Screens and shades that protect from wind, sun and insects bring indoor comforts to outdoor living. Outdoor living is a growing trend for homeowners seeking to relax and entertain outside with all the comforts of indoor living. Restaurants and hotels are also extending guest areas to outdoor patios, sidewalks, rooftops and beachfronts. All of this [...]

The secret to a sideline in cleaning and repair is convincing customers to do it regularly. Cleaning and repair of fabric products is a bit like pie-making: It’s an extremely useful skill, and there’s a sizable market for it, but it’s not everyone’s strong suit. Today’s high-performance fabrics are an investment. They have a longer [...]

Why it’s important to give your website the careful attention it needs to support the success of your business. All industries experience their share of change. The fabrics industry is no different. From hemp to cotton to microfibers to “smart clothes” that gauge body temperature and GPS locations, the fabrics industry is undergoing a rapid [...]

A vanguard fabric airbeam supporting a tent atop Carnegie Hall is poised to expand markets. It takes a village to raise a child. And it takes a team to raise a tent—at least in the case of a challenging, vanguard installation atop a nine-story building in the center of Manhattan. Carnegie Hall, the renowned music [...]

David Snoad implements systems and empowers employees so his business can flourish—and he can take a vacation. "I’ve been away six months of this calendar year and we’re about to have our most profitable year ever,” says David Snoad, managing director of Pinz Pty. Ltd., Seaton, Australia. “Because of my time away, I’m more productive [...]

The Collectif de la Meute (Collective of the Pack), Douarnenez, France, is an affinity group enthusiastic about creating art—theater, visual arts, digital productions, circus acts, architecture and urban planning—in public spaces. The transitory nature of modern life inspired the Pack to create a movable public space: the Air Bubble, “a temporary, nomadic and living shelter, [...]

Baylor University in Waco, Texas, prides itself on its football program and demanded “a first-class facility for a first-class university and sports program,” says Douglas Radcliffe, business development manager for membrane canopy expert Birdair North America, Buffalo, N.Y. Waco’s subtropical climate, characterized by hot summers and mild winters, can produce 90-degree temperatures during any month [...]

On the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, signed into law Sept. 3, 1964, by President Lyndon Johnson, Wilderness50, Nature’s Best Photography magazine and the Smithsonian Institute asked photographers throughout the nation to define wilderness in pictures—and selected winners are now displayed as large-format prints in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, [...]

The Wover, a gigantic woven rocker, was a favorite exhibit at the 2014 Seattle Design Festival in October. Created and installed by a team of volunteers, it was designed with two guiding principles in mind. The first, fittingly, was the theme of the festival, Design in Motion. The second was to juxtapose architectural tectonics with [...]

Only in Minnesota, where many are cold, but few are frozen, would an art project invite innovative thinkers to build temporary ice-fishing shanties on a lake in below-zero temperatures. The Art Shanty Projects, Minneapolis, Minn., holds an annual event to build new, engaging public art in relatively unregulated public spaces—like a frozen lake in February. [...]