24 March 2010 | 5:00–6:30pm
Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street

Design and Nonlinear Systems Biology: LabStudio

Jenny Sabin
Lecturer, Architecture, Penn School of Design
Director, CabinStudio+, Philadelphia

LabStudio is a hybrid architectural-biological design unit founded by architect Jenny Sabin and molecular biologist Peter Lloyd Jones at the University of Pennsylvania. Through this unique intersection of disciplines, LabStudio offers strikingly new insights into ecological and generative design in architecture, as well as new ways of seeing and measuring dynamic living systems.

"Can architects help create next-generation treatments for cancer and lung disease? Will the buildings of tomorrow have intelligent skins?" So begins a 2009 Pennsylvannia Gazette cover story on the remarkable work of LabStudio, which Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones cofounded within Penn's Institute for Medicine & Engineering and School of Design in 2007. In this unusual partnership, architects, mathematicians, materials scientists, and cell biologists collaborate 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 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, while providing new ways of understanding how dynamic living systems are formed and operate during development and in disease. In 2007, Sabin and Jones were awarded the prestigious Upjohn research grant from the American Institute of Architects for their work on nonlinear systems biology and design.