Archilace is a construction and research strategy that explores an eco-mimetic building as a set of hyperbolic, semi-permeable membranes, each enclosing a complex habitat and encouraging exchange with each other and the surrounding environment. Elements specific to the site such as the local ecology, the human community’s skill set and available resources inform a co-authored, open-ended design process.

By combining research into resilience theory, topology, new composite materials and traditional textile techniques we aim for the construction of self-supporting, textile membranes of complex geometry without specialist machinery using only a small number of modular parts. This is facilitated by a continuous workflow from parametric drawing to physical simulation to material fabrication.

The research associates creativity with growth rather than novelty, emerges from dialogical relations both among people and between them and materials, and is democratic rather than based on systems of command and control.