The Architecture of Science

Abstract

Back to the future. Suppose for a moment that you are the chair of a faculty team at Cornell University in the year 1905 and are charged with the responsibility for developing plans for a new science building. You, however, have the foreknowledge that this building is the one in which a young man from Columbus, Ohio, Thomas Midgley Jr., will one day learn his basic science. Further, you know what he will do over the course of his career. You have only this one chance to affect the mind of the man who will otherwise someday hold the world’s record for banned toxic substances by formulating leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. What would you do? Before developing the building program, could you engage your faculty colleagues in a conversation about the kind of science to be taught in the building? Would it be possible, in other words, to make architecture a derivative of curriculum? Would it be possible to signal to all entering the building that knowledge is always incomplete and that, at some scale and under some conditions, it can be dangerous? Is it possible to make this warning similar to but more effective than the Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of cigarettes? If you succeed, the catastrophes of lead dispersal from automobile exhaust and the thinning of stratospheric ozone from chlorofluorocarbons will not occur. Of course, the design of science buildings alone is not likely to influence young minds as much as teachers, peers, and classes do, but it is far from inconsequential. Frank Lloyd Wright once said that he could design a house for a newly married couple that would cause them to divorce within a matter of weeks. By the same logic, it is possible to design science buildings in such a way that they contribute to the estrangement of mind and nature, deadening senses and sensibilities. Indeed, this is the way we typically construct buildings. Typically, science buildings are massive and fortresslike and give no hint of intimacy with nature. Their design is utilitarian, with long, straight corridors and graceless, square rooms. Neither daylight nor natural sounds are permitted. Windows do not open.