TEXTILE TECHNOLOGIES IN CONCRETE ENVIRONMENTS."

Girli Concrete is a cross disciplinary funded research project based in the University of Ulster involving a textile designer/ researcher, an architect/ academic and a concrete manufacturing firm.<br/>Girli Concrete brings together concrete and textile technologies, testing ideas of<br/>concrete as textile and textile as structure. It challenges the perception of textiles as only the ‘dressing’ to structure and instead integrates textile technologies into the products of building products. Girli Concrete uses ‘low tech’ methods of wet and dry concrete casting in combination with ‘high tech’ textile methods using laser cutting, etching, flocking and digital printing. Whilst we have been inspired by recent print and imprint techniques in architectural cladding, Girli Concrete is generated within the depth of the concrete’s cement paste “skin”, bringing the trades and crafts of both industries together with innovative results.<br/>Architecture and Textiles have an odd, somewhat unresolved relationship. Confined to a subservient role in architecture, textiles exist chiefly within the categories of soft furnishings and interior design. Girli Concrete aims to mainstream tactility in the production of built environment products, raising the human and environmental interface to the same specification level as the technical. This paper will chart:<br/>The background and wider theoretical concerns to the project.<br/>The development of Girli Concrete, highlighting the areas where craft becomes<br/>art and art becomes science in the combination of textile and concrete<br/>technologies.<br/>The challenges of identifying funding to support such combination technologies,<br/>working methods and philosophies.<br/>The challenges of generating and sustaining practice within an academic<br/>research environment<br/>The outcomes to date