Lumen by Jenny Sabin Studio for the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1's Young Architects Program 2017, on view at MoMA PS1 from June 29 to September 4, 2017. Image courtesy of MoMA PS1. Photo by Pablo Enriquez.

Jenny Sabin, principal of Jenny Sabin Studio and director of the Sabin Design Lab, has been selected as the 2017 winner of MoMA PS1's annual Young Architects Program, which kicks off today, June 29. Sabin is active in academia and the cultural sphere, often showcasing her work in pavilions and installations like this year’s Lumen.

Based in Ithaca, New York, Jenny is the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. Her work centers on design and emerging technologies, and bridges between science and architecture. Funded by organizations, foundations, and institutions the National Science Foundation, Nike Inc., and the American Philosophical Society Museum, Jenny Sabin’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Jenny was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2010), was named a USA Knight Fellow in Architecture (2011), and recently received the prestigious Architectural League Prize for Young Architects (2014), awarded by the Architectural League of New York. She co-authored Meander: Variegating Architecture with Ferda Kolatan (2010), and is soon to publish LabStudio: Design Research Between Architecture & Biology, Routledge / Taylor and Francis (July 2017) with her longtime collaborator, Peter Lloyd Jones.

I spoke to Sabin while she was in the middle of building the Lumen pavilion at the MoMA PS1. Following her podcast for Archinect, this interview complements the topics discussed earlier and discusses Sabin’s trajectory working at the forefront of architecture.

Your projects are aesthetically beautiful, yet their value also seems to lie in how they integrate science and sustainability. How do you think about sustainability in your designs?

I wrote an article not too long ago for the Journal for Architectural Education called “Transformative Research Practices” (2015), which addresses this very question. My expertise and background is by no means in the area of sustainability and environmental systems, but we end up touching those topics through alternate means. We may therefore end up innovating with an adaptive material, such as the eSkin project, but that comes about not with a technical, solution-based, and overarching agenda. It happens more so as we rethink how we approach the whole problem conceptually.

A lot of what we do is in the area of new materials—innovating new material applications across multiple scales. That has, in turn, given rise to applications that address very important issues related to sustainability and environmental systems. For a number of years now I have looked into how buildings might behave like organisms, adapting and responding to environmental conditions. That sets up a really interesting scenario to look across disciplinary boundaries, from biology to materials science to mechanical engineering. I would say that all of my collaborators in those various fields are equally invested in rethinking how we approach the problem of sustainability.

We're approaching fundamental research that rethinks our conceptual approach towards sustainability issues.

We're approaching fundamental research that rethinks our conceptual approach towards sustainability issues. It primarily resides within the innovation of materials, and within the fabrication protocols that span multiple scales. Although, as I mentioned, my expertise and background are not in sustainability, I have wonderful colleagues whose backgrounds are. This means that we do end up touching those topics through the types of research that we engage in.

You mention materials science, and how your background influences the work you do. You also mention how it affects the sustainability aspects of your designs. It is very clear how materials science has influenced the way you design. How do you see the inverse happening—architecture influencing materials science?

When I started my early collaborations, twelve years ago, some of the first applications happened on the biomedical end. Our bridge was through the topic of visualization and simulation. Working with Dr. Peter Lloyd Jones and his lab, what I was able to do, along with my students, was to develop tools and models for seeing data in a new way. We were able to take individual slices of a multicellular structure, and form them into a 3D digital model that we eventually 3D-printed. It was amazing to discover that, as an architect, I could design and lend my disciplinary core and expertise, but at an altogether different scale and within a set of dynamic biological design parameters.

I think that is happening in many areas. The advent of big data is really impacting how science is done. The reductive method of looking at a discrete moment or event with a data set is shifting. Now we have abundant data, where you are looking for trends and for new information within a system. In that way, we as architects were able to lend our tools and ways of thinking about design in a generative fashion.

Maintaining my role as the architect on the team has been crucial because most of my collaborators do fundamental science.

In terms of materials scientists, we have also developed very robust simulation tools to model the materials that we are working on together. Maintaining my role as the architect on the team has been crucial because most of my collaborators do fundamental science. They don't worry about application, or about scaling what they're looking at. This is not a part of their daily scientific practice. What I have been doing with my students, research associates, and collaborators such as Andrew Lucia, especially within the eSkin project, is to stop and think about what we have proposed. We are going to innovate with bio-inspired adaptive thin film technology that can be integrated within existing building construction or even new façade design. What does that mean? Are there certain features and effects at a nano to micron scale that simply won't scale?

Maintaining that role, and pushing the team to think about scale and application has actually put us through some very productive phases. It has generated some hurdles for us to surpass. We develop prototypes together, scale them, and then discover that there are certain characteristics of these materials that cannot scale. On the one hand, we bring tools, techniques, and a way of thinking about relationships and systems. Yet most importantly, we bring expertise in design and architecture to disciplines that don't normally engage that. There are a lot of buzzwords like ‘design thinking’ and ‘interdisciplinary.' I think a part of that is because we do need each other.

It’s not about turning architects into pseudo-scientists, or scientists into pseudo-designers. It is about putting people in a truly collaborative space to combine our skill base and disciplinary expertise to solve these problems.

It's fascinating to hear you talk about the dynamic way in which you work with data across scales. I guess it’s also fair to say that your projects revolve around responsive design. We see that both the Nike Pavilion and Lumen respond to the context in real time. Do you see responsive architecture becoming an increasingly crucial part of how we design?

I think it will increasingly become more a part of what we do. A part of that is based on what I am observing and what is happening in materials science at Cornell University, where I have been based for six years and where I direct my lab, Sabin Design Lab. Cornell has one of the best Materials Science departments in the world. I see many things that, though not yet out in industry, are going to impact the buildings we inhabit and the devices we wear. 

Maybe that would generate excitement around issues of sustainability, which in turn would leverage change!

In terms of what is happening with adaptive materials and responsive materials, our ability to tune and design characteristics and features across multiple length scales is moving very quickly. I think it will become increasingly a part of architecture, and of the way that we think about design and the design process. One of the things that was really important to us on the eSkin project, alongside the performative aspects and functions of the material, had to do with issues of beauty and aesthetics. What does it mean to have large scale transformations of buildings in an urban context? How might that impact and affect people? Maybe that would generate excitement around issues of sustainability, which in turn would leverage change! That’s real impact.

I am very curious to see how this way of thinking impacts pedagogy, and how we design and think in architecture. I love the projects and the research that I do. That keeps me going. That keeps me really excited about things. But I also love teaching, and I think that, at the end of the day, that is probably where I will make my biggest impact—just to get people to think a little differently.

In your podcast for Archinect, you discuss your interest in how responsive design could either influence or be influenced by social patterns. How do you see this new way of thinking about architecture affecting the way we, as people, interact in space?

Architecture and architects have had connections and relationships with nature and the sciences throughout our entire history.

It's been a journey. It's been a process, and often times a lonely one because there hasn't been a path to follow. Early on there were a lot of naysayers, a lot of critics. They would say things like "Jenny, why would you collaborate with a biologist? What are you doing? What is this about?" There was a lot of criticism towards my collaborators too. It was kind of funny to me, because architecture and architects have had connections and relationships with nature and the sciences throughout our entire history.

After three or four years of developing our work, we were successful in procuring a multimillion dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This was for the eSkin project, where we were proposing an adaptive thin film technology. Our point of departure was to look at how, when human cells are placed on polymers, the changes in design, geometry, and pattern affect the behavior of those cells. We weren't proposing to put human cells on buildings, but we were proposing that there was a fine-scale design ecology that we could learn from. The cell was our muse for a certain portion of the project. We worked at a very specific scale, so that we could extract and apply particular behaviors and features and characteristics of the material at different scales.

As we got that multimillion dollar stamp from the NSF, interestingly enough some of those naysayers were suddenly saying, “Oh wow this is really important work.” “It's cutting edge.” “It's this.” “It's that.” There is a certain amount of institutionalized knowledge that carries weight that has helped us along the way. What was really interesting, and the NSF was all over it, was that we had been collaborating successfully. It is one thing to say that you are going to collaborate across disciplines, and it is another thing to really do it. It is really hard and it takes trust, it takes developing relationships, it takes risk, it takes commitment, and it takes friendship.

So I have worked hard to let negative criticism roll over me. You can't let that get you down. But I have accepted criticism that I have received from my collaborators in a very rigorous fashion. I think that being immersed in science has made me a better architect. And I think I have impacted my scientist collaborators quite a lot.

My experience working with early mentors like Cecil Balmond, a pioneer in the area of form and algorithm, was important as he fostered a generative design process and in a way I felt protected. I could then turn to this unknown territory because I knew that he and a few others were engaged in it. I am also part of the Smart Geometry group, which continues to be a really important group of people that I seek criticism from. I am also part of ACADIA, with which I am very involved. I bolstered myself by finding and helping to form these islands of amazing people around the world engaged in computational design and digital fabrication. That really helped along the way.

Even if they don't get it, there is something that comes out of it that is quite exciting

This way of thinking is now certainly more common, and I think my students are a little less resistant. I think they're actually really excited. My Option Studios at Cornell tend to be oversubscribed, and people are really interested in the thinking and the way of working. Part of that too is that there is always the material component. Even if they don't get it, there is something that comes out of it that is quite exciting and that was something really unique that I brought early on. I think that, at the end of the day, I am still happiest as a maker, and I think Lumen is going to be spectacular on that front—in terms of bringing what I have been working on for about six years now, in terms of material system, in terms of the scale and it being outdoors and with large bodies of people.