Photos by Benjamin Swett

Winner of The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1's annual Young Architects Program, Lumen is an immersive, interactive installation by Jenny Sabin Studio. 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.

This exhibition features elements from the full installation on view at MoMA PS1 during the summer of 2017. A lightweight knitted fabric of responsive tubular structures and a canopy of cellular components employs textiles, photo-luminescent and solar active yarns that absorb, collect, and deliver light. 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. 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. This exhibition features a swath of the main canopy structure, several robotically woven and recycled spool stools, and a video documenting the design process and installation.

Originally presented as the winning submission to YAP MoMA/MoMA PS1 LUMEN 2017, commissioned jointly by MoMA PS1 and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Jenny Sabin is the Wiesenberger Associate Professor in the area of Design and Emerging Technologies and the newly appointed Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. She is principal of Jenny Sabin Studio, an experimental architectural design studio based in Ithaca and Director of the Sabin Design Lab at Cornell AAP. Sabin holds degrees in ceramics and interdisciplinary visual art from the University of Washington and a master of architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including in the acclaimed 9th ArchiLab titled Naturalizing Architecture at FRAC Centre, Orleans, France and most recently as part of Beauty, the 5th Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. She co-authored Meander, Variegating Architecture with Ferda Kolatan, 2010. Her book titled LabStudio: Design Research Between Architecture and Biology co-authored with Peter Lloyd Jones was published in July 2017.