Fabric Prism

Design collective Pneuhaus designed and fabricated Fabric Prism, an inflatable immersive color installation built around the fundamental properties of light and color. Outside, red, blue, and green fabric panels filter light through an inflated membrane where color wavelengths combine, producing an iridescent, subtle color gradient on the white surface inside.

The structure is a double-membrane inflatable structure, modelled digitally through Grasshopper for Rhino. From the digital model, templates were made with a HP DraftPro Plus pen plotter. For about two weeks, fabric was cut and sewn on industrial sewing machines, with a UV, fire and water resistant 200 denier nylon.

The technique of creating iridescence through geometric arrangement of material was inspired by the phenomena of structural color. The way many organisms in nature produce color is not through pigment at all, but through microscopically structured surfaces fine enough to alter the visible light reflecting back off of them. This phenomena of varying color can be seen in many bird feathers as well as butterfly wings.

Commissioned by Judith Tolnick Champa and Leora Maltz-Leca, the installation was part of PVDFest: a festival celebrating international arts in Providence, Rhode Island. The project is one in a series of explorations of RGB additive color experiments done by Pneuhaus.

Fabric Prism, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Design: Pneuhaus
Team: Levi Bedall, August Lehrecke, Matthew Muller
Client: PVDFest
Cost: 2,000 $
Area: 103 sqm
Completion: 2016