From Nature’s Structures, Prof Weaves Architectural Creations

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By Joe Wilensky

Her fabric-and-fiber sculptures, light-filled and technology-infused, span atriums, courtyards—and the interdisciplinary spaces between art, architecture, and science.

Architecture professor Jenny Sabin creates dramatic, immersive installations that merge design with fields ranging from biology to engineering, botany to data science.

Ryan Young / Cornell University

One sweeping, color-changing installation drew its inspiration—after years of research—from the miniscule and delicate structure of butterfly wings; another incorporated artificial intelligence, collecting data and impressions of its human visitors and responding in real time.

Since arriving at Cornell in 2011—and establishing both a research and design lab on campus and her own client-based design studio in downtown Ithaca—Sabin has developed a symbiotic, multidisciplinary presence.

These two elements of her work inform and inspire each other: the biological systems she studies on the Hill, often at the nano scale, may be later realized in much larger architectural forms—whether knit in fiber, created with 3D printers, or laced with glowing lights—in dramatic installations around the country.

Sabin was recruited to Cornell—from Penn, where she earned a master’s in architecture, taught for six years, and launched her studio and research program—with the express purpose of bringing emerging technologies into the architecture curriculum.

One of her lab’s first NSF-funded projects looked at structural color—hues created not by pigments or dyes, but by the geometry of the molecules themselves.

“It’s something that you see in nature everywhere: the wings of the blue morpho butterfly, hummingbird wings, abalone seashells,” Sabin says. “We looked at those patterns and textures at a nano scale.”

I frequently don’t know what the final form will look like. It evolves over time, as a collaborative process—and that’s how nature operates.

From that research, Sabin developed high-tech, responsive color-changing fibers with photoluminescent, crystalline structures; they were built on the molecular concepts found in nature, but realized at an architectural scale through a variety of new materials.

The applied design result of that research was Lumen, a knitted-fiber installation that spanned two courtyards outside MoMa PS1—the Museum of Modern Art’s Long Island City location in Queens—in 2017.

With muted hues during the day and an ethereal glow at night, Lumen’s vast canopy structure was created out of a million yards of recycled textiles mixed with photoluminescent fibers.

Jesse Winter

(The work—which was featured in a New York Times video—also offered shade and seating for visitors, even spraying a cooling mist in warmer weather.)

Then Sabin’s largest installation to date, it was immensely popular (and eminently photographable); it also won that year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program competition.

In 2019, as an artist-in-residence at Microsoft Research’s headquarters in Redmond, WA, Sabin created Ada, an artificially intelligent pavilion outfitted with cameras and microphones to interpret visitors’ facial expressions and ambient sounds in order to interact with them through light and color.

Knitted cones of fabric connected the egg-shaped pavilion’s soft inner surface to a more rigid outer shell, supporting a framework of 3D-printed nodes, fiberglass rods, and a network of LEDs that could react in real time based on the “collective sentiment” the AI gathered via cameras and microphones.

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On campus, her PolyForm project—commissioned by Human Ecology and installed outside Martha Van Rensselaer Hall in 2021—took eight years to design and create.

The permanent, square structure includes colorful, wavelength-dependent glass walls and stainless-steel modules that look different depending on the light, time of day, weather, and where a viewer is standing.

PolyForm includes colorful glass walls and stainless-steel modules that look different depending on the light, time of day, weather, and where a viewer is standing.

As Sabin observes with a laugh: “I think in some ways, it would have been easier to build a building on campus than this experimental pavilion that’s not quite sculpture, and not quite a building—but you can inhabit it.”

Her bevy of other projects and installations include Purl, a canopy structure that offers shade to beachgoers in Abu Dhabi; Polymorph, a digitally fabricated ceramic form in Orléans, France; Lightweb, a building-sized, 3D mural in Philadelphia; and commissions by Nike, Google, and more.

“Not only does the installation just look plain cool; Sabin’s process and vision behind the whole thing are fascinating,” Architectural Digest raved about a 2018 project mounted in NYC’s West Village.

“Luster is more than just a work of art; it’s a collaborative effort between a couple of different disciplines that collectively allow the visitor to envision a sustainable future.”

Sabin’s many accolades include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects; she also co-authored the textbook LabStudio: Design Research Between Architecture and Biology.

“While architecture and design have an emphasis on aesthetics and overlap with creative or artistic fields, she and her team take design very seriously—and are able to create extraordinary complexity in her work through this research-based approach.”

In 2022, following several years of work by a task force that Sabin co-chaired, the University tapped her to head the new multicollege Department of Design Tech, administered by AAP in partnership with Human Ecology, Bowers CIS, Engineering, and Cornell Tech.

“There was a need, and a real desire,” Sabin says, “for a unique department like this for folks that don’t squarely fit in engineering, computer science, or architecture—they are working more horizontally across disciplines.”

The department’s inaugural class bears that out, she adds; their backgrounds include “everything from evolutionary biology to human-computer interaction, architecture, industrial design, and biology.”

Among her lab’s ongoing projects is PolyBrick, which takes inspiration from the biological structure of bone, which is porous rather than solid. In collaboration with a mechanical engineer, Sabin aims to produce ceramic building blocks that can carry higher loads due to—rather than in spite of—their porous structure.

“We’ve been looking at the paradox of building with holes, which you see everywhere in nature,” she says. “It is so extremely lightweight, but very robust.”

Other recent and ongoing research includes the NSF-funded HelioSkin, in which Sabin and her team are studying kirigami geometry and the mechanics of diurnal heliotropism—the ability of certain plant species to turn their buds, leaves, and other structures to follow the movement of the sun.

From that research, she and her team are creating next-generation solar collectors—which would be “skins” rather than panels.

“The grand vision,” she explains, “is to develop a building wrapper that can adapt and morph to multiple architectural forms and types—from a backyard canopy to a skyscraper.”

Top: Visitors explore Lumen at MoMA PS1 in 2017. (Photo by Sara Wass.) Ada image by John Brecher / Microsoft; Branching Morphogenesis image by Sabin+Jones LabStudio. All other images and video provided by Jenny Sabin Studio, unless indicated.

Published September 23, 2024

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