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Silk Street + The Difference Engine

Part 2 Project 2003
Suzi Winstanley
 Royal College of Art | UK
New generation software programmers tap to a similar tun as their skilled silk weaving predecessors. As Asian Tigers compete for a slice of the technology pie, Chennai morphs into a heady metropolis dangling the Difference Engine into its original inspirational soup.

A digital prosthesis for the jaquard loom gives remote handloom weavers time, identity and independance. At city centre Godown Street planners shift textile wholesalers to a purpose built market, leaving space for urban artisans and a digital connecting gallery.

Meanwhile, a derelict walled oasis, once occupied by a voracious cotton mill, becomes the site for an iconic, excessive textile fantasy. The centralised research, educational and productive programme of the Weavers Super Service Centre frames a network that may eventually function without it. Its initial physical test challenges 3-Dimensional woven bits to wriggle up the skyline, criss-crossed by a new residential quarter, stirring an international ruffle in textile-land.


Suzi'z ambitious project proposes an emblematic architecture, which cherishes a technological future growing within a traditional ritual continuum. the proposal is neither nostalgic nor alien. It celebrates the potential complexity, invention adn enterprise of the city of Chennai itself.
2003
three elements of an urban network for digital textiles, chennai india- a voracious, expanding city, a hidden city quarter and a densely layered street.
the story of the silk sari navigates chennai city investigating the physical changes that are occuring as industry shifts from dextrous to digital.
the root of the silk street project, at godown street compact facades overlaid with shop signs lie in the heart of the old textile district.
as city planners relocate wholesale textile sellers to the city edge the silk street project proposes an emphemeral route through a digitally wired gallery connecting new spaces for urban artisans to reinhabit the district.
The handloom is set against a lost industrial landscape- the hidden city that was once binny mills. this disused cotton mill becomes the focus for a critical look at the silk industry.
A landscape strip coupling IT training with weaving skills in open air drop in shops is an agitator for the redevelopment of the mill quarter.
Zeros and ones creep back beneath the fence to nest in a mini tower, a textile fantasy woven in limecrete reinforced pineapple thread.
The tower super sizes the Government of India program for textile futures and entwines it with the possibility of future decline in IT as competition increases.
Inspired by woven palm leaf the tower utilises pineapple and banana leaf to reinforce organic resin to construct the slim access tower.
The main tower frame is limecrete reinforced with jute. In construction it is shuttered with reusable plastic gas piping.
The building skin echos drying saris and construction cloth, an interwoven double leaf fabric enables the buidling to mimic a tent whist retaining movement, colour and a breathable facade.
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