Knit Skin

Knit Skin reskins a modernist, curtain-walled skyscraper in Melbourne’s CBD using anarchitectural knitted membrane. A knitted membrane is a meta material, emergent from thecombination of fibre and stitch morphology. It’s a material of structural contingency and limitation, so baked in to the design process is a consideration of material and its manifold specificities.

The project engages with Melbourne’s already built, mid-century office towers, not as reified heritage ‘icons’, and not as ecopathic stumbling blocks in our vision of a utopic sustainable future, whose riddle we might solve if only we came up with the perfect new build. Rather, these buildings are an already-existing ecology to team up with. Knit Skin proposes the knitted membrane as a lightweight, ultra-strong solar array and sunshade, an energy source for the city, draped on and between existing towers, exploiting and being exploited like lichen on a log. The knitted membranes define social space, dapple light, and provide a radically different street level experience.

The project explores the opportunities in an architecture of strategic weakness and material constraint, and aims to eke more pleasure and utility from an already existing urban ecology.