Tschumi and his use of the grid and cross-programming (for example in his project for the Parc

de la Villette) that was the most textile-like in architecture. According to Derrida, the text is a textile, a veil, a texture, as both a network of abstract and porous referents and meanings and as a decentred, fabricated surface. The question of meaning is a necessary one. If for Derrida architecture must have meaning, then the question of architectures links to textiles becomes urgent when considering the wider social and cultural context of this disciplinary twinning. Questions of architectures problematic relations to fashion, advertising and media, and its role in societies and cities networked into the accelerating systems of globalised capitalist production and consumption, are important ones. The giant building-scale textiles such as can be found in todays Manhattan, and the new media-driven giant screens of tomorrows hyper- and media-architectures, are forcing this issue and proposing problematic solutions. The importance of the theorisation of field-effect architecture and field-spaces, and of new architectural building skins (such as the 2.5 dimensional in architecture), is also stimulating the interfacing of architecture with textiles. On a larger scale, the concepts being developed in landscape urbanism theories of spatial design share common concepts and qualities with todays textile design research. Of central interest in both of these areas are the problems of structuring, deforming and informing continuous, convoluted, flexible, polycentric an multiscale surfaces with unpredictable, multidimensional and broad ranges of factors. Certain new Postmodern architecture theories developed after Deleuzes text on the fold are articulating a new metaphysical and ontological characterisation of space. The new theories are concerned with the dynamic, interactive, multimedia, flexible, ephemeral, event- and process-based methods of designing and experiencing space. Opposed to historical paradigms based on the Vitruvian concept of firmitas and the conception of architectural space as permanent, finished, durable, static, hard and compression-based, they articulate a new space one that is never finished, never static, in a continuous state of provisional and transitional becoming. They describe this paradigm as a literal reorientation of architecture from the solid to the liquid and gaseous states of matter. A transition stage from the solid to the liquid, the material qualities and concepts of textiles and textile design, makes them particularly relevant to this new paradigm of spatial design. Towards a New Theorisation of Architextiles The manifold ways of theorising or materialising collisions between textiles and architecture and the possible transferable qualities and effects of each for the other can now be argued to be of central importance to architecture per se. Moving towards any useful theorisation of this ragbag of historical precedents and concepts requires a synthesis of the salient textile qualities and concepts that have been embodied in the architectural projects and texts in this issue, and in general. The qualities and concepts, as described in this body of work, are often contradictory, vague, but approximate. Together they reflect some of the paradoxical but real qualities and concepts in many of the most interesting new (and older) textiles and buildings today. Grouped and considered as a whole, such qualities and concepts seem to offer a robustly useful framework for understanding, interpreting and designing contemporary architecture. Moreover, these categories and qualities suggest further, as yet unexploited,

programmes for their materialisation and realisation in both architecture and textiles: soft, flexible, convoluted, networked, continuous, dynamic, variable, woven, latticed, folded, adaptable, translucent, tensile, pneumatic, pleated, creased, knotted, pliable, porous, veiled, elastic, plastic, supple, knitted, draped, flowing, interactive, patterned, comforting, cosy, fashionable, enveloping, clothing, protecting, lighter, faster, stronger and smarter. The Future of Architextiles Utopian and futuristic representations of the architecturetextile nexus are also of interest for the designers and researchers of today, and those of the future. They raise aesthetic, social and cultural issues that provoke more complex, sophisticated critiques and discourses within architecture, unencumbered by the problematic needs of clients and material and financial constraints. Speculative, conceptual and fictional architextiles provide useful counterfactual thought-experiments on subjects as diverse as