choi+shine brings crochet to a new scale
In landscapes and public spaces, Choi+Shine ArchitectsThe lace works first appear as figures floating in the air. Knitwhich is usually held close to the body, expands into something that people can walk under. It casts patterned shadows, filters light and gathers visitors beneath a structure whose surface still looks handmade.
The Amsterdam-based studio was founded by Jin Choi and Thomas Shine in 2003. Along with the help of a community of volunteers, the duo works between architecture, public artand fabric practice. Before being suspended for public viewing, their works are created through a process that includes drawings, digital models, structural testing, pattern making and community workshops.
A single stitch it can form part of a hanging room, while a typical pillar can become an anthropomorphic figure in the landscape. In these changes of scale, the studio continues to return to the simple idea that infrastructure can carry human presence.
Distance, Choi+Shine Architects, Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art Museum Zhejiang China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, 2025
the land of giants
Before Choi+Shine Architects started building the large-scale lace installations, the studio he imagined a different kind of public figure in Iceland. His proposal in 2010 The land of giants he transformed the typical steel-framed electrical transmission tower into a series of human-shaped pylons that are imagined to traverse 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, and then asking how it might have a sense of place. The pylons still carry electricity, but they also lean, climb and stand on the horizon like figures caught in mid-motion.
The same instinct appears again in lace works, where an ordinary technique evolves into a public structure with its own social life.
The Land of Giants, Choi+Shine Architects, proposal for Landsnet, Iceland, 2010
bulky woven constructions
In projects like The Urchins, The lace, The Treesand The Power of Onecrochet moves well beyond the scale of objects. Facilities become canopies, screens, walls and temporary enclosures. Their surfaces are open and porous, but they still shape the space. The light passes through the shaped strings and breaks on the ground. Shadows change with the day. Bodies gather around the work and begin to read the pattern through movement.
First established in Marina Bay in Singapore, The Urchins transforms crocheted lace into large hanging forms that glow after dark and cast intricate shadows during the day. The works borrow the visual language of marine life without making literal copies. Their strength comes from the tension between softness and scale, with crocheted surfaces held in place by structural frames. Because crochet is strapped here neither as a decoration nor as a surface treatment, it becomes the main spatial system.
The Urchins, Choi + Shine Architects, Marina Bay, Singapore, 2017
lace as a public structure
Lace, installed for the Amsterdam Light Festival, blew that thought overboard. Suspended along the Herengracht, the illuminated work appeared as a large lacy plane on the urban canal corridor. Its pattern was visible from the road, from passing boats and in the reflection below, transforming a familiar waterway into a multi-layered field of light and thread.
Other works extend this language into more explicitly symbolic territory. The Feather in Brussels he used lace as a light, suspended gesture next to the Palace of Justice, bringing textile delicacy to the weight of a monumental urban building.
A long crochet project, Berlinproposed to meander through a railway station as a temporary wall and threshold, using lace to speak of division, passage and liberation. The works differ in location and tone, but share one question: how can a thin line become a space?
The Lace, Choi + Shine Architects, Amsterdam Light Festival, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2016
workshops as part of the work
Choi+Shine’s crochet installations are also made through groups. The studio organizes regular workshops with local volunteers, who help produce the panels and fragments that later make up the large-scale works. Architects document these gatherings in detail: tables covered with string, hands following diagrams, finished sections on floors, and teams of builders working on a shared design.
This community process enhances the impact of these large textile projects. While the final piece was designed by the architects, designed for its location and assembled in precise form, its surface holds many hours of collaborative work. Beginners learn from experienced crocheters. Volunteers work through iteration, small fixes, and collective assembly. The piece enters the public space with this process already within it.
Distance (process), Choi+Shine Architects, Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art Museum Zhejiang Art China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, 2025
distance to Hangzhou
Created for the Hangzhou Fiber Art Triennial, Distance brings these threads together with unusual richness. The work draws from Hangzhou’s waterways, Chinese zodiac imagery, West Lake architecture and local lace traditions, and then translates these references into large crocheted forms that hang in the museum.
Choi+Shine’s process documentation shows sketches, CAD drawings, 3D models, crochet diagrams and anamorphic deformation studies, all moving towards a hand-crafted project.
The project involved a large group of crochet volunteers, many of whom joined through workshops associated with the museum. Patterns were shared, tested and adapted to all skill levels, making the construction process part of the cultural fabric of the facility.
Distance brings computation and manual labor into direct contact. Digital tools shape the geometry, while crochet gives the work texture, time and human scale.
