Woven into this remarkable works of fabric sculpture are incredible details, from metallic sheen and scratches on a recreated pay phone to grime and fish skeletons on dirty dishes (complete with fabric “water” pouring into the sink).

Working out of Beijing, China, Mongolian artist Gao Rong sews scenes from her own history, drawing on time spent in past apartments, family homes and familiar streets. At the same time, the objects she chooses are easy for anyone to relate to.

Her “meticulously crafted and embroidered pay phone,” for instance, “replicates the chips and scratches of a once-shiny public” utility, preserving the memory of a modern relic. Structurally, the work employs wood, metal, sponge and foam as shaping materials, all covered in detail-driven cloth.

In her own way, Rong is preserving a family tradition, adapting a legacy practice to create a new kind of art. In her more elaborate settings, it can be hard to tell that embroidery is the visible expression, but once realized, that lends a kind of ambiguous softness to nostalgic scenes.

More about the artist: “Gao Rong takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. In banal moments of the everyday – waiting at a bus stop, making a call from a public phone, collecting the mail, catching a cab – she sees a deeper significance. She re-creates quotidian things from her student days and from her life today as an artist in Beijing, documenting her existence in a dramatically fast-changing city. With her hyper-real embroidered sculptures she is recording the memories of a 1980s generation and their experiences of a transforming post-Mao China.”

Her projects intentionally question tradition: “Think of Chinese embroidery and you tend to imagine dragons, phoenixes, and blossoms applied with tiny, delicate stitches – a feminine craft from the imperial past. Gao Rong subverts this notion of decorative ‘women’s work,’ creating large-scale 3D works in stitched fabric wrapped around an armature of sponge, steel frames and wire.”

“Exact representations of peeling paint, moldy shower rooms, electrical fuse boxes, public telephones and bus timetables replace the traditional motifs. Embroidery has become her visual language … it appears astonishingly real. On closer inspection you see that every single detail is embroidered fabric … evocative and nostalgic.”

Spanning interiors, wrapping trees and adorning facades, these big bright red doilies are somehow both conventional and ominous, somewhere between knit holiday sweaters and huge spider webs.

Created by Ashley V Blalock, this Keeping Up Appearances series was started over a half-decade ago and has made its way into various public spaces and museum galleries. They can really tie a room together, so to speak

The series is all about context and intentionally both “anachronistic and antagonistic,” explains the artist. “Although non-threatening in a domestic setting, in the gallery and at this scale, the forms overtake the viewer and loom menacingly. The doilies represent a certain desire to keep up the appearance of gentility expressed through the arrangement of objects in the domestic setting.”

She prefers “crochet, where every stitch is evidence of work by hand. Through her work, she explores themes of discomfort and the coping mechanisms used to provide solace from the stress and trauma of modern life.”

“Inherent is a compulsion to arrange and place and decorate in order to control or influence a perceived outward appearance. The red color gives away the futility of such an act and hints at the unease that exists behind every well-decorated home and lurks below the surface of an obsessive need to control and arrange.”

NASA’s latest futuristic textile is made of metal but can fold and change shape, protecting a wearer (or covered craft) from dangerous collisions that could tear holes in people or ships.

The woven metal is made up of a squares on the surface that are linked together on the back, but thanks to clever manufacturing the entire system can be created at once (rather than stitched together). With printers sent into space, this means astronauts could recycle and rebuild the material for different applications on demand.

“We call it 4D printing because we can print both the geometry and the function of these materials,” explains Polit Casillas. “If 20th century manufacturing was driven by mass production, then this is the mass production of functions.”

Developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this versatile textile has thermal protective properties as well, able to to keep machinery and people warm. Despite its flexibility, the mail retains a high tensile strength and can reflect or absorb light for heat control depending on which side faces outward.

Borrowing logic from the 3D printing industry, Kniterate lets users turn ideas and designs from digital files to one-off wearable garments in hours. Able to “print” shirts, scarves, sweaters, dresses and more, the machine is aimed at enabling customized creations as well as rapid prototyping.

Compact, portable and affordable, the gadget itself links into computer and mobile apps – creatives can build out ideas in Photoshop, build them in Kniterate’s device-specific application, then send them to straight to production with the touch of a button.

The application comes with a number of preset patterns that can be used but the intuitive interface is also designed to allow for easy from-scratch creations, even by people with limited digital design experience. Even in cases there the final product will be made via other methods or materials, this machine allows for iterative design experiments to test size, fit and styles.

The system is also designed to reduce waste from off-cut materials, printing with the exact amount of material needed to make a particular piece. The device can carry up to six yarns at a time to span an array of colors and materials – it is also made to be compatible with off-the-shelf yarns, making it more flexible and affordable than printers (often designed to make money from material sales rather than the machines themselves).

Designed for empty warehouses or buildings under construction, these material-light shelters provide functionality for liminal interiors either past their prime not yet in use. Places like the infamous Tower of David, a restarted project previously inhabited by skyscraper squatters, would be an ideal candidate for this sort of system.

A polyethylene-coated metal grid frames these modest shelters, serving as walls and doors and supporting interior shelves and an exterior fabric facade. A plastic-laminated plywood floor floats above concrete or whatever raw surface is found in a target structure. Nylon nets provide a degree of privacy while letting in light and can be covered by opaque cloth as well.

Each dwelling can be completed with just $1200 and while no heating or cooling is included the system is intended to work well in tropical or other climates supporting open-air living. Since a stable roof and floor are provided, the main task is simply filling in gaps for habitation.

All(zone) drew inspiration for their Light House from traditional architecture of Thailand, often designed to be collapsed and moved as needed.

The light and flat-packable materials make it easy to ship these systems in conventional containers or other forms of transit, making them suitable possibilities for emergency shelters as well.

The designers tested their prototype by deploying it in a parking garage and staying within their mockup module for a few nights.