In the past, the Museum of Modern Arts Young Architects Program has addressed environmental issues as thorny as geopolitical water conflict and the American suburb in crisis through glowing tubes and exquisitely detailed models. This years winner is no less ambitious, exploring the crossover between material science and architecture with a soft forest of glowing, solar-active yarn that is temporarily on displace in the courtyard of PS1, the Museum of Modern Arts Long Island City art outpost.

Lumen, as the installation is called, is the brainchild of Jenny Sabin, head of the Jenny Sabin Studio in Ithaca, New York (she also teaches at Cornell University). Its a structure of knitted light that will not only transform from day to night but will also respond to visitors who interact with it, Metropolis reports. The yarn will absorb light during the day and emit it at night, and the installation will include misting stations to create cooler micro-climates throughout the day. You can take a virtual tour (complete with some appropriately relaxing music) at Sabins website.

But the project has a purpose beyond looking seriously cool. Sabins work tends to operate at the intersection of emerging digital technologies, adaptive materials, architecture and science, she tells Metropolis. At the Cornell lab she directs, she works on projects funded by the National Science Foundation, among others, using adaptive materials and new digital fabrication techniques.

What does that mean?

At the end of the day, I would describe myself as a maker, who operates across disciplines with new digital tools and design experiments and who engages adaptive materials and nonstandard forms, she says. But, in all cases, human engagement and interaction is at the core. One of the fundamental questions that I ask is: How might buildings behave more like organisms responding to and adapting to their built environments?

Some of the research Sabins firm is doing could have implications for green building design and environmental engineering, though that would take thinking and funding big.

[W]hats amazing is thinking about the promise of these materials and how theyre programmed, which can then create large scale transformations at, say, the scale of a building faade, she tells Metropolis.

Click here to read the full Metropolis Q&A.

Rachel Dovey is an award-winning freelance writer and former USC Annenberg fellow living at the northern tip of Californias Bay Area. She writes about infrastructure, water and climate change and has been published by Bust, Wired, Paste, SF Weekly, the East Bay Express and the North Bay Bohemian.

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