“Laser Cut Fabric” is a series of experiments using computer-controlled cutting patterns on a variety of textiles in order to rethink the design of curtains. By using the machines and the software tools of architecture to manipulate fabric, the project exposes the curtain – typically the territory of interior designers – to ideas and dialogues being generated by contemporary architecture.

Architecture and interior design hold the curtain as a device that separates the two fields and gives rise to an unfortunate diagram of power between architect, client, and interior designer. At the end of a typical project, the importance of the architecture retreats while the interior designer — imperious and privy to the secret domestic desires of the client — demands the addition of curtains to “soften-up” or domesticate an otherwise “cold” architectural project. In the context of this project, the curtain is no longer a tool of the designer meant to “cover-up” architecture or to assert a dialectic of power by alternately obscuring and obstructing vision. Instead, the curtain is understood as an architectural device that is capable of generating a specific range of effects and atmospherics; effects and atmospherics roughly understood as diaphanous. Thus the curtain is transformed from a hard disciplinary device of division between architecture and interior design to a pliable but rigorously structured body that intertwines the two disciplines.