If a picture is worth a thousand words that means photography often tells the story for us. In this photograph of the Pell Laboratory for Advanced Biological Studies at Penn State, a brief rainstorm broke through a gray, cloudy day and then left as quickly as it arrived. This flash of nature brought us a sweeping photograph of a highly technical building consisting of two distinct zones: the headhouse and the biocontainment zone. As soon as the skies cleared photographer Warren Jagger climbed his ladder and got the shot.
If you look closely you can see the rainwater in the scupper. While you’re looking, notice the panel near the front entrance – that graphic is based on what the plague looks like under a microscope. Fitting for a biocontainment facility, isn’t it? The building celebrated its grand opening earlier this month.
Part mapping exercise, part design project, part model-shop tutorial, the DigiFab Quilt is a favorite tradition of the OpenLAB Studio Fabrication course. Referencing a map from 1912 of the Nubian Square site and comparing it to the present day, students designed a ‘speculative interpolation’ that imagined a potential urban condition that might have existed between these two moments in Boston’s development.
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