Jenny Sabin Studio

In order to address today’s pressing issues in our built and natural environments, designers and architects must embrace change and cultivate new design models to comprehend key social, environmental and technological imperatives. This requires a radical departure from traditional research models in architecture and science, with a move towards hybrid, trans-disciplinary concepts and new models for collaboration. Advances in design, material sciences, and information technologies have recently inspired hybrid design research experiments, but direct collaborations between scientists and architects continue to be rare. The approach that the Sabin+Jones LabStudio at the University of Pennsylvania formed over 15 years ago and that continues to be developed at Jenny Sabin Studio and the Sabin Lab at Cornell University, couples architectural designers with engineers, material scientists, and biologists within a research-based laboratory-studio in order to develop new ways of thinking, seeing and doing across fields. This mode of working has contributed to a body of fundamental research and applied projects that integrate science, technology, and architecture through methods and tools that emphasise design research as a continuous and emergent process. At a time of ecological and sociopolitical catastrophe grounded on our deeply entrenched misconceptions of human and cultural dominance over nature, biosynthetic architecture has the potential to open new models for pedagogy, research, and practice to address these urgent crises.