Events
Design Tech Public Lecture Series: Radical Softness — The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman
Janet Echelman shares her artwork at the scale of buildings and city blocks, where she creates large-scale, fluid installations that merge art, architecture, and engineering. Her work transforms with wind and light, inviting viewers into immersive experiences rather than static observation. Echelman uses unconventional materials — from atomized water particles to fiber stronger than steel — blending traditional craft with advanced computational design. Her monumental works anchor public spaces across five continents, in cities including New York, London, Sydney, Shanghai, and Singapore. Permanent installations in locations such as San Francisco, Vancouver, and Porto continually evolve with shifting light and air. Echelman’s unconventional path includes a degree from Harvard, five years living in a Balinese village, and graduate studies in both painting and psychology.
The major new monograph from Princeton Architectural Press, Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman (2025), is a comprehensive sourcebook that unpacks Echelman’s vital practice and her ongoing commitment to “Taking Imagination Seriously,” the title of her TED Talk, which has been translated into thirty-five languages and has more than two million views. It features mesmerizing color photographs, a foreword by fellow creative Swizz Beatz, and contributions from a diverse range of internationally recognized scholars, engineers, designers, architects, and curators contextualizing the interdisciplinary impact of Echelman’s work within the fields of global art history, architecture, computation, and landscape architecture.
The Lecture will be followed by the book launch of “Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman”.
Speaker Bio
Janet Echelman is an artist known for sculpting at the scale of buildings and city blocks, creating large-scale, fluid installations that merge art, architecture, and engineering. Her work transforms with wind and light, inviting viewers into immersive experiences rather than static observation. Echelman uses unconventional materials — from atomized water particles to fiber stronger than steel — blending traditional craft with advanced computational design. Her monumental works anchor public spaces across five continents, in cities including New York, London, Sydney, Shanghai, and Singapore. Permanent installations in locations such as San Francisco, Vancouver, and Porto continually evolve with shifting light and air. Echelman’s unconventional path includes a degree from Harvard, five years living in a Balinese village, and graduate studies in both painting and psychology. Oprah ranked Echelman’s work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!, and she received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring “the greatest innovators in America today.” Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, she has taught at MIT, Harvard, and Princeton. Her interdisciplinary approach challenges artistic boundaries and redefines urban space through experiential public art.