Redmond, Washington and Ithaca, New York – Jenny Sabin is perched high on a scissor lift, her head poking through an opening of the porous fabric structure that she's struggling to stretch onto the exoskeleton of her installation piece, which is suspended in the airy atrium of building 99 on Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus. Momentarily defeated, she pauses and looks up. "It's going to be gorgeous," she says. "It" is a glowing, translucent and ethereal pavilion that Sabin and her Microsoft collaborators describe as both a research tool and a glimpse into a future in which architecture and artificial intelligence merge. "To my knowledge, this installation is the first architectural structure to be driven by artificial intelligence in real time," said Sabin, principal designer at Jenny Sabin Studio in Ithaca, New York, who designed and built the pavilion as part of Microsoft's Artist in Residence program.

Art and architecture already speaks to us on a multitude of levels. A new installation on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash., communicates in a new way, using artificial intelligence to "read the room" and become an interactive element reacting to people in the space. As part of the tech giant's Artist in Residence program, "Ada" has been installed in Microsoft's Building 99. Ada -- named for the 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace -- is a two-story, 1,800-pound web of hexagons forming an ellipsoid-shaped pavilion. The exoskeleton, which is reminiscent of The Spheres on Amazon's campus in Seattle, contains 895 3D-printed nodes that connect 1,274 fiberglass rods, and a web of fabric digitally knit with photoluminescent yarn.

Jenny Sabin is perched high on a scissor lift, her head poking through an opening of the porous fabric structure that she's struggling to stretch onto the exoskeleton of her installation piece, which is suspended in the airy atrium of building 99 on Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus. Momentarily defeated, she pauses and looks up. "It's going to be gorgeous," she says. "It" is a glowing, translucent and ethereal pavilion that Sabin and her Microsoft collaborators describe as both a research tool and a glimpse into a future in which architecture and artificial intelligence merge. "To my knowledge, this installation is the first architectural structure to be driven by artificial intelligence in real time," said Sabin, principal designer at Jenny Sabin Studio in Ithaca, New York, who designed and built the pavilion as part of Microsoft's Artist in Residence program.