The Architectural Laboratory

Performing Design Research
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-89128-6
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 246 Seiten, Format (B × H): 174 mm x 246 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Over the past thirty years, the number of architectural laboratories has surged from a handful to hundreds across the globe. Yet the term remains elusive: What defines an architectural lab? And why has it become so compelling to architects today?

The Architectural Laboratory is the first volume to critically address these questions, assembling a series of essays that examine some of the most remarkable architectural labs of the twentieth century. While scientific laboratories have long been the subject of scholarly inquiry, architecture labs remain underexplored. This book situates them within their specific architectural-historical contexts, revealing how they have operated both metaphorically and materially.

On the one hand, architectural laboratories have functioned as amulets—protective spaces that shield practitioners from conventional expectations while fostering creativity through their unique material environments. On the other, they served as shibboleths—symbolic alignments with scientific traditions that lend credibility and facilitate interdisciplinary exchange. Within this dual framework, the volume identifies three key modalities of laboratory performance: simulation, personification, and technological visualization.

Essential reading for architectural historians, theorists, practitioners, educators, students, critics, and curators, The Architectural Laboratory offers a compelling lens through which to understand the evolving role of experimentation in architectural practice.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mattens, Filip

Martens, Janno

Heynickx, Rajesh

Symons, Stephane

Symons, Stéphane

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architektur: Allgemeines
• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Technik: Berufe & Ausbildung
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Gestaltung, Darstellung, Bautechnik
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architektur: Berufspraxis
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architekten & Architekturbüros

Inhaltsverzeichnis

0. The Architectural Laboratory: Amulet or Shibboleth?  Part 1: Simulation: modeling, measuring, mastering  1. Laboratory Urbanism: Field Notes from the Psychotechnical City 2. From Medical Laboratory to Architectural Practice. Douglas HK Lee’s Hot Room Experiments and the Physiological Principles of Tropical Housing in Interwar Australia. 3. Architecture as Instrument: Acoustic and Spatial Variability in Piano+Rogers’ Espace de projection at IRCAM, Paris (1978)  Part 2: Personification: from PI to protagonist  4. A Space for Disciplinary Experimentation: Frederick J. Kiesler and the Invention of the Architectural Laboratory 5. An Incubator and Accelerator: Jean Labatut’s Architectural Laboratory at Princeton 6. From Architecture Machine to Media Lab: Nicholas Negroponte and the Sublimation of Architectural Research  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 8. Algorithms in the Margins: Flowcharts, Holograms and Encephalograms at the Madrid Calculation Center (1966-1975) 9. Dolphin Embassy 1975-1978: Laboratory of Interspecies Communication 10. Piano Laboratory

Über Autor(innen)

Janno Martens is an FWO postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Architecture of KU Leuven (Belgium). He published 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 relation between architecture and ecological psychology together with its founding partner, Erik Rietveld. In 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 70s. As a research associate of 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, aesthetics, and 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 interest 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.