Design challenge:

CURTAINS is a multi-site installation, exhibition, and publication event designed to explore the use of fabrics in contemporary art and architecture—not in the form of rigid tensile structures, nor in the form of cladding or upholstery, but in their more relaxed, natural forms: curtains associated with windows, but also defining and activating spaces indoors and out, billowing overhead as canopies, catching and using wind like sails, creating shade, diffusing light, holding color in their folds, filtering views, absorbing sound, showing the wind, and making theater of the everyday.

This is an invitation to artists and architects to design and propose installations that demonstrate the functional, transformative, and evocative powers of architecturally-scaled curtains and affiliated fabric objects. These might be located inside a building or outside, between several, or in a larger, more open landscape (Christo’s Running Fence and The Gates come to mind). They might use traditional or yet-unknown kinds of fabrics; they might use traditional or yet-unknown forms of rigging. They might be temporary and ephemeral by design, or thought of as permanent and maintained. For more information about how to submit proposals, visit http://soa.utexas.edu/caad/curtains/index.html

The CURTAINS event itself is scheduled for October 18, 2013, at the University of Texas at Austin, with keynote addresses by Christo and Petra Blaisse.