Air Forms

The project provided a vehicle to question the conventions of architectural design and textile design. Air forms sought to identify spatial, formal, experiential, material opportunities through revisiting the notion of kites. Kites are adaptive surfaces that are designed to self-balance and adjust to dynamic, transient, intangible, invisible and moving conditions of air posing a complex design challenge. Through collaborative interrogations from architecture and textile design perspectives, this project aimed to find new approaches to engage with humans and the environment. The investigations involved iterative phases of research, design, computational modeling and simulations, material explorations, making and testing, and resulted in final prototypes that were installed for the 2018 Design Philadelphia Exhibition venue in the Bok building.