About John Lobell


Résumé  


Background

I received my undergraduate and architectural education at the University of Pennsylvania where the faculty included Louis Kahn. Robert Venturi. Edmund Bacon, Ian McHarg Denise Scott Brown, Romaldo Giurgola, and Dean G. Holmes Perkins. My second Masters in theory was for a thesis on Architecture and Structures of Consciousness. I am currently a professor of architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. I have written numerous articles and papers on architecture, culture, and technology, and several books, including Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn.


Current Projects and Interests

My interests range widely, and include, besides architecture, cultural theory, consciousness, art, Buddhism, mythology, information theory, Transhumanism, and quantum reality. Besides teaching at Pratt, I am currently working on the following projects:

  • Journal of Computational Architecture
    This is an online journal and information site that I am working with Michael Silver.
  • Louis I. Kahn: Building As Philosophy (Working title)
    This book shows how Kahn (and other architects) express philosophical positions through their buildings, specifically they way the buildings are constructed. The text is finished and the illustrations (which involve building five of Kahn's buildings in CAD) are under way.
  • Quantum Architecture (Working title for a book in progress)
    If reality is quantum, then quantum theory must enter into our understanding of architecture.   I am just starting the manuscript.
  • AlgoRhythms
    Complex curved metal based on the higher mathematics of surfaces, created by the architect/morphologist Haresh Lalvani for the architectural metal fabrication firm, Milgo/Bufkin.
  • Timeship
    A $300 million complex for the storage of 40,000 cryogenically preserved people traveling to the future. The Architect for the project is Stephen Valentine, and the clients are the owners of Life Extension Foundation.
  • Our World today
    We are now in one of the most significant periods of cultural and technological change in history, probably greater in scope than those associated with Newton and Einstein. Developments on a theoretical level in quantum mechanics are now leading to quantum computers that gain their prodigious power through harnessing their siblings throughout the multiverse. Biotech and genetic engineering will bring about new species and the alteration of homo sapiens. Materials engineering and nanotechnology will alter the substances we use. Cosmologists place us in ever expanding infinities of multiple universes. And communications technologies promise that eventually everything will be connected to everything at all times. There is no doubt that these developments will alter our environment, but even more importantly, as McLuhan taught us, they have already altered the structures of our consciousness - how we perceive, think, and even our being. My interest is in exploring the history and future of the interrelationships of technology, culture, and consciousness. I share this interest with Transhumanists and proponents of strong A.I. I differ in that I believe that the best way to understand consciousness is through its expression, namely culture, and more specifically the arts. Thus I regard art as a full equal to science in the exploration of the ultimate nature of reality and of human being. Further, I regard science and mathematics as branches of the arts, and finally I find it profoundly significant that art changes. The implication going backwards is that our world we experience changes, and that therefore the structures of our consciousness have changed. In looking more closely at a given cultural period, we see strong parallels between the cultural forms of that period. Thus for example, we find uniform space, time, and causality underlying Newton's physics, perspective painting, classical music, and Enlightenment political and social thought, all in Europe between 1400 and 1900.   McLuhanists refer to the "linear-logical paradigm." The period between 1900 and 2000 is dominated by Einstein's space-time, modern art and architecture and a "holistic paradigm." And what of the quantum reality of our time? Interesting question.