House of Flags 1-3. Projects for loose skinned fabric buildings.
Most fabric buildings use stretched skins which look solid and therefore lose some of the most appealing aspects of non rigid materials which you see in clothing. Using loose fabric for an object with the scale of a building has an even more dramatic effect than clothes, where wind can be seen moving slowly across it, rather like very large flags.
Below are three projects where I looked at creating buildings which were clad in loose fabric skins.
House of Flags #1: Three steel frame farm silo towers on a hill, draped in loose fabric. The concept was to create ethereal buildings which looked almost like human statues covered in drapery.
House of Flags #2: A fabric core skyscraper with external billboard screens.
Unlike House of Flags 1, this is purely conceptual and the images are done in a highly stylized fashion using retro-futuristic elements such as machine age industrial design (think Sky Captain). The aim was to create an aesthetic that was modern but decorative. Somewhere between art deco and gothic.
House of Flags #3: A terraced row of artisan’s shops based on a spiral plan
This project consisted of a proposal for a series of wooden framed spiral units braced off ruined stone walls of a derelict building, so that the interior space of that building became a courtyard garden, effectively turning it inside out. Each unit would have fabric sails. The style of this project was to combine wooden and landscape elements, rather like the work of Peter Salter. The freehand drawing style is deliberately loose.