 Hello, hello, hello. I am so excited to be here tonight. I'm Ellen Lupton. I'm senior curator of contemporary design here at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. And tonight, we will welcome the visionary architect Jenny E. Saban. This is the last program connected with our triennial exhibition. So we're ending on an amazing pal of I just I was sitting here like looking at just previewing her slides. I'm like, this is my job. I get to come listen to this. And I'm just I'm super excited. So Jenny's spectacular poly thread pavilion is on view on the third floor in our beauty exhibition. And it has been so much fun watching people enjoy it and enter it and experience it. And when we do our tours, I love telling them about the ideas and the technology and then saying, yeah, and imagine this as portable architecture that makes its own light. And people are like, oh, wow. It's not just pretty. It's important, valuable, amazing, visionary. So that's really exciting. This piece was commissioned by Cooper Hewitt for our exhibition. And I'm grateful to all the staff that helped to make the installation happen, especially to my colleague and co-curator, Andrea Lips, who really was the brains behind it. So she's here tonight, too. The exhibition is open till August 21st. So if you haven't seen it, you've got another two and a half months to check it out and just lie on the floor under Jenny's pavilion. So Jenny E. Saban's work is defining a new direction for 21st century architectural practice. She is investigating the intersections of architecture and science. And she is applying her insights and theories from biology and mathematics to material structures. Her experimental design studio develops models and prototypes for high tech and high performance composite fabrics, such as those that are used in our very own poly thread pavilion. In addition to her work as principal of Jenny Saban's studio, she is on the faculty of Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, where she is also director of the Saban Design Lab. Very impressive. Tonight's event is part of Game Changers, a program of conversations with influential and innovative practitioners, thinkers, and industry leaders across disciplines. The series launched last year in April 2015 with a conversation between myself and Tim Brown, who's CEO and president of IDEO, the world-renowned innovation and design firms. That was a really fun way to start this amazing series. Design Talks, Game Changers is made possible by support from IDEO. And it's my great pleasure to welcome Jenny Saban. It's gonna be really cool. Thank you, Ellen, for that kind introduction. It's a sincere pleasure to be here this evening and to take part in the Game Changers series. And I just wanna thank everyone at the Cooper Hewitt, Andrea, Ellen, Susanna, it's just been really awesome working with you and being a part of this exhibition from start to finish, so I'm thrilled to be here tonight. So I'm going to address the subject of my talk through the lens of my transdisciplinary collaborations with a fundamental interest in developing an alternative material practice in architecture. And this is done through the generative fabrication of what I call the non-linearities of material and form across disciplines. And I'll say at the end of the day, although my expertise is in emerging technologies and design, I'm happiest as a maker. So I'm very invested in how these techniques and topics meet the material world. So I'm gonna start by discussing the foundation for the work, provide a bit of a mission statement around the work, and then I'm going to talk about three topics and unfold a series of projects within those topics that address adaptive materials, adaptive structures, and non-standard tectonics, looking at part-to-whole relationships, and then concluding with adaptive environments. So this video is a compilation of data simulations produced in a number of my collaborators' labs, as well as visualizations and models that we've developed in my lab with my team. So certainly biology and material science present useful conceptual models for us as architects to consider. It's here that form is in constant adaptation with environmental events. Geometry and matter operate together as an active elastic ground, what I call a data scape. One could say that the polythread upstairs is an example of this type of interactive data scape that steers and specifies form, function, and structure in context, and I'll talk specifically about what I mean in relationship to context in a moment. And it's through direct references to the flexibility and sensitivity of the human body as a subject that I'm interested in developing adaptive materials and architecture where code, pattern, environmental cues, geometry, and matter operate together as a conceptual design space. One of the things that I'm very interested in in the context of digital architecture is how we as architects are being repositioned as makers again, and some say, some theorists and historians say that this hasn't been in place since the medieval period. So I'm interested in looking to nature for cues as to how we manage the gap between design formation and its material manifestation. Now this interest probes the productive tinkering and misuse of digital fabrication machines, oftentimes found in alternate disciplines such as in textiles, and how this is informed by issues of craft and making the human hand to produce bio-inspired material systems and software design tools that have the capacity to facilitate embedded expressions in our built environments. Similar to Detlef Merton's description of what he calls bioconstructivisms, the emphasis here is upon the analogic negotiation of process and morphological behavior as a dynamic template that is then filtered through material organizations to produce models that are at once natural and artificial. So never have I been interested in simply scaling up what might be a beautiful form operating in nature at a nano to micron scale to an architectural scale, but more so invested upon processes and behavior that are then filtered through material organizations. And it's here that we purposefully resist post-rationalization of complex form through an approach that engaged architectural affordances reveal themselves as evolving flows of force through both geometry and matter that are then computed, designed, and fabricated. And I think it's here that these transformative models may in parallel provide potent contributions towards issues of sustainability, construction, digital fabrication, and material ecologies in architecture, and also importantly address issues of beauty, levity, and play. So one of the fundamental questions that I ask within my team is how might buildings behave more like organisms in their environments, responding to and adapting to environmental context and cues. So I oftentimes find myself in venues and environments that are not typically frequented by architects. This is a photograph that was taken on the first day of a course that I co-taught for four years titled Nonlinear Systems Biology and Design, which I co-taught with Dr. Peter Lloyd-Jones at Penn before I accepted my position at Cornell, where we paired post-docs and PhD students with graduate architecture students. And in the beginning, we purposefully resisted setting any applied goals but had a shared commitment towards the generation, the co-generation of a truly collaborative space. And we thought at the very least we would form new questions and at most new applications on both the biomedical end as well as on the architectural end. So a few important collaborators that I continue to engage with that have influenced my thinking. Peter Lloyd-Jones introduced to me the extracellular matrix. He himself is a matrix biologist. It's a dynamic protein network. It physically and chemically couples exterior with interior. And the big idea here is that half the secret to life resides outside of the cell. So you have DNA or code, but that DNA is acted upon by external environmental cues in this protein rich dynamic extracellular matrix. So this presented to me and my team a series of powerful ecological models to consider in terms of considering how context specifies form as a series of robust feedback loops or what is called reciprocity, biological reciprocity in the context of matrix biology. Now, Dr. Xu Yang who I continue to collaborate with formally, we have two National Science Foundation grants. She is a material scientist and engineer and she engages biomimicry in the true definition of the word. She's interested in looking to nature for models, extracting principles, synthesizing those principles and then engineering and designing new materials that are adaptive. So one of the topics that we've been looking at which I'll come to in a moment is the topic of structural color. And we're looking at the wings of butterflies. And in this case, color change is not based on pigment but it's entirely based on how light reflects and refracts relative to changes to geometry and pattern. And a relatively new collaborator Dr. Dan Lau who's based at Cornell, he's a bio engineer. He's doing incredible work where he's 3D printing hydrogels which are sort of squishy plastics and impregnating them with synthetic human DNA to get these materials to fold and adapt on their within their own material makeup. And I'll talk about a project that we are pursuing together later on in my talk. So over the years, what has been formalized is a series of processes, methodologies and phases to productively deal with the problem of scale in a meaningful way. So oftentimes, whether it's in my fundamental core research or an applied commission project, we begin with the design of tools. I like to think of software as a new type of material. So we develop tools to model behavior and processes that may be based on a particular dataset coming from biology, it may be based on mathematics and so on. Some of those tools are then brought into the realm of prototyping. So productively contaminating the process with the stuff of making and beginning to meaningfully deal with the problem of scale. So this is where issues of digital fabrication come into the fold. And some of those prototypes are brought into the realm of buildings and issues of building ecology. So it's a purposefully slow process. So I'm gonna transition into the first topic which engages adaptive materials and personalizing architecture and also fundamentally negotiates the question that I just posed. So this project titled E-Skin started in 2010. And in 2010, the National Science Foundation put out a call for collaborative teams that would include architects. And it was the first time that they had done so. And they were interested in collaborative teams that would engage the problem of sustainability as it relates to buildings and building energy. But most importantly, how we might reconceptualize our approach towards the problem. And so at that point, we had about four years, three to four years of collaborative work in place in the context of Lab Studio which I co-founded with Peter at Penn. And we were fortunate to secure one of the 10 multi-million dollar grants. And this really put a stamp on the work and formalized it in a pretty exciting way. So the team includes material scientists, cell biologists, mechanical engineers and myself and my team. Now our point of departure was this notion of dynamic reciprocity going back to the ECM, the extracellular matrix as a model. And so what you see here is a PDMS substrate which is basically an organic polymer that's been fabricated through photolithography in Xu's lab, Dr. Xu Yang. And it's been plated with a single smooth muscle cell. And so you can see here the internal structure of that cell, the cytoskeleton, lassoing up and around these pillars and the nucleus stained in blue here. Now what we were interested in is how changes in compliance, materiality, pattern, geometry would in turn alter the behaviors of the cell. And we proposed to the NSF that we would develop passively responsive building skins, adaptive thin films that could be integrated with either existing construction or a new facade design. Now we weren't proposing to put human cells on buildings. Human cells work very well in our own bodies but they would quickly become confluent and die if they were placed at this scale. But rather that the cells would act as our muse, our protagonists to understand how to extract a set of features and effects that then could be synthesized and re-engineered as a set of sensors and imagers that could potentially be locally dumb but learn over time relative to environmental changes. So what are we actually working with? This is an example of a predefined geometric pattern embedded within what's called a shape memory polymer material and it's displaying structural color change under both deformation and recovery. So literally what's happening with these substrates either fabricated with holes or pillars when they're stretched and they undergo a mechanical change that changes the orientation of the geometry at a nano to micron scale and in turn that changes how light is reflected or refracted and then we see a change in color or a change in transparency and opacity. So one of the applications that we're considering is how those dynamic features and effects may be applied towards, for example, blocking UV into a building. Some of you may be familiar with what's called Frit Patterning which is a static pattern printed onto glazing and so we're proposing the possibility of having that be a dynamic scenario. So obviously central to this project and our original proposal is the reduction of the overall carbon footprint in the built environment. So we're interested in the optimal features and effects of e-skin but we're also very equally interested in addressing important social and community based topics that arise through large scale transformations of building facades against environmental constraints. So here's where issues of beauty, levity and play come into the fold. So not only do we seek to contribute to sustainable green building but we hope to inspire excitement between disciplines and responsibility around the topic through beautiful spatiotemporal effects such as shape transformation, color change, transparency change, water harvesting and so on. So some of our recent speculative renderings this is looking at the promise of a tunable window. So personalizing our interior environments and this is directly working with the transformations that I just described through a simple mechanical change of vis-a-vis stretching. So imagine if you could generate your own window on demand. We're also interested in sensing based color change so integrating a degree of interactivity in terms of personalizing one's engagement with the materials and through a series of productive deadlines that I've imposed through exhibition invitations. We've produced a series of prototypes to test these applications. This was a contribution to an exhibition in Paris called Alive where we were working with the actual simulated data of eSkin but then projecting that at multiple scales and looking at transformations of geometry relative to that. Another prototype that we're all very proud of that we collaborated on across the board working at the lab bench side together. This came through an invitation to produce work for the ninth archae lab at the frock in Orléans called naturalizing architecture. And so we were interested in producing a human scale prototype that would dynamically switch between opaque, transparent and obviously looking at color change as well. So this was an early schematic for the prototype. We had some scale issues with the existing organic polymer that we were working with. And so we elected to work with a material that exhibited the same features and effects as eSkin but allowed us to work at a human scale. And that material is called nano colloidal particles and these little particles are found in models or models found in nature such as seashells, milk products, anything that exhibits an opulent color spectrum. So this is a view of the final prototype. Took us about a year to produce this collaboratively. And we made everything from scratch. This is a view into the interior board system. There's an array of sensors which you can see here. And these sensors detect a change in light intensity. And in turn, those sensors when they detect a change in light intensity pass a very low voltage regionally to these components, which you see here. And each one of those components is composed of two sheets of conductive glass, which is called ITO glass. And a solution is sandwiched between of those nano colloidal particles. And so what's happening at a nano scale when you pass by this thing or you pass your hand in front of it, such as being shown in this video, that regional charge then changes the density of the packing of those particles which in turn to our eye changes color or transparency. So it's entirely wavelength dependent. It's not pigment based. So this is our current vision for the East skin material. We completed our fourth year of the fundamental research and are now looking for industry partners to bring it into a viable building product. And realistically, we're probably looking at another four years before this can actually be a material used in construction. So after this successful project, which was our first NSF grant, which concluded in 2014, we went after another grant with the NSF. They put out a call for collaborative teams that would engage topics of folding or origami. And we proposed within the team to work with Kirigami. Let me turn this off. There we go. And the team includes a physicist, Xu Yang, the material scientist myself and the other architectural research associates and students and also Dan Lau, the bio engineer. And so we proposed to work with Kirigami which is like origami but has the addition of cuts and holes within the assemblies. And so for me, this project really provided a bridge between what we had developed with East skin but allowed us to move beyond a single substrate of material and to start to look at larger systems that also adapt and fold and exhibit a degree of hierarchy with the promise of developing prototypes, prototypical prototypes that would then potentially influence facade design at the building scale. So I'm gonna turn this video on. This is Randy Kamian, who's the theoretical physicist on the team. He models squishy stuff and crystalline structures coming from material science and he's gonna describe Kirigami. So we worked with Randy quite substantially for the first year and a half just in the innovation and development of tools to look at various Kirigami geometries. And now we're starting to work more substantially with Xu and Dan Lau starting to integrate material constraints which obviously start to influence the purity of those geometries. And so you'll find in nature, many examples of how holes and cuts are leveraged to deal with disturbances or energy flows. And so I'm very interested in how that as a model can be used in an architectural context. And so these are some of the things that we're looking at with Xu in terms of 3D origami within material systems. And our first prototype that we developed as an active experiment was Color Folds in 2014. And we started with a whole series of physical models, just exploring again those features of Kirigami behavior and thinking about, okay, what happens when we start to scale up or thicken the material? And immediately one has to deal with the hinge as a mechanical system. So I was also very interested in embedding a degree of human interactivity within this system. And these diagrams just highlight us how that would start to unfold. One of my PhD students who's a mechanical engineer, I brought him on board to innovate the mechatronics. And so we developed basically a learning network which is based on a learning tree, a kind of neural network that would be, again, locally dumb, referencing some of the earlier research, thinking about cells and how they network, but would have a cohesive strategy in terms of how the components would fold or unfold. So if one component starts to unfold or fold, its neighbor says, oh, okay, maybe I need to fold and unfold too. The entire system was CNC cut. So again, moving like as Randy just described from 2D flat sheet to 3D form. And the material was a six millimeter extruded polycarbonate. This was actually the file used to cut all of the panels. All of the panels are different. Before we cut the panels, they were laminated with a dichroic film, which is also wavelength dependent. So again, working with issues of structural color as a fundamental. Again, we made everything from scratch. All of our boards, which have a basic MOSFET, a series of thermistors which regulate heat. And then a network of night and all springs, which are a two phase conductive responsive system. So when a low voltage is passed through these, they either contract or fold or unfold. And some final images of that prototype. I will say one of the issues that we came up against, and we took this all apart and are continuing to work with it as an active experiment. We underestimated the amount of power that was needed to power the entire network. And so we're now working with a couple of people, including Dan Lau and Spencer Malgoby on innovating how we design and refine the hinge as a mechanical system. And again, coming back to material as a fundamental. So these are some of the tests that we're doing with my resin printer, which prints at a micron scale in terms of its resolution. So here you can see how we're leveraging behavior just simply by changing the patterning of the geometry. And also this is where Dan comes in, where we're working on the design of hinges that actuate based on their own material makeup. And in this case, working with synthetic DNA. So now I'm gonna transition into the second topic which engages non-standard tectonics and starting to look at adaptive structures in form and fundamentally working with 3D printing as a digital fabrication process. So in 2009, I secured a grant to purchase our first 3D printer. And at the time it was largest format in terms of its build size and it was a powder-based printer. And I was interested in working with the printer not as a representational device, which it's still typically used for in architecture to print models and so on, but more so to look at how we can embed behavior and processes and in my case, looking towards biology in the production of non-standard parts and components. So manufacturing through 3D printing, non-standard components that overall have a coherent strategy for how they come together and assemble. Now this not only maximizes the build bed size because we can produce a number of components, but in their assembly, they produce a much larger whole, but it also allowed us to look at other material systems. And so it was at this point, at some point during the summer of 2009 that I thought when I was working with the printer one afternoon, wait a minute, this is a powder material, couldn't we put a different powder material in there? And so my background in ceramics, in addition to architecture of a BFA in ceramics, I started to come back in a pretty interesting way. And so what you see here are our first successful 3D printed clay components. And so I swapped out the proprietary media. We formed our own recipe, which is a high-fire stoneware clay body mixed with a little bit of sugar and maltodextrin to facilitate the printing process. It has to be a little bit sticky and started to work with digital ceramics. And so what you see here is the same part. This one printed with a regular proprietary media and the second part printed in clay. It's been bisque fired and then glaze fired. So for me, just that as a promise was pretty exciting. And that's been formalized in a series of courses called Digital Ceramics, Experiments in Building Construction Techniques. I've taught this I think three or four times now at Cornell. And in the lab on some of this work is on view within the exhibition. We continue to work on polybrick, which fundamentally is just looking at the dimensions of the building brick, which really haven't changed a whole lot. And it's precisely because of how they're made. And so we think we have produced the first successful fully printed 3D printed brick wall featuring mortarless connections using an age old means called dovetail joinery. So using gravity as our friend in terms of making connections. These are unfired, and then bisque fired and glaze fired. And we have received a lot of really positive response on the polybricks. I think because there's an immediate association with the fact that it could be a viable building product and we're continuing to push that. And so once we've figured out the technical aspects of printing these bricks, we've now turned back to nature as a design model and are working with human bone formation to optimize for load paths. So thinking about how we can change porosity considering the flow of force through both geometry and material and how that can be leveraged through a prototypical wall. And these are some of our current investigations looking at polybrick 2.0 based on human bone formation. And probably the most mature project to come out of this parallel line of research, a lot of things emerge along the way, is Polymorph which was produced for the naturalizing architecture exhibition at the frock in Orleans. And I was interested in incorporating my years of investigation into cellular networking processes as a point of departure, but in this case, not working directly with a biological data set, but synthesizing all of that into a set of tools that could work with issues of recursion, feedback, networks, considering how one spatializes a node, how one moves from a component-based logic within a network into a surface that then folds into larger morphological structures. And so Polymorph is composed of only three components and the secret to complexity is actually simplicity. You start with very, very, very simple rules and inputs, but it's through feedback environment that then changes those morphological conditions. So although it's just three components, they have upwards 300 different ways of interweaving. There are two surfaces that compose the material system. And there's a background logic that's incredibly simple based on an equilateral triangle and an isosceles. So it's a spatial prototype in terms of its structure. It's rigid and features an internal network of stainless steel cable that's in continuous tension. And it's now permanently housed at the frock in Orleans within one of the turbulences, which is the new addition by Jacob and McFarland. And so in this project, we didn't directly print, 3D print the components, but I wanted to work with a printer to optimize for molds for slip casting. And if you know anything about slip casting in ceramics, it's very hard to slip cast components that feature any complexity in their curvature because of undercuts. And so we optimize for that through a series of algorithms and tools that we produced to then print positives of those molds. And then each of those were used to produce upwards 20 plaster molds per component because in slip casting you have to use plaster because it wicks away a certain amount of moisture so that the part effectively can be released. I hired a really amazing team, two ceramic artists who really pushed forward the production. I wanted people that were in the production that really knew the material in the process. And so what started out as a very sophisticated digital design process then became very analog, very slow. We were able to cast about 90 parts a day. We did all the casting and the bisque firing in my studio and I outsourced the glazing because it was actually much more efficient and cheaper. This image gives you a sense of the material system and how the structure works. In slip casting, the part is hollow and so that was very important in terms of how the structure worked. And so running internal to each of these components within the weave, there's a structural weave, so this continuous network of stainless steel cable which is under tension brings all of the ceramic components into compression. This was our map, our construction document for the upper half of the surface. This is how all of the components arrived to the site in Orleon. I didn't sleep very well for about a month while they were in transit, but thankfully not a single component broke along the way. We had an amazing team on site and I think we took away the award for the longest installation period. And this is how we worked. So we produced parts which were locally tensioned and then those parts were connected to neighboring parts and here you can see how it's starting to take form. So this is rigid, right? It's not flexible. And then we suspended it. 2,000 pounds of ceramics suspended in the air within one of the turbulence is what you see here and it's now permanently housed in this location. So in situ, you can start to see some of the lacy, calcified features and effects of those earlier generative design processes based on cellular networks influencing the final form and some final views of it fully installed. It's not a sphere. It has three topological inversions. I can see one of them here, a second here and a third here and it changes quite a lot throughout the day with the change of light. So I definitely view this as a prototype operating within that mid-phase as it described in the beginning, not a sculpture but an architectural prototype that continues to push the work along. And just as a little fun side story, Frederick Meagrew, one of the curators, came through on the last day of installation and he was sort of looking at it and looked at me and looking at it and he turned to me and he said, and he really loved it, but he turned to me and he goes, you are really smart. He goes, that's not going anywhere. And that was an intentional, but we didn't put a whole lot of thought in how this would come down. So it's now permanently there. So I'm going to transition into the final topic, the third topic, which begins to look at what is on view upstairs, engaging textile tectonics and the question, what if we could form fit and enhance architecture with the bio-architecture and performance of our own bodies? So now working with immersive adaptive environments. Now PolyThread, which is on view as part of the exhibition titled Beauty Here, is actually the fourth project engaging textiles as an architectural tectonic system. My first commission came to me through Nike and that project was called MyThread. And this was in 2012 and they started what they called the FlyNet Collective and this was in conjunction with the launch of Anushu, which all of you are probably familiar with now, called FlyNet. And this was actually a 10 year investigation on Nike's side in terms of R&D. And they invited six designers and artists, architects around the world, to basically riff on the technology that they had been working with and the core attributes such as performance, sustainability, form fitting and so on. And they were genuinely interested in how these aspects could be brought back into our own fields. So out of the six, I was the only one that proposed working with knitting. I thought it was somewhat obvious. But I had done a lot of work with weaving before that but had not done a lot with knitting. And one could say that knitting is actually the first example of 3D printing where you're additively layering row by row, stitch by stitch material. So I was interested in looking at the simplicity of knitting processes as a material system and wetting that with bio data, human data and the complexity and spatial aspects of that as a generative starting point in terms of its design. Now although I knew a lot about weaving, I didn't know a whole lot about knitting. And so I formed a collaboration with Anne Emling, who's a textile designer and expert in knitting at the time she was based at RISD. And we spent a long weekend with her, just really understanding what parameters we could work with and how those could be scaled up. And so we produced a whole series of prototypes, both working with mechanical knitting machines, digital knitting machines, hand knitting, looking at issues of transparency, scale, the human hand and so on. We also conducted a series of workshops engaging participants here in New York City. And I should mention that my city was New York and I was representing the states. This is Anne here. And in addition to working with knitting and human bio datasets as a kind of provocative system, I was very interested in working with high tech yarns. And so this was the first time that I integrated solar active and photo luminescent responsive threads and also reflective threads. And so basically as you've probably seen from poly thread upstairs, in the presence of the sun. And so I was interested in how this as an architectural textile could begin to influence how this could be brought into the built environment and considering this project as a prototype for that. So after the workshops, one of which included outfitting 30 participants with sensing devices, sent them out into Manhattan, collected a ton of bio data. I had reams of Excel sheets full of data streams and we began to integrate that with our tools. Now I wasn't interested in just simply mapping that data but looking at the intangible structure and inherent qualities of that data and linking that to the specificity of the parameters within knitting. So using the data actively as a data scape. We were digitally knitting and continuing to innovate what the final pavilion form would be which was on view during the fall of 2012. And then I finally landed my knitting manufacturer after a long and stressful search and have worked with Shimasiki for a number of years now. They are at the forefront of what's called whole garment knitting. So they're seamlessly knitting 3D forms and they make the machines and then they also do production. And so for this project, it was absolutely perfect. They had never done anything at the scale before. They worked predominantly within fashion and at the scale of the human body. But they were on board in terms of really pushing the technology and going beyond the scale of the human body. So we formed Kidaparts, a family of components based on the geometry of the conoid or the cone in terms of its topology. This was one of our drawings for organizing the data, the human bio data as a series of streams which were linked to the parameters of knitting, holes, ladders, tension, and also the different material systems in terms of the high tech yarns. Again, not as a map, but as these changes were integrated within the overall assembly, that in turn changed the behavior of the knit both locally and also globally. I was interested in architecturally and spatially transitioning from a harder outer frame or sort of a shell that then would lead you into the softer organic interior architectural fabric. And so in this project, there's a static frame which is composed of hundreds of water jet cut aluminum rings which are also held in tension and each one of those knitted cones has a home within that ring network. So once the cones were fabricated by Shimaseki, individually knit as a cone, we then had to assemble the final fabric. This was our seam diagram, looking at how one cone is connected to its neighbor. And this is what the textile fabric looks like when it's not in tension. And one of the best parts about these projects is actually the weight of the architectural fabric and here it fits into a single canvas bag and weighs approximately 150 pounds. So this image gives you a sense of how it was installed. Again, as I mentioned, each cone had a place within the ring network, it was pulled into tension and then an outer ring was placed and mechanically fastened with felt washers. As we installed it, we tuned it kind of like a drum to control the distribution of forces throughout and in its full installation, you can see here a taut elliptical ring that was formed and this is the area that people inhabited. During the design process, we worked constantly back and forth between analog tests, understanding the dynamics of the knit and our digital simulations. So it was truly enmeshed with feedback and incorporating the material constraints. I worked with a lighting designer to simulate a day to night sequence, in this case over the course of an hour, looking at the activation of the solar active threads, the photo luminescent threads, which the same features and effects, albeit in a completely different organization, are found in poly thread upstairs and an exterior view of the overall structure. At the entry, the cones were allowed to sort of escape and integrate with its environment. It was housed in the Lower East Side at Nike Stadium for about four months and comfortably houses about 50 people. And so I'm going to conclude with poly thread, which is the culminating project in this series of investigations into textiles and architecture. And when Andrea and Ellen approached me to be a part of the exhibition on me, first of all, it's one of those emails you get and you're like, oh, so exciting, so exciting. And we, through the course of a series of conversations and discussions, decided on looking at another pavilion that would incorporate textile, tectonics and knitting as a strategy. But I was very interested in moving away from working with an actual data set in the case of my thread, working with bio data as a muse, as a dynamic template, but really building upon all the serious and rigorous R&D that we had invested over the course of the years and to work with the performance, the high performance of the knit and its assembly. So working quite closely with my engineer, Thomas Scholler, we spent about two months working with these swatches and moving back and forth between these analog stress tests and developing simulations of that, incorporating that into our form finding techniques, mathematically derived, but again, working with cellular systems and networks as an organization. And I was also very interested in developing a dynamic reciprocity between the armature and the knit structure. So in the case of my thread, it was a static frame, which is much easier in terms of rationalizing the structure, but in this case, everything's dynamic. So the armature holds up the knit and the knit holds up the armature. So our form finding techniques started with minimal surfaces, again, looking at the flow of force, albeit synthetically through simulations as a point of departure and integrating that with the cellular networks and looking at basic part to whole relationships. I was also interested in moving beyond a single surface of these cones and we call them windows, the shallow cones, but working with two surfaces, an interior surface and an exterior surface that would be connected through the cones. And so this is a view of polythread upstairs with the photo luminescent threads activated, looking at the space between the outer surface and the interior surface. We produce loads of models, 3D prints, again, going back and forth between our form finding techniques and working with my engineer as to how this would be rationalized and sit within the gallery site, which went through a series of iterations. This is a view of the fabric structure before it was installed. Again, the cones were produced by Shimasiki. They did all of the knitting. The finishing was done by two outfits in Philadelphia, Andrew Dahlgren and a new partner that I'm super excited about called All Zone Together. That's the name of the company. And they are doing some amazing things with finishing of fabric structures. So this was our template for, I think, the outer surface. So this was used by the finishers to connect all of the cones to each other and to place a network of pre-stressed twill tape between each of the cones. And here we are installing. Here you can see the armature, which is composed of a bundle of 19 fiberglass rods connected with stainless steel couplers. And you can see the rope here doing what will be the work of the fabric structure. So everything is entirely integrated. If this rope wasn't around the structure, the whole thing would be quite floppy and fall to the floor. And some views of it finally installed. And as Andrea and Ellen know, the form finding process continued on site, even despite all of our copious amounts of tests and simulations. And because of its highly dynamic nature, we weren't quite entirely sure how it would finally be fully assembled, but it really came together. It was incredibly exciting. And I don't think I'll ever forget that moment when everybody came upstairs and it was fully installed. It was one of those aha moments. And again, another view and the opening night. So for me, this project really marks a sort of point of maturity within the investigation. And I hope that the next commission that comes related to this work will move the work outdoors and begin to leverage the performance and interactivity of the systems with larger scale transformations in the built environment, actually working with the sun and context as inputs, as opposed to simulating that through lights and working with a lighting designer and also working with issues of permanence and siding outside. So I'm going to conclude here. And I will say the projects keep me going. The teaching keeps me going. It keeps me excited and engaged. But I think probably the most important deliverable that we've co-generated over the last 11 years is this truly collaborative space because at the end of the day, collaboration across disciplines is actually really difficult. And it's about relationships. It's about friends. It's about trust. It's about forming partnerships and really innovating together. And so I think for me and the influence that I've had upon my students and also researchers, it's been this collaborative space of sharing that has been really transformative. So I don't work alone. We've been fortunate to receive a lot of funding from the NSF and other entities. Here's an image of my team, which includes undergraduate students, senior researchers, and senior personnel. And I'll just end with this video, which is hot off the press from an option studio that I taught this past spring called Biosynthetic Robotic Fabrication, Digital Handcraft, and Weird Tectonics. And this was our first robotic fabrication studio where we were working entirely with 3D printing and our muse was a six-axis robotic industrial arm named Sola. And so I'll conclude there. Great. I feel like the image is in here. Great inspiration. A maker, also very interested in analogic models. One of the things that he stated was that the art of structure is how and where to place holes. And so he was fundamentally interested in looking to nature as the producer of design models that would allow him, and he was a structural designer and engineer, but to work with concepts such as infinite span zero weight or the beauty of failure. And in his case, failure was about understanding how force flows through geometry and material. And that's where holes were leveraged. And so in his case, he was looking at, to answer your question about which natural system, Radiolarian, which are these little beautiful micron exoskeletal creatures. And he was analyzing their surface structures and their morphologies. And he's now credited with being the father of the space frame, kind of a big deal in architecture, and also corrugated sheet metal amongst other systems. And so he didn't start out with, I'm gonna produce the space frame. He started out with an interest in these processes and behaviors that then led to these optimized systems that were applied in architecture. So that's one example of how holes are leveraged as a dynamic. And so we're looking at that in the context of the Kirigami project. The Kirigami thing was like, when you add cuts and holes to origami, you get like, my head just exploded. That was just so amazing. So I wanna save some questions for the audience. I know there's a lot of your students and followers and people who are inspired by you here. Yeah, hi, go ahead. I think, can you just wait for the microphone because we're, the internet is listening and they wanna hear you. Okay, hi. Out of curiosity, when you first started your career, was there a project or something you really wanted to do, but wasn't able to do the lack of the technology available, but you're able to do now thanks to advances and that you really would love to do? Well, for me, it's been very much a process. When I was teaching at Penn, I was a part of a pretty exciting time that was looking at the transition between analog production of drawings and issues of representation into the digital and was a part of some really innovative groups, one of which was called the Non-Linear Systems Organization. And so because of the advent of these technologies, there was an interest in looking to science and complexity and generative systems and so on. And while that was really interesting to me, I was also really focused on how that would meet the material world. And I also thought we could perhaps be a bit more rigorous with the terminology that we were using. And so that's when I met Peter and started to collaborate with him. And so I actually answered your question, was interested in how we could learn from science and how that would then impact and impart a new way of approaching the technology. And I would say in the beginning, the digital fabrication machines were not quite useful because they're very reductive, right? They're sort of still working with a kind of Cartesian XYZ system. And so now with working with 3D printing and now robotics, we're able to work in a much more spatial way. So that's where we, I went with things. Another question, yeah. Yeah, I'm curious if you have any type of view into the future of when you'll be able to actually apply some of this research into larger scale projects, like into buildings, or do you think that even when it comes to that point in time, would you still be focused more on the research and experimenting or would you then transition into applying it to the built environment? Yeah, no, I'm fundamentally interested in how this work impacts our thinking and the discipline and also how it impacts how we make and produce architecture. And that's why I have a studio practice because I'm interested in how this meets projects and client briefs and the constraints that come with that. And so, for example, I just finished a large project, my first permanent project in North Philadelphia called Polyvine, where my studio did all of the ornamental dressing, if you will, of the project. The facade accent paneling, stoops, public seating, interior staircases, Julia at windows, and so I'm really proud of that. And it's mixed use and also includes low income housing units. So not only is this work really never been seen in Philadelphia, but it's also being offered to people that otherwise may not be able to incorporate this kind of design. And so it does incorporate a lot of the cellular systems as a strategy. Most of it is still a stamp cut through Waterjet and so on. So in terms of budget, we're somewhat limited. And then I have a new facade project in Philadelphia and some other collaboration. So yes, but it's a bit slower on that end. Great, great question. Who else has a question for Jenny? Oh, up here, thanks. I was watching TV, I'm half-watching, half-listening on TV today. Can you speak into the microphone too? Thank you. I was half-watching and half-listening to one of the cable networks. And I thought they said today they printed building, the first printed building, and I thought it was in Dubai. Do you know anything about that? And does that employ any of the research and things you have done? Yeah, I do know about that project. I saw news about that last week. And there's been a bit of a race amongst people to print the first room or print the first building. And who knows who did it first? I'm less interested in that. I actually think there's a, in a positive way, a focus on the technology and how it is somewhat of a spectacle. But I'm really interested in how 3D printing is integrated with other processes and systems. And I think that's probably where it's going to go and be most effective. And so the Polybrick project for me is looking at those aspects. So I'm not necessarily interested in 3D printing as a kind of monolithic one-off. But yeah, there's a lot of interesting things going on, especially in prefab, homes, mass production. She'll do the first knitted building, for sure. So we have time for one more question. So who wants to ask, maybe I get to ask, unless I see somebody looking brave. Do I get to ask the last question? So I will then, because again, I was really fascinated by your vocabulary and the very sophisticated things, but also the everyday. So the word squishy, is that a thing? Oh yeah. Squishy, can you just tell us what squishy materials are? Or squishy, you don't just mean squishy. No, I do mean squishy, like squishy. So some of the work that Shu is working on is looking at the integration of water, right? And so what happens to the material when it swells, and so it becomes squishy. And we're interested in how we can move away we can move away from systems that require a lot of energy input to get them to change and adapt. And most of the examples that you see out in the built environment in architecture are mechanical, right? So they exist on a mainframe. They require a lot of energy input. They typically don't work. They break down, because they're really complex. And so myself and my collaborators were fundamentally interested in how we can get adaptation through the material makeup of itself and how that adaptation requires contextual input to spur on that actuation. So the squishiness in this case comes from the water. I like that. And Randy models the squishiness theoretically. Right, the theory of squishiness is a good place to end. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for all of what you're doing. Thank you.