Digitally knitted and robotically woven fiber installation by Jenny Sabin

Lumen is an immersive, interactive installation by Jenny Sabin Studio that made of over 1,000,000 yards of digitally knitted and robotically woven fiber.

Architect: Jenny Sabin Studio
Location: Long Island City, NY, USA
Year: 2017
Photography: Yuriy Chernets

Project's description: Lumen by Jenny Sabin Studio, will be on view in MoMA PS1’s courtyard beginning June 29. Winner of The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1’s annual Young Architects Program, this year’s structure evolves over the course of the day, with responsive textiles that display subtle color in sunlight and emit glowing light after sundown. Lumen serves as the setting for the 20th season of Warm Up, MoMA PS1’s pioneering outdoor music series, incorporating a custom lighting program to complement these vibrant, popular events. Lumen will remain on view through the summer.

Made of over 1,000,000 yards of digitally knitted and robotically woven fiber, Lumen features two large scale cellular canopies with 250 hanging tubular structures that create opportunities for visitors to interact with the work. The design incorporates 100 robotically woven recycled spool stools and a misting system that responds to visitors’ proximity to produce a refreshing micro-climate. Socially and environmentally responsive, Lumen’s adaptive architecture is inspired by collective levity, play, and interaction as the structure transforms throughout the day and night, responding to the density of bodies, heat, and sunlight. The result of collaboration across disciplines, Lumen applies insights and theories from biology, materials science, mathematics, and engineering integrating high performing, formfitting, and adaptive materials into a structure where code, pattern, human interaction, environment, geometry, and matter operate together.

By night, Lumen is knitted light, bathing visitors in a responsive glow of photo-luminescence; by day, Lumen offers succor from the summer heat, immersing participants in delicious ground clouds of cooling mist. Lumen is a socially and environmentally responsive structure that adapts to the densities of bodies, heat, and sunlight. A lightweight knitted fabric of responsive tubular structures and a canopy of cellular components employs recycled textiles, photo-luminescent and solar active yarns that absorb, collect, and deliver light. This environment offers spaces of respite, exchange, and engagement as a misting system responds to visitors’ proximity, activating fabric stalactites that produce a refreshing micro-climate. Families of robotically woven recycled spool chairs reveal informal messages and conversations through hydro-chromic materials. It is an open responsive system featuring digitally knitted and robotically woven lightweight, high-performing, formfitting, and adaptive materials. Lumen is a feminine form that offers luminous interiorities, informal networks, social fabrics, and fibrous assemblages that are pliable, transformative, and playful.

Lumen is an experiment, taking risks through collaboration across disciplines. Held in tension within the PS1 courtyard matrix of walls, Lumen applies insights and theories from biology, materials science, mathematics, and engineering. Material responses to sunlight as well as physical participation are integral parts of our exploratory approach to new materials, embodiment, and a transformative, adaptive architecture. The project is mathematically generated through form-finding simulations informed by the sun, site, materials, program, and the structural morphology of knitted cellular components. Resisting a biomimetic approach, Lumen employs an analogic design process where complex material behavior and processes are integrated with personal engagement and diverse programs. Through direct references to the flexibility and sensitivity of the human body, Lumen integrates adaptive materials and architecture where code, pattern, human interaction, environment, geometry and matter operate together as a conceptual design space. Knitting and textile fabrication offer a fruitful material ground for exploring these nonstandard fibrous potentials. As with cell networks, materials find their own form where the flow of tension forces through both geometry and matter serve as active design parameters. Lumen undertakes rigorous interdisciplinary experimentation to produce a multisensory environment that is full of delight, inspiring collective levity, play, and interaction as the structure and materials transform throughout the day and night.

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