Edited by Gloria Sutton with a foreword by Swizz Beatz, Radical Softness – The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman is an extraordinary constellation of contributions that collectively frame the pioneering work of Janet Echelman in diverse contexts and publics. The 288-page comprehensive sourcebook features contributions from a diverse range of internationally recognized scholars, engineers, designers, architects, landscape architects, and curators, contextualizing the interdisciplinary impact of Echelman’s work within the fields of art history, architecture, computation, and landscape architecture. The book beautifully surveys the artist’s monumental works that anchor public spaces across five continents, continually evolving with shifting light and air in cities including New York, Boston, London, Santiago, Sydney, Beijing, Shanghai, Helsinki, and Singapore.

Janet Echelman is an interdisciplinary artist known for sculpting at the scale of buildings and city blocks, creating large-scale, fluid installations that merge art, architecture, and engineering. Although I have followed Janet Echelman’s work since the early 2000s, including her extraordinary project She Changes, an installation in Porto, Portugal, and the Target Swooping series in Miami Beach, Rotterdam, and Madrid, the first project that I was able to experience in person was As If It Were Already Here. This monumental, aerial sculpture was suspended over Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway in the fall of 2015 as part of the Greenway Conservancy’s Public Art Program. Soaring 600 feet into the air and stitching into 3 high-rise buildings, Echelman achieved with this project what many planners, architects, urbanists, and developers hope to create in their life’s work: an extraordinary civic living room that brings the city and its architecture inside and outside through the framing of people, activity, rhythms, the elements, community, and most importantly, inspiring wonder and moments of pause and engagement in one’s busy day. As with all of Echelman’s projects, As If It Were Already Here transforms with wind and light, inviting viewers into immersive experiences rather than static observation. Echelman uses unconventional materials — from atomized water particles to fiber stronger than steel — blending traditional craft with advanced computational design. Echelman challenges artistic boundaries, redefining urban space through experiential public art.

Similar assessments of Echelman’s work are articulated by contributors throughout the book. From global art history to impacts in computational design and engineering, the contributing authors invite readers into the network of voices and collaborators that have shaped Echelman’s built work. The chapter Tracing Lines Through Global Art History brings together authors including art historian and curator Jenni Sorkin who position Echelman’s oeuvre in relationship to the artistic work of seminal protagonists that share synergies with Echelman. Gego, Ruth Asawa, Frei Otto are a few of the pivotal figures highlighted as kindred spirits working with networks, tensile nets and membranes, and the space and structure of textiles. In working with the interconnectedness of the built environment, Gloria Sutton highlights how “radical softness” is Echelman’s “critical means for navigating a changing environment.” While embodying the personal and domestic domain of textiles, Sorkin and colleagues argue that the scale and responsive architecture of Echelman’s work challenges the decorative and gendered space frequently relegated to textile crafts.

In chapter two Public Interfacing contributing authors such as curator Isolde Brielmaier articulate the important role of the public in Echelman’s process and how the siting of each work is as critical as the materials and fabrication methods incorporated. Responsive materiality in this sense is co-produced between the engagement of the public with the works and the moments of wonder and pause that they elicit. Or, in Isolde Brielmaier’s words as she describes the work that she commissioned, Earthtime 1.26 Hong Kong, “Her works invite the public to dwell, to linger, and highlight elements that we often pass by or through every day without really taking note. In this way, her work is also performative, in that it asks one to look at and reconsider a familiar site in a totally new way.”

As a computational and architectural designer sharing synergies with Echelman’s work in my own urban-scale fabric architectures, my favorite chapter of the book is Soft Systems: Nets to Software. Engineer and Professor Sigrid Adriaenssens positions Echelman’s work in a longer human history of tensile form and structure including Antoni Gaudi’s hanging chain models for form-finding inverted catenary masonry shapes to Frei Otto’s scaled cable-net models to perform structural analysis for the stadium roof at the Munich Olympic grounds. The essay by Caitlin Mueller, Adam Burke, and Andrew Sageman-Furnas outlines a fascinating history of Studio Echelman’s parallel work in computational modeling through the generation of software such as JNET and Mango and the seminal collaborators that have propelled this work, most notably David Feldman. As illuminated in this section, Janet Echelman’s work inspires a diverse range of collaborators and audiences, including those at the cutting edge of computational design and design technology. Echelman takes risks in her work that push these fields to innovate, to generate new tools for form-finding and simulation, which results in extraordinary feats of materialization and engineering, and ultimately advances the fields of computational design and engineering. Readers interested in these topics should check out Echelman’s latest publication outlining the most current technological innovations in the studio published in association with the MIT Museum’s show “Remembering the Future” in collaboration with the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology.

In the fifth chapter, the book presents an overview of Echelman’s current work with body movement and dance where her net installations operate as both environment and an extension of the dancers’ bodies in collaboration with choreographer Rebecca Lazier. Wind is replaced with coordinated movement between dancers and a dynamic reciprocity between body and form emerges as the tensile interface negotiates exchanges of dynamic forces and emotion in Noli Timere, Dance #3, a performance series that continues into 2026. The book concludes with Echelman’s inspiring 2011 TED Talk, Taking Imagination Seriously which has been translated into 35 languages with more than two million views.

Weaving text with stunning photographs of Echelman’s early to current works, the book brilliantly invites readers into her collaborative process to see how data, energy, and natural phenomena are translated into responsive and immersive meshworks. What I appreciate most about the book is its focus on Echelman’s collaborations across art, architecture, engineering, dance, computational design, and landscape architecture. Just as her projects blur edges in favor of open systems, interconnected networks, and highly porous structures and materials, the book unfolds the ecology of thinkers, collaborators, and makers that support and contribute to Echelman’s monumental installations. Featuring contributions by a diverse range of scholars, curators, professionals, and practitioners, this book is a must-read for anyone inspired by Janet Echelman’s uncanny and transformational urban projects and the collaborative craft-to-computation processes behind them.