DiyBIObcn

DIYBio Barcelona was born after a brief meeting at Fab12. Our activity started at Made Makerspace on 2012, until we moved to Hangar on March 2016. Conexion directa con Nuria Conde

Advanced boxology y Mobile Kits

Re-ocurring biohacking architectures

Along the years, biohackers alike have been working on exploring / building / opening / "making" (you name it) laboratories in all kinds of unorthodox contexts. Much of this work has emerged as a challenge to the fixed meaning of the term "laboratory" in the modern history of science, as opposed to its more flexible meaning throughout the earlier history of science and technology.

There was another reason why the laboratory was not—pace the OED—necessarily a “building set apart”: the home was often where the laboratory art was pursued, in close juxtaposition to other aspects of ordinary domestic life. William Thomson himself hints at this in suggesting that Archimedes used his bathroom to study the laws of hydrostatics. But it is not so much the bathroom as the kitchen that, since the Renaissance, has been most closely linked with the laboratory. In metallurgy, the laboratory is the particular space defining the relation between the fire and flue bridges; it is also, not insignificantly, known as the “kitchen” or “hearth.” The relationship between kitchen and laboratory is perhaps a little stronger than this rather obscure synonymity suggests. It is even stronger than the occasional architectural metaphor of laboratory as kitchen: in the University of Oxford, the chemistry building constructed as part of the University Museums complex in 1860 was modeled on the kitchen of Glastonbury Abbey and was recognized as such owing to its quirky chimney-based architecture. 23 And as Bruno Latour reminds us, a few years later, in 1865, Claude Bernard presented work in a physiological laboratory as being akin to passage through a “long and ghastly kitchen.” 24 In the domestic context, we know that kitchens often

The laboratory of the geologist and naturalist is the face of this beautiful world. The geologist’s laboratory is the mountain, the ravine, and the seashore. The naturalist and the botanist go to foreign lands, to study the wonders of nature, and describe and classify the results of their bservations.” Of course, Thomson’s conclusion to all this was that these field practitioners must have recourse to the indoor appliances of the “laboratory properly so-called” for thorough and detailed examination: the naturalist in the laboratory equipped with a microscope learned more that way than by “merely looking at external beauties.”

Such a laboratory-centered representation of science was not popular with some field workers in the life sciences who objected to this proclaimed hegemony of the laboratory as a disciplinary epicenter. This theme has also been discussed by Eugene Cittadino in his study of Darwinian plant ecology in the late nineteenth-century German empire: the title of his book Nature as the Laboratory is a reference to the way in which the Teutonic practitioner Ernst Stahl resented the restrictions placed by laboratory traditions on the study of plants and declared, apparently on many occasions, “My laboratory is Nature.”

Here are some example that inspire us and which we find can/should inspire you!