S01E11: Joseph Dahmen on Building Flexible Models for Architecture and Society
In this episode, Kalina Christoff is joined by sustainable building technology expert Joseph Dahmen to discuss how architecture shapes our health and society, and how our building codes and architectural practices can be improved by making them more akin to the much more adaptable and often much more successful biological codes that natural phenomena such as the COVID-19 virus exhibit. The conversation focuses around an essay recently co-authored by Dahmen and Robert Kleyn, a Vancouver architect and artist. Their essay is titled Building Code, Viral Code: Flexible Models for Architecture and is being submitted for publication in Log 50, a thematic issue exploring the models that architecture produces and the behaviors they elicit and project, published by Anyone Corporation.
Joseph Dahmen is an Associate Professor at UBC’s School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture and a 2016 Wall Scholar. His research focuses on creating a more sustainable future in architecture and provides pathways for emergent materials derived from regionally specific biological and geological processes to enter architectural practice.
Listen to episode 11 below, and make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Links to content mentioned in this episode:
- Robert Kleyn, Monica Reyes Gallery
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s “Architecture and the Times” (1924) Translated from the German by Philip Johnson. (Museum of Modern Art. New York, NY: 1947).
- Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill Mckibben on The Pandemic and The Environment (2020), The New Yorker
- Studio for Form and Energy, Joe Dahmen
- Joseph Dahmen (2017), Architectural Materials. Public Salon
- Joseph Dahmen (2020), Keeping Stanley Park Car Free. Vancouver Sun
- Dahmen, J., Von Bergman, J. (2019) Tear Down or Build Up, The Province
- Amber Frid-Jimenez, a Vancouver artist and Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Related People