The Science of Architecture

The second event in the monthly series “Log’rithms: Six Exponential Conversations in Architecture” featured design research presentations by faculty members of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Log'rithms is a collaboration of Log and CityX Venice for the Italian Virtual Pavilion at the Biennale (which you can visit online here).

Introducing the event, Log Executive Director Cynthia Davidson clarified the terms of the discussion: “By science, we don’t mean biology or chemistry, or anything you automatically associate with the sciences.” She continued, “Rather, science here means knowledge—knowledge built from research and from experience.”

Working to address planetary challenges like the climate crisis, these architect-researchers are designing at new scales and reevaluating the fundamental stuff of building. “Today, for the first time in architecture, we can design materials to the molecule,” said Assistant Professor Laia Mogas-Soldevila, “All to take control of the matter of architecture.”

Penn’s Chair of Architecture, Winka Dubbeldam, detected a profound change in architecture’s assumedly static materiality. “Typically in architecture we think of materials as passive; they’re just things that hold a building together,” Dubbeldam said. In the work of Assistant Professor DORIT AVIV and Mogas-Soldevila, materials and spaces “act as agents. They operate both internally to themselves, as well as on the outside.” It’s the outline of a new metabolism of architecture and environment based on dynamic transactions of energy and matter.

Longtime theorist-provocateur Sanford Kwinter chimed in at the end of the session, challenging the presenters to articulate a broader philosophical position for their work. “Might anyone be willing to express a wider, more systematic allegiance to a supra-formal or worldly concern?” he asked. Answer: Yes, and no. “The challenge to to address a larger issue is challenging,” admitted panelist Karel Klein, before elegantly laying out the stakes of an architecture that approaches “ecstasy,” a literary concept outlined by Welsh author Arthur Machen in his polemical 1902 book Hieroglyphics. Klein stated, “That’s been associated in the past with a kind of transcendental sensation that one found in religion; now perhaps, it’s accessed through art.” The conversation continues with Log'rithms 3: Re-Origination on August 19.