CabinStudio+ is a research and architectural design studio based in Philadelphia. Jenny Sabin, its director, focuses her practice on investigating the intersections among architecture, textile structures, computation, and biology. She also codirects a hybrid research and design unit with cell biologist Dr. Peter Lloyd Jones. In her CCA lecture “BioMaterial Invasions and Other Acts of Interdisciplinary Fray,” she will discuss how we intuit, see, and inhabit complex wholes that are indiscernible from their parts.

Collaborations between architects and scientists offer up venues for productive exchange in design while revealing powerful models for visualizing the intangible. Through the hybridization of algorithmic design techniques generated through the analysis of biological design problems, she argues, it is possible to gain a rigorous understanding of how context or environment specifies form, function, and structure.

The Architecture Lecture Series is funded by McCall Design Group; Jensen Architects; ARCH Drafting and Art Supplies; GCI Inc.; Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, Inc.; Perkins+Will; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP; and SRG Partnership.