We Weave Our Worlds Together
Download PDF
We weave the world around us through gestures, words, materials, among entanglements and intertwinements.
Our world is a tangled web of relationships, intersecting and crossing over in ways that don’t necessarily make sense, even if that same disorder make the world interesting and lively. Things contradict each other, juxtapose, overlap, overshadow; they have gaps, they break, they fall apart. Streets, buildings, rooms, objects and people are in constant, often chaotic, conversation. The fabric of our world may just be different threads woven, sometimes tangled, together.
Walk through London. Buildings that haven’t changed in centuries have seen people come and go. Stories whispered and shouted inhabit the brick, the wood, and concrete. Materials are witnesses, defined by the stories they have heard. Their destruction is tragic, and senseless, when we can create and evolve public space without building new. The metaphor of weaving is the most apt way to conceptualize this, maintaining a focus on humans, our built environments, and how the materially influence each other.
This essay is divided into seven chapters exploring the idea of storytelling through weaving; discussion and connection with materials; the ecological impact of building and its materials; the way that materials change space; how decoration and ornamentation adapt to space; how immaterial action changes the context in which we view space; and how the built environment can create sites for connection and community.
How is weaving a site-situated practice of making and inhabiting spaces? An exploration of weaving as a metaphor and weaving as a craft.