Felecia Davis
Felecia Davis | Black Flower Antenna, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 2021. Image credit: Hayato Nishi
The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices program spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.
Felecia Davis is a 2022 Emerging Voice.
Felecia Davis is a researcher and designer focused on the possibilities of computational textiles: “textiles that respond to their environment via programming, embedded sensors, and electronics,” as Davis describes them. Through its varied experimentations with this form, her practice aims to reimagine the possibilities for textiles in architecture, both to achieve lighter-weight buildings and to communicate through fiber.
Projects include:
- Black Flower Antenna, a symbolic antenna that transmits the presence of electromagnetic waves via live sounds;
- Fabricating Networks Quilt, a touch-activated quilt with photographs and stories from the era of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District;
- FELT: Feeling Emotion Linked through Touch, a large textile panel exploring the connections between texture and emotion.
Felecia Davis holds a PhD in design and computation from the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. She received her MArch from Princeton University and her BS in engineering from Tufts University. Davis is an Associate Professor at the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Pennsylvania State University and is the director of SOFTLAB@PSU. She is a founding member and an executive officer of the Black Reconstruction Collective.
Davis has received numerous grants and awards, including a Graham Foundation award and a DigitalFUTURES award.
