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Today's architecture is characterized by a growing demand for flexibility and adaptability, allowing to adjust to meet the current needs. Both covering spaces for weather protection and improving energy performance of buildings ask for dynamic architectural solutions. The integration of lightweight technical textiles offers great possibilities for these kinematic structures, due to their inherently high flexibility.

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Due to their low self-weight and their inherently high flexibility, technical textiles offer great possibilities for the integration in kinematic structures. Furthermore, the implementation of active bending in a transformable design creates new challenging perspectives.The paper describes an integrated approach for transformable textile hybrids where an improved design is obtained through a parameter study, performing a structural analysis in the different phases of the deployment. The studied parameters include (i) the form-finding position, (ii) the prestress (ratio), (iii) the used materials and sections (including the fibre directions) and (iv) the number of bending-active elements.This research confirms the feasibility of realizing kinematic form-active structures with integrated bending-active elements, where both the membrane and the supporting structure are stable in the different configurations. Due to the high interaction between the bending-active supporting system and the pretensioned membrane, the different parameters influence each other significantly.In a next step, an experimental verification of the designed pringle-shaped textile hybrid is carried out in order to both confirm the possibilities and reveal the remaining challenges.

The integration of bending-active elements in kinematic form-active structures opens new perspectives for the development of transformable architectural applications, introducing new typologies and interesting structural concepts. Structures that combine the use of membrane materials and the concept of active bending are referred to as 'textile hybrids'. The complex interaction between the bending-active boundary elements and the membrane, but also the inherent high flexibility of both the membrane material and the bending-active elements, however, complicate the structural behaviour of the studied transformable textile hybrid. Therefore, an experimental verification of the structure becomes crucial to validate the results obtained through the numerical analysis and to allow a full understanding of the structural behaviour. This paper discusses the experimental setup and investigation of a representative case study and compares the experimental results to the numerically obtained values.