Jenny Sabin

Jenny E. Sabin (born 1974) is an American architect, designer and artist who draws upon biology and mathematics to design material structures. She focuses on design and emerging technologies, with particular emphasis on the areas of computational design, data visualization and digital fabrication. After working by day (as director of admissions at the Seattle Art Museum) and by night (in the studio) for several years, Sabin returned to school, completing a master's degree in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005.

As of 2005, Sabin became the principal investigator of the Jenny Sabin Studio in Philadelphia. The studio focused on multi-disciplinary research and design, enabling architects, mathematicians, biologists and other scientists to apply ideas from biological systems to the ecological design of architecture. Using the organizational structures of cells as inspiration, Sabin designed networks of sheets, tubes, and larger forms based on simple mathematical rules, to explore the aggregation of parts in greater wholes.

Works

In 2011, Sabin created the Greenhouse and Cabinet Of Future Fossils as part of The Greenhouse Projects at the American Philosophical Society Museum.

Sabin's hanging structure PolyMorph (2013), on permanent installation at the FRAC Centre in France, is made up of 1400 hollow ceramic modules held together with stainless steel cables.

In 2016, Sabin created a polythread knitted textile pavilion for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, as part of the Emergent sector of the “Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial”. The temporary structure was lightweight, portable, and photoluminescent. Sabin's design was applauded by the Cooper Hewitt as being at the "forefront of a new direction for twenty-first-century architectural practice".

On June 29, 2017, Sabin's immersive installation Lumen debuted at MoMA PS1 as part of the Young Architects Program. It was commissioned through the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 The knitted structures making up the installation were made of solar active yarns that absorb light during the day and release it at night.

In 2018, Sabin and collaborator Mariana Bertoni received a Frontiers of Engineering grant from the Grainger Foundation to explore the emergent design and fabrication of solar panels.

Sabin's works are included in collections of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in Washington, D.C., Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France.

Awards In 2010, Sabin received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for work in architecture and design. In 2015, Sabin received The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects from the Architectural League of New York.

Books