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By Technology Review

April 2003

Design and the Body

Assistant architecture professor J. Meejin Yoon has recently garnered national attention for her hallmark designs, some of which include walls and clothing embedded with motion sensors that react to people's presence. Two of her works, Pleated Wall and The Defensible Dress, helped her win the Architectural League of New York's Young Architects Forum annual competition, and they were included in the League's exhibition last spring.

Yoon created a special display-case version of Pleated Wall for the exhibition with the help of Matt Reynolds '98, MNG '99, who made circuit boards that allowed pieces of the wall to move. The wall is made of three millimeter-thick aluminum panels, stacked and interlocked, but the exhibition version housed a series of infrared sensors and motor-operated rods, or "pines." As viewers approached, the pines retracted to reveal transparencies of other works by Yoon.

The Defensible Dress, also outfitted with infrared sensors, raises "spikes" whenever anyone comes too close. "It's a very aggressive apparatus when you wear it," Yoon says, noting that the dress helps "reinscribe the notion of personal space in everyday life."

Yoon says her designs explore "the intersection between the body and architecture and space."

Yoon was also asked to create an installation for the Brooklyn Public Library's Visual and Performing Arts Library Competition. That piece was on view through February. Her works appear this month in Material Process, published by Princeton Architectural Press.