham Marsh in Essex as a culmination of fabric elements in plan that will layer against other random patterns in section to create a three dimensional environment. As if the collage of random geometric patterns applied from high above in the designers chair would somehow create an “identity built into the local DNA” for that community. In another example the author strews jackets across the room to study the architectural potential of the fabrics folds however he does not delve into the potential of fabrics layers, construction methodologies or veiling characteristics. For Coates, fabric is simple a malleable surface that contains two dimensional patterns that should be applied everywhere. He talks about the three dimensional aspects that can be studied with computer modeling, yet the images are about two dimensional surface slapped on a terrain.
Lebbeus Woods presents a poetic article in “Radical Reconstruction,” however idea for inhabiting the devastated city is a more romantic view of the desolation of place than a viable solution. He states that “wherever the restoration of war devastated urban fabric has occurred in the form of replacing what has been damaged or destroyed, it ends as a parody, worthy only of the admiration of tourist.” Many of the worlds most culturally diverse and vibrant cities were war torn and rebuilt including London, Paris, and Rome. The fact that tourist visit these places do not make them equivalent to visiting Epcot in Orlando because a rich local fabric exist with or without visitors. I agree that the local fabric should not be imitated or superficially memorialized. There is richness to these virgin war zones and his says it beautifully writing, “ there exists within this degraded layer of urban fabric another, more intimate scale of complexity that can serve as there point of origin for a new urban fabric.” The pictures that he is trying to paint are not backed by viable models shown through history and begin to make him sound like another quixotic socialist visionary. These environments have always existed and grow further, yet today we call them slums.
Habraken’s commentary “Palladio’s Children” takes a strong urbanist approach of architectural history. He claims that while the buildings facades change overtime, the guts of the building remain ordered by time honored cultural customs. He asserts that the cities architecture can be broken into type, pattern, system which create the block and ultimately the city. It is this social memory that creates the architecture for even those removed from the architecture community, and that while architects try to stylistically break free, the customs ultimately prevail. While I agree with most of Habraken’s urban commentary on field, the conclusions prognoses seems to be a stretch. He grounds his argument for the departure of the time told thematic variety to a centralized shelter on a massive scale as being a decision of professionals. While it is true that the modernist architects were thinking about how to improve the social condition through large scale housing projects, this could only have been a discussion after large scale industrial buildings were already being built in communist and socialist countries. He mentions this, but as an afterthought leading you to believe that it was primarily the ingenuity of the design professional that revolutionized the new housing type rather than the new economic models, industrialized methods and importantly the radical change in political ideologies.