Observing Threshold Textiles

The title Observing Threshold Textiles introduces the main features of the research project: observing spaces and architecture with a focus on thresholds and textiles. It investigates textile elements used for articulating transitional spaces, giving climatic shelter and creating hospitable common spaces in urban environments and architecture.

Series of observations, through a phenomenological and experienced approach, are documented in a travel archive within the thesis book. It is not a tectonic study but contextual, highlighting the role of textiles in varied urban and sociocultural contexts. The varied observations show that there are great potentials in the planning of threshold spaces as temporary social meeting places with several possible conditions of openness and closure. The use of textiles as architectonic material can allow the necessary flexibility to articulate such spaces. A large variety of usage and forms are documented and categorized within the thesis book. Understood as a spatial concept, thresholds are part of boundaries, opening up and organizing transitions in space, between spatial bodies. Thresholds are therefore both boundary and transition, thriving on the ambiguity and potentiality of opening and closing off spaces. The perception of time and sequence is important when discussing thresholds. A threshold space can be understood as the space that is within immediate proximity of a threshold element and is defined by it. At the moment when facing the ambiguity of a threshold, we may experience a liminal condition of otherness that disturbs defined identities and temporarily suspends the hierarchical power structures of private and public spaces. We find ourselves 'in-between'. This allows for new connections between people as well as between physical spaces to produce new commons and commoning practices. This is why threshold spaces hold great social potential in our urban environments. I also believe that we are capable of navigating ambiguity to a much greater extent than most architecture built today. Textiles as flexible space-defining elements are often part of threshold spaces, articulating transitions between inside and outside, public and private, profane and sacral. As a study of semiotics, textiles have rich meanings, signs and historical and social importance. The thesis aims to establish a view on textile as a threshold material and create further discussion on the topic of thresholds.