Felecia Davis

In recent years, Davis has been using computer scripting and mechanized weaving technology to design textiles that move. These soft building components are computational insofar that electronics are woven into each textile, allowing the textile to send signals back and forth with a target object. This capacitive sensing allows the textile to register the distance between its position and its target object, with the varying distances triggering different responses in the textile. This produces a kind of textility: the body is metaphorically woven into this material in a feedback loop of forces that in turn, reshape the material, the body, and the environment. Davis maintains Architextiles, engendering this type of textility, have the potential to morph standard conceptions of shelter and enclosure; Architextiles constitute a novel type of infrastructure that receives input and responds almost passively, but that also registers its physical transformation in its surface.

In addition to her numerous writings on Soft Architecture, Computational Textiles and Digital Fabrication, Davis is featured in the published works Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race, “Inside and Out: Three Black Women’s Perspectives on Architectural Education in the Ivory Tower” in Space Unveiled: Invisible Cultures in the Design Studio, Row: Trajectories through the Shotgun House as well as the catalog of the exhibition Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor held at the Studio Museum, organized by Thelma Golden. Her project “One Week, Eight Hours,” was exhibited at Rick Lowe’s show, Trajectories Through the Shotgun Rowhouse in 2004.