Design-to-production Workflows for CNC-knitted Membranes

This paper discusses the design integration of knitted textiles into architectural workflows. The increasing interest in knit as a building material asks new questions of how knit can be designed, analyzed, specified and fabricated at a large scale, with appropriate tolerances and verified performances. This paper presents a classification of two methods for fabricating 3-dimensional non-developable structural membranes with CNC-controlled industrial knitting machines: the graph method and the graded field method. It outlines the key differences in the two methods and discusses their individual benefits and limitations. It presents Zoirotia as a design case for the graded field method and describes a series of advances to this method as developed through the project.