‘LabStudio: Design Research between Architecture and Biology’ simultaneously challenges and expands contemporary notions of what collaboration across broad knowledge domains means and how that might operate within and then expand the liminal space that exists between laboratory and studio practices. This book represents the culmination of more than eleven years of experimental and creative research through practice undertaken between Sabin and Jones via a collaboration first launched within the Jones laboratory at The University of Pennsylvania, which was subsequently continued by Jones at Thomas Jefferson University and Sabin at Cornell University, USA. This book not only embraces the post-disciplinary, design science revolution first proposed by systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, which above all aimed to make disciplinary frontiers obsolete, but it also “provides a more substantial set of examples going in this direction”. Through presentation of original case studies, author-led and commissioned chapters, this book demonstrates to natural scientists, engineers, artists, designers, architects and other academics alike new and radical approaches when compared to more traditional design studio and hypothesis-led research that is at once complementary, experimental, and reciprocal. The notion that the biological sciences and architecture share many of the same fundamental concerns is not new, but the formalization of this idea within a comprehensive lab and studio setting and aesthetic text is. As well, although the idea that nature “designs” using minimal energy with maximum effect is fully recognised, extrapolating that coded idea into architectural design from biology and then back again represents an innovative turn within the long history and relationship between architecture and nature. Whether contemplating the genesis of bodily or built forms, another outcome of this book is to provide readers with an alternative, post-genomic view of how life operates, especially when considering conditions where structure integrates with code to become the dominant message.
