Fabric

Architecture 209X, Spring 2007

Words and Cities: The rhetoric and meaning of statistically improbable phrases

Nicholas De Monchaux

Qing Wang

Fabric

The richness of the word – fabric makes it so intriguing. In WiKi, there are three different meanings of it:

A textile or cloth (Cotton fabric)

A grouping bound together (The Internet is a fabric of computers connected by routers.)

Interconnections between people and events

Although the meanings are quite different in different fields, the shared meaning of three of them is apparent that is a sort of embedded internal structure that is recognized as fiber in textile, computer in Internet, connection of people in society and urban pattern in city. In Radical Reconstruction, Lebbeus Wood stresses the importance of urban fabric in a city reconstruction. He sees the city as a dynamic entity full of changing, in which urban fabric is made of static architectural form, but also subject to this fluidity. Apparently, he is against two kinds of views: one is that the ruler totally disregards the continuity of the living culture of a city and rebuilds the new city on the debris of the old one after war. Another is that governor recovers the old urban fabric by rebuilding it as same as before. For the first view, he says:

“The erasure of old cities in order to build a better and more humane world is by now a widely discredited concept, yet it lives on wherever a totalizing system of space and of thinking is imposed in the name of a common cause…..Wherever buildings are broken by the explosion of bombs or artillery shells, by lack of maintenance or repair, by fire or structural collapse, their form must be respected in its integrity, embodying a history that must not be denied. In their damaged state they suggest new forms of thought and comprehension, and new conceptions of space that confirm the potential of the human to integrate with the building, to be whole and free outside of any predetermined, totalising system.”

He regards the urban fabric is the formal presentation of living culture in a long systematic history. For the second view, he says:

“The attempt to restore the fabric of old cities to their former conditions is, therefore, a folly that not only denies post-war conditions, but impedes the emergence of an urban fabric and way of life based upon them. Wherever the restoration of wardevastated urban fabric has occurred in the form of replacing what has been damaged or destroyed, it ends as parody, worthy only of the admiration of tourists.”

Again, he emphasizes the dynamic of urban changing as well as urban fabric changing. He insists that the reconstruction has to be done on a systematic consideration of the essence of old urban fabric. “However, 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 relation between urban and it fabric is like the fiber and cloth. The urban is made up of urban fabric - blocks, streets, public space just like the cloth is weaved by cotton fiber.