Jenny Sabin, Lumen, via Art Observed
Marking its embrace of the hot summer months in New York, MoMA PS1‘s popular Warm-Up summer concert series has returned to New York City, bringing with it the annual Young Architects Program design for an outdoor canopy structure to shade and entertain visitors and concert-goers in the museum’s open courtyard.  This year, the museum has tapped Jenny Sabin Studio, a Cornell-based design group known for its tech-first design concepts and use of woven, photo-reactive materials, spreading a photo-luminescent tent structure, and robotically-woven chairs across the space.Â
Jenny Sabin, Lumen, via Art Observed
Jenny Sabin, Lumen, via Art Observed
The design, titled Lumen, marks a continuation of Sabin’s interest in hyper-modern computer drafting techniques and the complex, undulating forms that modern rendering software is capable of producing.  Here, recycled materials are turned into a photo-receptive canopy, glowing with the light absorbed over the course of the day, while keeping Warm-Up attendees in the shade during the peak hours of sunlight.  It’s a social structure, as Sabin notes, weaving elements together in the same manner that the space’s many uses and contexts, visitors and artists, stand unified under her work.
Jenny Sabin Studio, Lumen, via Jenny Sabin Studio
Jenny Sabin Studio, Lumen, via Jenny Sabin Studio
Emphasizing the notion of the human body as a flexible, adaptable structure in its own right, Lumen welcomes the organic form as a mode for creating lightweight, modular systems that invite the viewer to play and relax below its hexagonal cells, which gradually change color and tone as the sun moves across the sky. “I find the history between computation and textiles inspiring,” Sabin said in an interview about her work on Lumen, underscoring the structure’s use of digital fabrication and micro-technologies to mirror and work alongside these natural elements.
The structure will remain installed throughout the summer.
Jenny Sabin Studio, Lumen, via Jenny Sabin Studio
Jenny Sabin Studio, Lumen, via Jenny Sabin Studio
Jenny Sabin Studio, Lumen, via Jenny Sabin Studio
— D. Creahan
Read more:
Jenny Sabin Studio – Lumen [Jenny Sabin]
Jenny Sabin’s Robotically-Woven ‘Lumen’ Installation Opens at MoMA PS1 [Designboom]
MoMA PS1 YAP [MoMA PS1]
