Zoirotia

ZKM (Center for Art and Media) was initiated and founded in 1980s by city of Karlsruhe, with universities and institutes, addressing the topic of “uniting artistic concepts with future-oriented technologies”. ​ The building was built between 1915 and 1918 as a factory for weapons, restructured in 1990s to facilitate the ZKM project. The space was opened to public in 1997. ​
 
For the exhibition project in ZKM BioMedienCITA proposed a large-scale knitted textile installation, composed of a "façade" and a "cave" structure inside the sapce of ZKM. TWE designed the load bearing structure and actuation concept for it. For the façade, steel wires and horizontal tubes work together as cable trusses, on which the textile units are hang. Vertical actuation cables transfer the dead load of the façade, serving meanwhile as actuators, powered by pneumatic cylinders installed on top floor of the building. Due to complex textile formation and movement of the façade, computational simulation as well as on site measurements were carried out, in order to ensure the structural integrity. ​
 
The porject was named "Zoirotia"(vivid in Greek), for its expressive color and material composition, and the embedded movement it performs. 

Project team Cita
Martin Tamke, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Yuliya Sinke, Simona Hnídková, Martynas Seskas, Nihit Borpujari, Viktoria Millentrup

Project team Royal Danish Academy | CNC Knit Lab
Sif Albrechtsen, Julie Amanda Aagaard Andersen​
with support from the students of the CITA Computation in Architecture Mastercourse: Camila Martinez Alarcon, Carl Hampus Vilhelm Carlström, Chih Wei Chan, Muchen Yan, Jack Young, Chloe Liang Xiuling​

Project team TWE | Department of Structural Design | University Kassel
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Julian Lienhard, M.Sc. Dongyuan Liu

Project team ZKM
Christofer Gutmann, Ronny Haas, Martin Häberle, Martin Mangold, Thomas Schwab​
with support of the team of essential art solutions: Raphael Dobler, Manuel Dück, Cim Jubke, Peco Kawashima, Hans Kohls, Raoul Muck, Johannes Niehus, Lothar Schmidt, Nemo Schmidt, Jost Schneider, Yannick Schwendemann​

Sponsor of yarn
AMANN Group ​

Collaboration partner | Kobleder GmbH
Viola-Stils Sia

Collaboration partner | Stoll Textilmaschinenfabrik GmbH
Karl Mayer

M.Sc. Dongyuan Liu

Telephone: +49 561 804-7250
E-Mail: liu@uni-kassel.de