words // Brennan Hiro Williams
Last weekend, Nike revealed a new design project in New York featuring artist Jenny Sabin.
The Nike Flyknit Collective, curated by Neville Wakefield, is a worldwide project celebrating the design principles at the core of the Nike Flyknit shoe: performance, lightness, formfitting and sustainability.
Sabin's myThread Pavilion, an installation housed at the Nike Bowery Stadium, starts with a series of questions: "How do you knit and braid a building? Could a building be as lightweight as air? How can sport influence both design and fabrication and inspire the next generation of buildings? What if we could form-fit and enhance architecture with bio-architecture and performance of our own bodies?"
Sabin took on the task by first collecting Nike+ FuelBand data from a community of runners during an earlier Flyknit workshop. The patterns from this data were then transformed into a 3D modeled environment, resulting in Sabin's unique installation piece.
“I’m very interested in probing the human body as a bio-dynamic model that can give us new ways of thinking about issues of performance and adaptation at an architectural scale,” said Sabin in a press release. “Performance, lightness, formfitting, sustainability become immediately relevant in terms of what we are doing.”
Check out images from Jenny Sabin's myThread Pavilion below.
