How to Dress a Room

This Industrial PhD is driven by knitwear designer Karen Honour in collaboration with Danish textile company Kvadrat and The Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation and the Innovation Fund. 

Methodologically driven by Research Through Design, the output of the PhD explores the relationships between body, space and identity, crossing over between Architecture, Spatial Design and Fashion Thinking. The practice-based research outputs utilise state of the art seamless knitting technology to design and produce knitted soft architectures. As epistemic artefacts the soft architectures are used to activate void spaces, mediating between the human scale and architectural space, forming and informing the way in which we inhabit spaces.

About Karen Honour
Karen Honour has a professional background as a fashion and knitwear designer and has used this as the catalyst for her PhD, How to Dress a Room? Moving in scale from dressing the body to dressing the architectural space, textiles are used to support the body in both contexts by providing comfort and privacy, whilst projecting an identity. The interior depicts how buildings are activated, while the textiles define their habitation. 

Working with 3D knitting technology Karen Honour’s research constructs spatial interventions which are used as epistemic artefacts to understand how we create and inhabit spaces. The liminal zones at the perimeter of the body within an architectural setting are activated with the use of knitted textiles, facilitating the body in these spatial transitions, hereby using textiles not just to define spaces but to shape them too.