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 a Professor at UBC’s School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture and a 2017 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.

For more information on this and other episodes, visit https://pwias.ubc.ca/news/podcasts