Peta Carlin Urban Fabric: Greige Installation view

What are these things hanging on the wall at West Space gallery in Melbourne? Why were they made? Art? Urban documentary? Architectural analysis? Flat and stiff, slightly coiled at the end from rolling, Carlin's photographs surround the room like the backdrop to our lives that they are.

These are photographs of building facades, manipulated to remove perspective and printed onto fabric, in an exhibition of works by Peta Carlin entitled Urban Fabric: Greige. The buildings are presented in true elevation, taking them toward two-dimensionality.

At first glance the works recall Rick Amor in their mood (man and architecture) and Callum Morton in their making (man and machine).

In 1994, Melbourne artist Bill Lane took photographs of striped suburban awnings, and exhibited them as parodies of abstract/minimalist art of the 1960s and 70s, along with survey data and pie charts analysing each pattern's popularity. The exhibition was called Shades: A Failed Attempt to Map Patterns of Convergence Between Suburbia, Greenbergian Aesthetics and Deleuzian Notions of Difference, and described by the artist as “a photographic project documenting the 23 pattern variations in the canvas window awnings of on Corio housing estate.”

Carlin's work is attempting to straddle more boundaries than that. Because she prints the photographs onto fabric, she does all that Lane was doing, and more. Not as witty as Lane, though there is irony, and playfulness, in making these oversized fabric swatches from buildings, but drawing together more threads, spanning across more realms. The project documents eight building facades dating from the 1960s-1970s in Melbourne, mapping patterns of convergence between architecture and fabric, between the domestic realm and the city, between Greenbergian Aesthetics and architecture and fabric design, between architecture and fabric design and photography and art… and it doesn't stop there. Carlin's project navigates between them all, eluding a single strong statement. Photographs printed onto “canvas”, not intended to mimic painting, but to mimic patterned fabric, hung in a gallery. This was Carlin's choice. It is not exhibited at, say, Craft Victoria, which would have pushed it further away from an art reading.

These cropped images of facades suggest infinite extension, like fabric. Yet the buildings are modest in scale, not all that much larger in extent than shown, the tallest only seventeen stories, the shortest ten. This information is revealed in miniature swatches hung on the wall outside, stating the horizontal and vertical repeats, and the overall width.

Her subjects are precast concrete and glass ‘curtain walls' and the photographs are hanging not from a curtain rail, but from a miniature I-beam. Contemporary office buildings tend to be all glass, but the technique remains the same, hung from the floor above, the whole building supported on columns hidden from view. The facades are weather-screens, not performing a structural, load-bearing function. Like the clothes we wear. There are many analogies on offer between fabric and façade, but how far can you take them? Comparisons fall away when pushed – fabrics are versatile, a continuous roll, cut to length, building facades are assemblies, bespoke, contingent, one-offs. In fact, this is the key to her work: it is situated on a point of intersection between different realms, different interpretations. The work is a delicate, fragile moment of intersection between multiple meanings.

Greige is a rag-trade term meaning undyed, unfinished fabric or goods, and is related to the Italian words greggia (raw silk) and greggio (grey). Is there a pun here? Grey, beige, greige. Urban greyness Grey sludge. Grain. Muted pastels, blues, off-whites, greens. In fabric pattern making, colour is the medium. Colour adjacent to colour. Abstract art before there was abstract art. Greige?

The coming together of photography, architecture and fabric design has coincided at a point somewhat unnatural for all three. There are not many points at which fabric design and architecture overlap. But this is not a comparison piece, it is a hybrid, like a manimal. If you exhibited a criss-crossing, warp and weft of fabric in a gallery, stiffened onto backing paper, a single, rectangular sheet of it, the effect would be clinical, abstract, dry. The life absent. Fabric is normally in a folded state (unless it's a floor rug), or stretched taught over a curved volume. The point with a tartan weave is that the ‘interest' is all in how the pattern sits, falls, hangs off a human body, or as a drape, or upholstery – it is rarely left to deliver the entire message. Carlin could have moved these images closer to fashion, leaving bolts of fabric lying around, loose. But crumpled, they would be less like buildings.

To hear Carlin discuss the process, it seems it was almost an afterthought to include this ‘life' in the images. One image was just too starkly flat and non-object like without including the office interior with the lights on. Despite being an actual photograph, it failed to be interpreted as a building, and therefore failed to create a duality. She was pulling architecture toward fabric, and was shocked when it worked so convincingly - and had to take it back again. It had failed as art.

Both fabric and commercial office buildings are grids by necessity. The weave, the Cartesian grid, of fabric is a logical outcome of its production. Repetition and the grid are necessary ingredients of an efficient office building, where sheer volume can make even the most trivial cost saving multiply into the $ millions. A building façade is hard, laboriously constructed, meticulously detailed, gigantic. The scaled-down, reverse telescope nature of the photographic process creates a miniature building. The design method, or idea, is related, not the objects themselves. Both fabric and architectural design deal simultaneously with utilitarian function and beauty. Literally ‘fabric' is not a garment, like ‘façade' is not a building.

In the spirit of the 17 th century polymath, Gottfried Leibniz, and his thesis on the value of combining arts, Peta Carlin commissioned a special font for the exhibition. It was generated from aluminium profiles. She also incorporated Ars Combinatoria in the show, their wheels reflecting indices of scale: the inner ring describing fabric widths; the middle ring, photographic f-stops or apertures; and the outer ring, architectural scales. They could be rotated, to find new intersections between the realms.

And during the course of her show a Scottish-Gaelic choir sang traditional songs. One described waulking, the process of fulling, or washing and shrinking fabric straight from the loom to prepare it for finishing and dying, done in the Hebrides by women only.

Her request is that architects look back on history, and learn from our predecessors. Despite the title, and its allusion to an urban grey-ness, it is not a lament about the blandness of the urban backdrop to our lives, but an amused and admiring glance at a peculiar, neglected period of recent architectural history.