Knitting Architecture: How to be Smarter about Building Concrete Structures

Though the building and construction sector may not be the first to come to mind, it is one of the largest contributors to climate change. As such it is an area key to reducing pollution, resource depletion and waste, by changing the way we design and build structures. Today, using computational tools, we can design buildings that intelligently include structural performance in architectural geometry. This leads to beautiful, economical and optimized systems which use very little material. Unfortunately, these structures have intricated and non-repetitive geometries. Making them difficult and expensive to build using our traditional methods that require months of milling or carpentry to make heavy, difficult to handle moulds that turn into waste. To unlock the full potential of these structures we need to come up with smart ways of building them. One solution is to use a knitted textile as mould for concrete. It is a lot lighter, does not need as much support, and it produces a lot less waste.