Overview
Stronger, faster, lighter, safer, smarterthese are the textiles of tomorrow. From the carbon-fiber composite bicycle frame to the cardiac constraint sock and the Mars Pathfinder landing airbags, material innovations surround us. Our landscape, our buildings, our vehicles, our clothes, and our bodies all benefit from these highly engineered performance textiles.Featuring examples of fully realized products from all classes of technical textilesarchitectural, product design, apparel, medicine, transportation, aerospace, industry, and the environmentExtreme Textiles highlights successful collaborations between design, industry, and science. Large, full-color illustrations and essays by some of today's most influential designers and scientists trace the extraordinary developments made in textiles over the last twenty years and suggest what is to come.
Tradition, technology, beauty, and strength are joined together in the materials and products presented in this volume. Whether exploring space, running a marathon, or fashioning the latest trend, we will be inspired by these extreme textiles every day.
Extreme Textiles accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum beginning in April 2005.
Synopsis
This volume accompanies a 2005 exhibition of the same name at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Curator McQuaid presents an intriguing look at technical textiles and their applications. Touted as the lightest, safest, strongest, smartest, and fastest materials, these "extreme" textiles are used in a myriad of different ways, ranging from airplanes to boats & bicycles, to prosthetic limbs and medical devices implanted in humans, as a structural element in architecture, in spacecraft & spacesuits, and much more. The unusual textured cover, close-up photographs of the textiles themselves, as well as numerous illustrations and photographs of their many applications serve to make the book visually compelling. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR