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Design Matters

When Fabric Becomes Architecture

December 13, 2025

For a literal eternity, architecture has been about mass

About concrete, steel, durability.

Light? Something that merely fills the space between walls.

Dana Harel reverses this logic. In her work, fabric does not decorate - it constructs. Rather than covering walls, it shapes the atmosphere itself

This is a fundamental shift: material ceases to concern weight and instead engages with permeability. Her "soft architecture" is a return to something we knew before the era of glass and concrete. To tents, pavilions, spaces that breathed. But with a new question: does a building have to be permanent to be real?

When fabric filters light, space becomes alive. It responds to the time of day, to the movement of air. It is not frozen in a single form. This is not sentimentalism, but a concrete response to a question architecture has long grappled with: how do you design the intangible?

Perhaps the future of building lies not in what endures, but in what changes.

What do you think: can architecture be ephemeral and still meaningful?