Stuckeman architecture lab’s work to be featured at 2025 Beaux Arts Ball in NY

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A new installation by Penn State architecture graduate students under the guidance of Felecia Davis, associate professor of architecture and director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, will be unveiled Oct. 3 at the 2025 Beaux Arts Ball, hosted by the Architectural League of New York in the MADE Bush Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.  

Long considered the premier annual gathering of New York’s architecture and design community, the theme for this year’s event is “Pattern Recognition,” and is dedicated to New York’s manufacturers, artisans, designers and entrepreneurs through a reimagined lens provided by Davis and her team, according to the event website. 

Davis was approached by the Architectural League of New York’s executive director about the commissioned event opportunity in August 2025 following the popularity of the SOFTLAB team’s responsive textiles work in both the 18th Venice Biennale in 2023 and the “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2021.  

The installation for this year’s Beaux Arts Ball features 12 colorful programmed lamps produced by architecture master’s degree students and Davis’ SOFTLAB team members Seterah Farashzadeh, Yasaman Ghaffarian, Mahtab Khabir and Joshua Jolly in collaboration with Davis, Lee Washesky, lecturer in architecture, and Jamie Heilman, supervisor of the Digital Fabrication Lab in the Stuckeman School. In collaboration with Davis, the lamps will be programmed by Joel Fitzpatrick Lighting Studio. 

Shayleigh Larsen, a master’s degree student and research assistant in the Zeis Knitting Lab in the Wilson College of Textiles at North Carolina State University, and Zoe Hezrony, Zeis Lab manager, produced the knitted patterns using Shima Seiki machine technology and flatbed knitting. The knitted fabrics are used to make the body of the lamps that will be mounted in the MADE Bush Terminal space. 

The fabric was knitted by Larsen and reveals loose floats or yarns that travel across the interior and face of the material making new traces, according to Davis. 

"We also collaborated with William Storms Studio, a Brooklyn-based weaver, to produce three large woven panels depicting historic and current maps of the Bush Terminal area in Brooklyn,” said Davis, who is a researcher in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing. 

The 2025 ball is one of the first events to be held in the terminal, which is being renovated “as a creative, light industrial and manufacturing hub” by the New York Economic Development Corporation, according to Davis.   

Learn more about the installation, which “celebrates the quiet attention required to uncover patterns, and the critical imagination required to design new templates for what’s to come,” and find ticket information on the event website.