Sabin+Jones, LabStudio

The LabStudio Breadboard residency (Fall, 2010) will include two project tracks. LabStudio Co-Director Jenny E. Sabin will lead track 1 based on non-standard component design and rapid manufacturing. LabStudio Design and Research Associate Andrew Lucia will lead track 2 on material and perceptual plasticity. LabStudio Co-Director Dr. Peter Lloyd Jones will lead the science team contributing to both tracks. Together, the two projects will incorporate and translate tools produced in LabStudio to study dynamic and complex biological systems towards the generation and production of experimental material tectonic organizations and systems at the architectural scale.

Images, video and information about the 2010 LabStudio Residency results are posted HERE.

Background: In 2006, Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones initiated LabStudio, a hybrid research and design unit based within the Institute for Medicine & Engineering, the School of Design and the Nonlinear Systems Organization at The University of Pennsylvania. Within the Sabin+Jones LabStudio, architects, mathematicians, materials scientists and cell biologists are actively collaborating to develop, analyze and abstract dynamic, biological systems through the generation and design of new tools. These new approaches for modeling complexity and visualizing large datasets are subsequently applied to both architectural and biomedical research and design. The real and virtual world that LabStudio occupies has already offered radical new insights into generative and ecological design within architecture, and it is providing new ways of seeing and measuring how dynamic living systems are formed and operate during development and in disease. Overall, the Mission of LabStudio is to produce new modes of thinking, working and creating in design and biomedicine through the modeling of dynamic, multi-dimensional systems with experiments in biology, applied mathematics, fabrication and material construction.

Fall 2010: Sabin+Jones LabStudio

Proposal: The evolution of digital media in architecture has prompted new techniques of fabrication as well as new understandings in the organization of material through its properties and potential for assemblage. Contemporary design tools have made accessible to architects the generation of complex patterns and forms. Consequently, designing through complexity to achieve coherent results demands an ever-closer look at truly dynamic systems and a rigorous return to the study of natural models. Organic models such as those found in cell biology afford new modes for understanding issues of feedback, adaptation, growth and self-assembly as they negotiate truly dynamic environments with nonlinear responses. A rigorous understanding and analysis of these types of models will allow architects to retool and revaluate how we negotiate topics such as complexity, emergence and self-organization in architecture at tectonic and material levels. Rather than mimic or directly translate these scientific models to the human built scale and vice versa, this type of collaborative research works to transgress and break through perceived pedagogical boundaries thus giving rise to new modes of thinking and working in design and science.

While the first phase of our design work resides within the spirit of research and discovery, our current phase (phase 3) engages design-oriented applications in experimental material systems ranging from new concepts of materiality to adaptive structures and complex geometries. Key to this design research is the exploration of new tectonic organizations for application at the architectural scale. Here, material technology and design ecology are informed by the visualization of complex biological systems through the generation of new design tools and experiments in fabrication and material construction. Thus far, essential part-to-whole relationships abstracted from the biological systems of study have been explored through the design and 3D printing of non-standard components on the LabStudio 510 ZCorp printer . We hope to expand this design research in generative fabrication at Next Fab through the use of alternate machines such as the 3D laser scanner, digitized embroidery machine, CNC mill, plasma cutter and metal-forming tools.

Visualization, Material Technology and Design Ecology

2006  Phase 1   Sabin and Jones collaboration defined and three research tracks formed: Surface Design, Motility and Networking

2007-2009  Phase 2   Digital Tool Production

2009-2011  Phase 3   Material Technology and Generative Fabrication: Experimental Material Systems

2011-2015  Phase 4   Architectural Application and Systems Integration

*Images, video and information about the 2010 LabStudio Residency results are posted HERE.

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RESIDENT BIOS

Jenny E. Sabin
www.sabin-jones.com
www.jennysabin.com

M.ARCH, University of Pennsylvania
B.F.A. Ceramics, University of Washington
B.A. Interdisciplinary Visual Art, University of Washington

Jenny E. Sabin is an architectural designer, artist and educator. Her research, teaching and design practice focus on the contextual, material and formal intersections between architecture, computation and biology. Through the visualization and materialization of dynamic and complex datasets, Sabin’s trans-disciplinary approach to design has generated a body of speculative and applied work that aligns crafts-based techniques with digital fabrication alongside questions related to the body and information mediation. She is Principal of Jenny Sabin Studio LLC, an experimental architectural design studio based in Philadelphia. Sabin is the first non-scientist member of the Institute for Medicine and Engineering (IME), University of Pennsylvania, where she is collaborating with the Jones Lab, and has co-founded and now co-directs the Sabin+Jones LabStudio between the IME and the School of Design together with Peter Lloyd Jones. The work of LabStudio has been widely published and exhibited and it has received a number of honors and awards including a Graham Foundation Award and the first prize in the 2010 National Science Foundation/American Association for the Advancement of Science International Visualization Challenge. Sabin is also a founding member of the Non-Linear Systems Organization (NSO), a research group at PennDesign started by Cecil Balmond, where she is currently Director of Research. Sabin teaches design studios and elective seminars within the graduate Department of Architecture at PennDesign.

Sabin’s individual and collaborative work has been exhibited nationally and internationally most recently at the Siggraph 08’ and 09’ Design and Computation Galleries and at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. Sabin is a member of the international Smart Geometry Group and was a senior tutor and lecturer at the 2007 – 2010 Smart Geometry workshops and conferences. Her work has been published widely including in A+U, Mark Magazine, 306090, American Journal of Pathology, Science, the New York Times and Wired Magazine. She has co-authored Meander, Variegating Architecture with Ferda Kolatan, due out fall 2010.

Peter Lloyd Jones, Ph.D. (Queens’ College, University of Cambridge)
www.sabin-jones.com

http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/ime/PJones/index.htm

Peter Lloyd Jones is a Cell & Developmental Biologist, Associate Professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Fellow of the American Heart Association. He is also a lecturer and Associate of the Non-Linear Systems Organization at PennDesign, and Director of the Penn-CMREF Center for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Research at The Institute for Medicine & Engineering (IME). Jones’s research work on the molecular and architectural control of lung development, vascular disease, and breast cancer has given rise to patents, and his research has been published in more than 50 peer-reviewed journals and books, including The Journal of Cell Biology and The Lancet.

Jones teaches at the graduate level in the Penn Schools of Engineering, Medicine & Design, notably with Jenny E. Sabin, M.Arch. at PennDesign with whom he founded LabStudio, a hybrid research unit investigating intersections between architectural design and spatial biology. Their written and physical work has been widely published and exhibited both here and abroad, and it has received a number of honors and awards including first prize in the 2010 National Science Foundation/American Association for the Advancement of Science International Visualization Challenge. In 2010, they were nominated for the New York Museum of Modern Art’s P.S.1. Young Architects Program.

Jones’ ideas on contemporary relationships between biology and architecture have been featured in the catalog accompanying the Gen(H)ome exhibition at the MAK Center, The Slought Foundation for Contemporary Art & Theory, and in an issue of 306090 dedicated to models. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including support from the National Institutes of Health, and the American Physiological Societies’ Giles Filley Award for Excellence in Respiratory Physiology & Medicine. In 2010, Jones co-founded Translatum LLC, a company whose mission is to discover novel diagnostic tools for pulmonary hypertension.

Andrew Lucia
www.sabin-jones.com
www.andrewlucia.com

M.ARCH, University of Pennsylvania
B.A. Architecture, University of Minnesota

Andrew Lucia is a designer and researcher living in Philadelphia who specializes in architectural, spatial and computational design and visualization through time-based modes of thinking. Lucia currently holds an Associate Research position within the Sabin+Jones Labstudio, a hybrid research and design unit based within the Institute for Medicine & Engineering and the School of Design at The University of Pennsylvania, and also teaches courses in the Visual Studies curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Lucia’s research explores aspects of rhythm and difference as they relate to the generation and perception of complex systems of matter and organization. Specifically, his current research and teaching focus on issues of Information Theory and perception as they relate to algorithmic processes, design, plasticity, pattern and affect.

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