Breathe — a screen that filters air
A triangulated screen structure woven with climbing plants, built for Dr. Ahu Aydogan's Breathe Research on plant-based indoor air filtration at CCNY. I was the project's main fabricator: design-build, weekends, from CNC and 3D printing through to sewing.
- Project
- Breathe Research facade screen
- Location
- City College of New York
- Year
- 2022
- Role
- Main fabricator, design-build
- Methods
- CNC, 3D printing, textiles, metalwork
The brief
The research tests whether plants can do measurable work on indoor air quality, and by extension on the energy a building spends conditioning it. That turns a planter into a building component: it has to hold a growing medium, stay serviceable, carry structure, and be occupiable rather than decorative.
What I made
CNC for the wooden bench pieces, so the screen has somewhere to sit rather than only something to look at. 3D printing for the modules that hold the planting medium, iterated until they could be filled, drained, and pulled out without disassembling the frame. Sewing for each of the textile pods. And the metal frame itself, cut and assembled on weekends.
It is the one project here that runs the full stack in a single object: subtractive, additive, soft goods, and metalwork, all landing in the same assembly with the same tolerances to reconcile.
Why it stayed with me
Everything else here treats a building element as a way to carry something a person cannot express. This one carries something a person cannot see. It is the same structural idea, an assembly that does work on the invisible and reports it back at the scale of a room, arrived at from the other direction. It is also the project that taught me the fabrication I use everywhere else.