MA Design Studies Director Susan Yelavich will be a featured speaker in Rhode Island School of Design’s Textiles Department’s spring lecture series: Textiles at the Intersection: Architecture, Art, and Science.  On March 21, Professor Yelavich will speak of her research on her forthcoming book Petrified Curtains: Animate Architextiles in which she explores the relationship between textiles and architecture – a relationship that has enjoyed periods of intimacy and fertility, suffered separation, infidelity, and compromise.  She will argue that we enter the picture, today, in the midst of reconciliation as architecture is re-embracing the virtues of textiles—their lightness, flexibility, and aesthetics. In the 21^st century, it is becoming increasingly feasible and environmentally sound to weave the walls of buildings, to ventilate their facades with openwork, even to propose knitted, responsive skins for entire cities. Yelavich’s research aims to identify the historical cultural connections between architecture and textiles that are informing the most visionary projects and reframing the nature of building today.