‘Extreme Textiles’, the title of the current exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, suggests a desperate attempt by this branch of the Smithsonian to market herself to the ADHD generation. But it’s justified - a remarkable survey of new materials, new technologies, and new applications in what I had thought of as a moribund industry. Ropes strong enough to anchor an oil rig; bulletproof, inflatable tents big enough to hangar a fighter plane; fabric that can sense and transmit how much strain it is under; concept designs for carbon fiber skyscrapers. What appears at first to be a sampler of embroidery from the 19th century turns out to be a surgical implant, a fabric scaffold for growing human tissue.
If ‘extreme’ is justified, so is the one use I saw of the dread prefix nano. The image on the left shows a transparent mold of a human face covered by a delicate mask that was ‘electrospun.’ A charged liquid is drawn through a very fine nozzle into an electrostatic field, where it forms a fast-spinning helix. As the helix breaks up and the liquid dries it forms nanofibers. The second image shows the result under an electron microscope. The thick strands are human hairs.
Unfortunately there are no wrist-mounted versions of the spinner that would enable you to swing from one carbon fiber skyscraper to the next.