The Architectural Laboratory Performing Design Research

0. The Architectural Laboratory: Amulet or Shibboleth?

Janno Martens, Rajesh Heynickx and Filip Mattens

Part I: Simulation: Modeling, Measuring, Mastering

1. Laboratory Urbanism: Field Notes from the Psychotechnical City

James Graham

2. From Medical Laboratory to Architectural Practice. Douglas HK Lee’s Hot Room Experiments and the Physiological Principles of Tropical Housing in Interwar Australia.

Deborah van der Plaat

3. Architecture as Instrument: Acoustic and Spatial Variability in Piano+Rogers’ Espace de projection at IRCAM, Paris (1978)

Sven Sterken

Part II: Personification: From PI to Protagonist

4. A Space for Disciplinary Experimentation: Frederick J. Kiesler and the Invention of the Architectural Laboratory

Bechara Helal

5. An Incubator and Accelerator: Jean Labatut’s Architectural Laboratory at Princeton

Rajesh Heynickx

6. From Architecture Machine to Media Lab: Nicholas Negroponte and the Sublimation of Architectural Research

Janno Martens

Part 3: Technology: Between Science and Art

7. Scientific Experimentation as a Catalyst for Aesthetic Innovation: Paulo Sá and the Evolution of the Brise-soleil in Brazilian Modernism

Samuel Imbeck

8. Algorithms in the Margins: Flowcharts, Holograms and Encephalograms at the Madrid Calculation Center (1966–1975)

Diana Cristóbal Olave

9. Dolphin Embassy 1975–1978: Laboratory of Interspecies Communication

Randy Nakamura

10. Piano Laboratory

Lorenzo Ciccarelli

Biography

Janno Martens is an FWO postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Architecture of KU Leuven (Belgium). He has published articles in several journals including The Journal of Art Historiography, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and The Journal of Architectural Education. Together with Dirk van den Heuvel and Víctor Muñoz Sanz, he co-edited Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture (2020). After studying philosophy and art history at the University of Amsterdam he worked at RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances), where he explored the relationship between architecture and ecological psychology together with its founding partner, Erik Rietveld. From 2018–2019, Janno served as coordinator of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre in Rotterdam. His subsequent doctoral studies at KU Leuven's Faculty of Architecture focused on the notion of environment in American architecture and planning between 1965 and 1985. His current research investigates transatlantic oceanic architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. As a research associate at the Flanders Architecture Institute, he also studies the historical relation between software and design.

Rajesh Heynickx is a full professor in the field of intellectual history and architectural theory at the KU Leuven in Belgium. He is chair of the Department of Architecture. His work demonstrates that modern art and architecture did not emerge solely from instrumental reason, order, or functionality; rather, myth, history, and spirituality played equally formative – at times even decisive – roles. With the edited volumes The Figure of Knowledge: Conditioning Architectural Theory, 1960s–1990s (2020, together with Hilde Heynen and Sebastiaan Loosen) and Architecture Thinking Across Boundaries: Knowledge Transfers since the 1960s (2021, together with Ricardo Agarez and Elke Couchez), he demonstrated that the development of architectural knowledge was not locked into demarcated ‘schools’, but related to the contexts in which it was produced, disseminated, and tested. This same approach also informs Architectural Education Through Materiality: Pedagogies of 20th Century Design (2021, edited together with Elke Couchez), in which the analysis of collages, models, or even entire campuses reveals the circulation and transformation of architectural theories.

Filip Mattens is a trained architect and holds a PhD in philosophy. He is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven, where he teaches philosophy and aesthetics and uses a design studio that centres on experiment and experience. His philosophical research focuses primarily on sensibility and perception, and extends into architectural questions relating to drawing, image, and form.

Stéphane Symons is a professor of continental philosophy and aesthetics at the Institute of Philosophy of KU Leuven. His research interests are interwar German philosophy (Frankfurt School and interlocutors) and post-war French thought (post-structuralism). His current projects revolve around Aby Warburg, and philosophy of drawing.