fbpx Entrelac: A Dialog between Knitting & Architecture | Amman Design Week
Written by Muna Al-Fayez on Thursday, September 1, 2016
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In another designer collaboration at Amman Design Week, Raya Kassisieh and Nader Tehrani join together to create a dialogue between digital design and traditional craft. The installation utilizes simulated physics to relax knit fabric produced with a tacit knowledge of material behavior.

Nader Tehrani is the Principal of NADAAA, a Boston-based architecture and urban design firm dedicated to the advancement of design innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration. Throughout his career, Tehrani has received sixteen Progressive Architecture Awards as well as numerous American Institute of Architects, Boston Society of Architects, and International Design awards. In 2013, 2014, and 2015 NADAAA was ranked as number one in design for Architect Magazine's Top 50 firms in the United States.

Entrelac at the HangarBorn and raised in Amman, Raya Kassisieh has always been interested in the world of self-expression. Starting out as a fine artist, Kassisieh gradually transitioned into sculptures and mobile art, and enrolled at Pratt Institute to study fashion, choosing fabric as her medium. After living in New York working in several fields in the industry, Kassisieh moved back to Amman, where she worked on made-to-measure apparel and assisted the Director at Wadi Finan Art Gallery.

The Women behind Entrelac - image courtesy of Hussam Da’naWorking with local women communities, Entrelac uses 350 kg of undyed wool yarn, which is hand knit into a monumental form. These strands are hung and again woven as a single cross stitch, at a larger scale, to form an enclosure, an architecturally scaled garment, which descends from the order and geometric exactitude privileged in the digital realm, to entropy and material reality at the ground.

Entrelac's woven knit strands emulate the most intricate details found in the traditional cross stitch technique. The individual stitch is an overlap of two threads creating negative spaces of elongated parallelograms between each crossing point. This technique was developed by Kassisieh through her experience with hand knit apparel.