ABSTRACT
Given the great interest that fabric formwork has generated in recent years, it may come as a surprise that, far from being a novelty, the concept has had over a century of development and applications. It has resurfaced many times and in different forms throughout the world. One would be hard pressed to find an idea that has been invented more often. The earliest examples, starting around 1900 onwards, used textiles like burlap or hessian made from organic fibers. The development of affordable synthetic fibers from the 1960s onward proved crucial to the use of fabric formworks, particularly in the fields of hydraulic and geotechnical engineering, and in the form of inflated (pneumatic) formworks for concrete shells. In architecture, seminal works were produced by Miguel Fisac starting in the 1970s, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Richard Fearn, Kenzo Unno, and Mark West, all without knowledge of each other. West initiated the founding of the first academic research laboratory dedicated to fabric formworks, the Centre for Architectural Structures and Technology (CAST) at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, which opened in 2002. Together
with the arrival of the Internet, this led to the first wide dissemination of the broad applications and rich history of fabric formworks, while inspiring and bringing new people to the field, and culminating in a variety of collaborations and a global sharing of knowledge among researchers and practitioners – a crucial step that had not previously occurred.
