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LabStudio: Design Research between Architecture & Biology
LabStudio: Design Research between Architecture & Biology
New York, NY, United States
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LabStudio: Design Research between Architecture & Biology
New York, NY, United States
LabStudio: Design Research between Architecture and Biology introduces the concept of the research design laboratory in which funded research and trans-disciplinary participants achieve radical advances in science, design, and applied architectural practice. The book demonstrates to natural scientists and architects alike new approaches to more traditional design studio and hypothesis-led research that are complementary, iterative, experimental, and reciprocal. These originate from 3-D spatial biology and generative design in architecture, creating philosophies and practices that are high-risk, non-linear, and design-driven for often surprising results.
Authors Jenny E. Sabin, an architectural designer, and Peter Lloyd Jones, a spatial biologist, present case studies, prototypes, and exercises from their practice, LabStudio, illustrating in hundreds of color images a new model for seemingly unrelated, open-ended, data-, systems- and technology-driven methods that you can adopt for incredible results.
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Foreword and Review of LabStudio (the book) by Sabin + Jones
Reinventing Nature by Antoine Picon
Path-breaking contributions to the sciences and the arts are generally rooted in a tradition, while challenging some of its funding tenets. This book by Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones provides a striking illustration of such duality. On the one hand, their ideas, explorations, and experiments retraced here may appear as a new episode in the long history of the relations between architecture and nature; on the other hand, they bring new and sometimes revolutionary propositions to the table, propositions that tend to reframe radically the way these relations must be envisaged.
The attempt to relate architectural design to natural principles is almost as old as the architectural discipline itself. In his De Architectura or Ten Books on Architecture, the only architectural treatise from Greco-Roman antiquity to reach us, the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius gives seminal examples of this attempt, first, when he tries to derive the use of ratios in buildings, for the
orders of columns in particular, from the observation of the system of proportions followed by nature in the human body. This parallel was to exert a lasting influence on architectural theorists and practitioners from the Renaissance onwards. In the De Architectura, another striking example of reference to nature occurs when its author accounts for the origin of the Corinthian capital. Its decor of acanthus leaves is explained by the fact that the ornamentation was derived from the observation made by the Greek sculptor Callimachus of how an acanthus plant had wrapped itself around a vase left on the grave of a young girl from the city of Corinth who had recently died.
The two previous examples are definitely not the only ones in Vitruvius’s text, but they allow us to identify an important duality between references made to the principles at work in nature and the mere imitation of natural objects. For proportions were not seen by Vitruvius as a static set of recipes; he interpreted them rather as rules governing natural processes. By contrast, the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian capital appeared as copies in stone of organic forms observed in nature.
More broadly, nature can be envisaged either as an active principle of change or as a collection of productions. Because it was overall considered as a non-imitative art, contrary to painting or sculpture that derived part of their inspiration from surrounding natural objects, architects were usually tempted by the first of the two alternatives. Architectural design seldom imitated the forms of natural objects— the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian capital remained somewhat exceptional in this respect—its ambition was to be in tune with the fundamental rhythms that animated the natural world.
Despite this ambition, the risk was always to fall back into the imitation of natural forms rather than mobilize natural dynamics in order for design to appear almost literally as an extension of the spontaneous creativity of nature. Episodes like Art Nouveau are typical of the ambiguities that arose from such a situation. Were the organic forms adopted by designers like Victor Horta or Hector Guimard truly dictated by a thorough understanding of the natural world? Revealingly, many Art Nouveau designers took their inspiration from the strange forms revealed
by German biologist Ernst Haeckel in his lavishly illustrated book Kunstformen der Natur [Art Forms of Nature], without further inquiry into the processes that shaped them.
One of the most salient features of the research led by Sabin and Jones lies in their dramatic departure from this traditional tension. Indeed, the approach revealed in this book ignores the distinction between processes of formation and form. Computation and the possibility of investigating natural as well as artificial structures through visualization and simulation reveal a nature populated with complex, dynamic, and ever-evolving systems. Information relates both to process and to the patterns and shapes that they produce. Advocated at the dawn of the twentieth century by the Scottish biologist, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, in his seminal treatise On Growth and Form, the blurring of the distinction between formation and form has a series of fundamental consequences.
The first is to contribute to a profound redefinition of the relation between architectural design and science. For centuries, these relations had been asymmetrical. Whereas scientific theories and results impacted architecture often directly, the influence of the latter on scientific thought remained limited. For scientists, architecture represented merely a source of convenient metaphors. The cooperation between Sabin and Jones tells a completely different story in which design becomes a genuine method of scientific investigation. No hierarchy is involved in a partnership that does not distinguish between exploring nature and mobilizing some of the processes at work within it in order to promote more efficient solutions to human problems, such as the quest for more energy-efficient buildings.
A second consequence has to do with the changing relation to nature implied by this innovative partnership between design and science. Indeed, it erodes the traditional notion of a nature “already there,” waiting passively to be discovered. It implies instead a more dynamic approach, according to which nature is as much invented as discovered. But it is perhaps more accurate to evoke a reinvention than an invention since science studies and authors like Bruno Latour have abundantly glossed upon the fact that nature has always been, to a certain extent, culturally
constructed. If we are to adopt such a perspective, the main difference between past attitudes toward nature and the path investigated by Sabin and Jones lies in the ever-increasing consciousness of what it means in practice to be simultaneously investigating and designing nature.
In this process, received boundaries such as those which separate architecture from other design disciplines become more porous. Prior to the rise of the digital age, twentieth-century pioneers like Buckminster Fuller had already envisaged the possibility of a “design science revolution” that would make many disciplinary frontiers obsolete. But they were unable to validate their intuition beyond the conception of a few key objects such as Fuller’s celebrated geodesic domes. Sabin and Jones’ book provides a more substantial set of examples going in this direction. Is their eSkin project with Dr. Shu Yang architecture, even if it tries to understand the effect of nano-to-micro material properties at an architectural scale? It does not matter in reality. Permeated by materials science, physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, and above all biology, design becomes a vector of change indifferent to existing professional domains.
Ultimately, feeding extensively on contemporary biological research, their approach is inseparable from a profound evolution of our vision of life. With the discovery of DNA in the 1950s, life became synonymous with code. Some of its key processes were envisaged as a univocal series of encryption and decryption steps comparable to what was taking place at the same moment in computing science.
Contemporary research has become much more receptive to the complexity of the processes involved in the encryption and decryption of DNA information. Above all, these processes are now seen as inherently spatial. This spatial character ranks among the fundamental justifications of the productivity of the use of design as an investigative tool. Being able to decode long strings of DNA is no longer enough; topological configurations, structural frameworks guiding the formation of RNA and protein need to be understood. Conversely, much is to be gained from such an understanding in order to improve the way artifacts are conceived. Within the new nature that Sabin and Jones are exploring/reinventing, information can no longer be envisaged
Authors Jenny E. Sabin, an architectural designer, and Peter Lloyd Jones, a spatial biologist, present case studies, prototypes, and exercises from their practice, LabStudio, illustrating in hundreds of color images a new model for seemingly unrelated, open-ended, data-, systems- and technology-driven methods that you can adopt for incredible results.
---------
Foreword and Review of LabStudio (the book) by Sabin + Jones
Reinventing Nature by Antoine Picon
Path-breaking contributions to the sciences and the arts are generally rooted in a tradition, while challenging some of its funding tenets. This book by Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones provides a striking illustration of such duality. On the one hand, their ideas, explorations, and experiments retraced here may appear as a new episode in the long history of the relations between architecture and nature; on the other hand, they bring new and sometimes revolutionary propositions to the table, propositions that tend to reframe radically the way these relations must be envisaged.
The attempt to relate architectural design to natural principles is almost as old as the architectural discipline itself. In his De Architectura or Ten Books on Architecture, the only architectural treatise from Greco-Roman antiquity to reach us, the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius gives seminal examples of this attempt, first, when he tries to derive the use of ratios in buildings, for the
orders of columns in particular, from the observation of the system of proportions followed by nature in the human body. This parallel was to exert a lasting influence on architectural theorists and practitioners from the Renaissance onwards. In the De Architectura, another striking example of reference to nature occurs when its author accounts for the origin of the Corinthian capital. Its decor of acanthus leaves is explained by the fact that the ornamentation was derived from the observation made by the Greek sculptor Callimachus of how an acanthus plant had wrapped itself around a vase left on the grave of a young girl from the city of Corinth who had recently died.
The two previous examples are definitely not the only ones in Vitruvius’s text, but they allow us to identify an important duality between references made to the principles at work in nature and the mere imitation of natural objects. For proportions were not seen by Vitruvius as a static set of recipes; he interpreted them rather as rules governing natural processes. By contrast, the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian capital appeared as copies in stone of organic forms observed in nature.
More broadly, nature can be envisaged either as an active principle of change or as a collection of productions. Because it was overall considered as a non-imitative art, contrary to painting or sculpture that derived part of their inspiration from surrounding natural objects, architects were usually tempted by the first of the two alternatives. Architectural design seldom imitated the forms of natural objects— the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian capital remained somewhat exceptional in this respect—its ambition was to be in tune with the fundamental rhythms that animated the natural world.
Despite this ambition, the risk was always to fall back into the imitation of natural forms rather than mobilize natural dynamics in order for design to appear almost literally as an extension of the spontaneous creativity of nature. Episodes like Art Nouveau are typical of the ambiguities that arose from such a situation. Were the organic forms adopted by designers like Victor Horta or Hector Guimard truly dictated by a thorough understanding of the natural world? Revealingly, many Art Nouveau designers took their inspiration from the strange forms revealed
by German biologist Ernst Haeckel in his lavishly illustrated book Kunstformen der Natur [Art Forms of Nature], without further inquiry into the processes that shaped them.
One of the most salient features of the research led by Sabin and Jones lies in their dramatic departure from this traditional tension. Indeed, the approach revealed in this book ignores the distinction between processes of formation and form. Computation and the possibility of investigating natural as well as artificial structures through visualization and simulation reveal a nature populated with complex, dynamic, and ever-evolving systems. Information relates both to process and to the patterns and shapes that they produce. Advocated at the dawn of the twentieth century by the Scottish biologist, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, in his seminal treatise On Growth and Form, the blurring of the distinction between formation and form has a series of fundamental consequences.
The first is to contribute to a profound redefinition of the relation between architectural design and science. For centuries, these relations had been asymmetrical. Whereas scientific theories and results impacted architecture often directly, the influence of the latter on scientific thought remained limited. For scientists, architecture represented merely a source of convenient metaphors. The cooperation between Sabin and Jones tells a completely different story in which design becomes a genuine method of scientific investigation. No hierarchy is involved in a partnership that does not distinguish between exploring nature and mobilizing some of the processes at work within it in order to promote more efficient solutions to human problems, such as the quest for more energy-efficient buildings.
A second consequence has to do with the changing relation to nature implied by this innovative partnership between design and science. Indeed, it erodes the traditional notion of a nature “already there,” waiting passively to be discovered. It implies instead a more dynamic approach, according to which nature is as much invented as discovered. But it is perhaps more accurate to evoke a reinvention than an invention since science studies and authors like Bruno Latour have abundantly glossed upon the fact that nature has always been, to a certain extent, culturally
constructed. If we are to adopt such a perspective, the main difference between past attitudes toward nature and the path investigated by Sabin and Jones lies in the ever-increasing consciousness of what it means in practice to be simultaneously investigating and designing nature.
In this process, received boundaries such as those which separate architecture from other design disciplines become more porous. Prior to the rise of the digital age, twentieth-century pioneers like Buckminster Fuller had already envisaged the possibility of a “design science revolution” that would make many disciplinary frontiers obsolete. But they were unable to validate their intuition beyond the conception of a few key objects such as Fuller’s celebrated geodesic domes. Sabin and Jones’ book provides a more substantial set of examples going in this direction. Is their eSkin project with Dr. Shu Yang architecture, even if it tries to understand the effect of nano-to-micro material properties at an architectural scale? It does not matter in reality. Permeated by materials science, physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, and above all biology, design becomes a vector of change indifferent to existing professional domains.
Ultimately, feeding extensively on contemporary biological research, their approach is inseparable from a profound evolution of our vision of life. With the discovery of DNA in the 1950s, life became synonymous with code. Some of its key processes were envisaged as a univocal series of encryption and decryption steps comparable to what was taking place at the same moment in computing science.
Contemporary research has become much more receptive to the complexity of the processes involved in the encryption and decryption of DNA information. Above all, these processes are now seen as inherently spatial. This spatial character ranks among the fundamental justifications of the productivity of the use of design as an investigative tool. Being able to decode long strings of DNA is no longer enough; topological configurations, structural frameworks guiding the formation of RNA and protein need to be understood. Conversely, much is to be gained from such an understanding in order to improve the way artifacts are conceived. Within the new nature that Sabin and Jones are exploring/reinventing, information can no longer be envisaged
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