Kengo Kuma Sculpture Absorbs Pollution

Japanese architect and designer Kengo Kuma’s latest work of art, titled Breath/ng, is an impressive fabric sculpture that can absorb the emissions of 90,000 cars per year.

Created for Milan Design Week 2018, the origami-like hanging structure is made from 120 hand-folded panels of an innovative air-purifying fabric that captures pollution in the air, cleans the particles, and generates clean air.

The multi-layered fabric, called The Breath, was developed by Italian start-up Anemotech. It contains a molecule-activated core that separates and absorbs large amounts of toxic pollutants like nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxides from the surrounding environment. Anemotech asserts that the material has numerous applications in both indoor and outdoor spaces, and it has already been used to make advertising billboards for highly polluted urban areas.

Kuma’s 6m-tall sculpture uses 175 sq m of the fabric, and is constructed using 46 unique 3D-printed joints. The installation was conceived in collaboration with French 3D-modelling company Dassault Systèmes, whose software was used to design the piece.

The project taps into growing global concerns about pollution and its negative impact on both the environment and consumers’ health. A number of future-facing designers and scientists are looking to address the problem by creating toxin-absorbing materials. See the Reducing Pollution section in Considered Environment to discover a number of solutions with real-world applications, such as air-purifying cement. 

Designers, architects and city planners should seek to incorporate such pollution-busting materials into urban spaces – both indoors and outdoors – in order to create healthier environments for consumers. See also Carbon-Negative Building Material Made of CO2.