colossal crochet structures by choi+shine begin with intricate, group-made stitches
By kat barandy I designboom
Across landscapes and public spaces, Choi+Shine Architects’ lace works appear first as figures hovering in mid-air. Crochet, usually held close to the body, is expanded into something people can walk beneath. It casts patterned shadows, it filters light, and it gathers visitors under a structure whose surface still reads as handcrafted.
The Amsterdam-based studio was founded by Jin Choi and Thomas Shine in 2003. Together with the help of a community of volunteers, the duo works between architecture, public art, and textile practice. Before they’re suspended for public display, their projects are created through a process which involves drawings, digital models, structural tests, pattern-making, and community workshops.
A single stitch can make up part of a suspended room, while a standard pylon can become an anthropomorphized figure in the landscape. Across these shifts in scale, the studio keeps returning to the simple idea that infrastructure can carry human presence.
Distance, Choi+Shine Architects, Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art Zhejiang Art Museum China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, 2025
Before Choi+Shine Architects began building its large-scale lace installations, the studio imagined a different kind of public figure in Iceland. Its 2010 proposal The Land of Giants reworked the standard steel-framed electrical transmission tower into a series of human-shaped pylons which are imagined to march across the landscape with outstretched arms and shifting postures.
The design made small changes to an existing industrial system, but the image changed completely. With this conceptual project, power lines become a procession of colossal bodies.
The proposal remains a useful starting point for reading the studio’s later work. It shows Choi+Shine looking at something infrastructural, repetitive, and easy to ignore, then asking how it might hold a sense of place. The pylons still carry electricity, but they also lean, climb, and stand against the horizon like figures caught mid-movement.
That same instinct appears again in the lace works, where an ordinary technique grows into a public structure with its own social life.
The Land of Giants, Choi+Shine Architects, proposal for Landsnet, Iceland, 2010
In works such as The Urchins, The Lace, The Trees, and The Power of One, crochet moves far beyond object scale. The installations become canopies, screens, walls, and temporary enclosures. Their surfaces are open and porous, but they still shape space. Light passes through the patterned cords and breaks across the ground. Shadows shift with the day. Bodies gather around the work and start to read the pattern through movement.
The Urchins, first installed at Marina Bay in Singapore, turns crocheted lace into large suspended forms that glow after dark and throw intricate shadows during the day. The works borrow the visual language of marine life without becoming literal replicas. Their strength comes from the tension between softness and scale, with hand-crocheted surfaces held in place by structural frames. Because crochet is harness here as neither decoration nor surface treatment, it becomes the main spatial system.
The Urchins, Choi + Shine Architects, Marina Bay, Singapore, 2017
The Lace, installed for Amsterdam Light Festival, pushed this thinking over water. Suspended across the Herengracht, the illuminated work appeared as a large lace plane in the canal’s urban corridor. Its pattern could be seen from the street, from passing boats, and in reflection below, turning a familiar waterway into a layered field of light and thread.
Other projects extend this language into more explicitly symbolic terrain. The Feather in Brussels used lace as a light, suspended gesture beside the Palais de Justice, setting textile delicacy against the weight of a monumental civic building.
A long hand-crocheted work, The Berlin, was proposed to meander throughout a train station as a temporary wall and threshold, using lace to speak about division, passage, and release. The works vary in site and tone, but they share a question: how can a thin line become space?
The Lace, Choi + Shine Architects, Amsterdam Light Festival, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2016
Choi+Shine’s crochet installations are also built through groups. The studio regularly organizes workshops with local volunteers, who help produce the panels and fragments that later form the large-scale works. The architects document these gatherings in detail: tables covered with cord, hands following diagrams, finished sections laid out on floors, and groups of makers working through a shared pattern.
This community process strengthens the impact of these large-scale textile works. While the final piece is designed by the architects, engineered for its site, and assembled into a precise form, its surface holds many hours of shared labor. Beginners learn from experienced crocheters. Volunteers work through repetition, small corrections, and collective assembly. The piece enters public space with that process already inside it.
Distance (process), Choi+Shine Architects, Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art Zhejiang Art Museum China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, 2025
Distance, created for the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, brings these threads together with unusual richness. The project draws from Hangzhou’s waterways, Chinese zodiac imagery, West Lake architecture, and local lace traditions, then translates those references into large crocheted forms suspended in the museum.
Choi+Shine’s process documentation shows sketches, CAD drawings, 3D models, crochet diagrams, and studies of anamorphic distortion, all moving toward a work made by hand.
The project involved a large group of crochet volunteers, many of whom joined through workshops connected to the museum. The patterns were shared, tested, and adjusted across skill levels, turning the making process into part of the installation’s cultural fabric.
Distance brings computation and handwork into direct contact. Digital tools shape the geometry, while crochet gives the work its texture, time, and human scale.
This article was originally published by Designboom.