The Corderie is one of the largest spaces in the Venice Arsenale, a sixteenth-century building over three hundred metres long, punctuated by a double row of columns, where the Serenissima produced the ropes and cables for its fleet. Since the 1980s it has been one of the main venues of the Biennale, and at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.", curated by Carlo Ratti it hosted the installation "Necto" in the section dedicated to natural intelligence.

The project is the result of a three-way collaboration: the New York studio SO-IL, founded by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu; the engineer and researcher Mariana Popescu, a specialist in computational textiles; and the Berlin studio TheGreenEyl.

The structure is a three-dimensional, double-curved knitted textile surface, suspended in tension between the columns of the Corderie, produced in twelve modular strips of 100% linen yarn, machine-made by the company Steiger from a computer-optimised model.

The constructive principle is tension, not compression. The membrane's anticlastic form arises from the equilibrium between the anchor points and from the behaviour of the fabric itself, calculated through computational design processes.

Woven into the knit are twenty-three programmable LED light threads which, together with a sound system, generate nine immersive scenes of light and sound, conceived to respond to the spatial tension of the canopy.

The environmental dimension, walkable, changing, almost organic, transformed this stretch of the Corderie into a bay inhabited by light.

Sustainability is an integral part of the project: around 95 per cent of the materials (linen, raw flax fibres, PVA) are locally sourced and biodegradable. The structure is lightweight, reusable and designed to be dismantled without leaving a trace. At the close of the exhibition, the surface was simply laid out and folded up, ready for a future iteration elsewhere.

An architecture understood not as permanent construction but as a temporary, reversible organism.