My critical take on Hawkins\Brown’s Biochemistry building, is that its most original proposition is to invert the normative layout of a biochemistry plan. This site-writing is a performative response to my understanding of the design decision taken to turn the programme inside out. In order to draw attention to this design move, to reproduce the spatial inversion in textual form, I decided to display the opening and closing pages of the scientific paper from the refereed journal on the outside. When the pages are turned and then opened by the reader, they reveal a series of images hidden within the folds of the book. These are the sketches of a biochemist, diagrams drawn as part of a personal process of concept development. Looking at them and attempting to decipher what they mean provides a moment for the reader, especially for the non-scientist, where the research process is turned inside out.

Publication Details: ‘Inside Out’ (text-image work), Hawkins\Brown, Salt Bridges: Changing Perceptions of Art/Architecture and Science, New Biochemistry Oxford, (London: Pretzel, 2010).

http://www.hawkinsbrown.com/studio/our-publications

http://bilder.buecher.de/zusatz/27/27981/27981411_lese_1.pdf

http://www.hawkinsbrown.com/projects/oxford-biochemistry

Note:
All diagrams are kindly reproduced from the workbook of David Sherratt. The four pages from the referred paper by Jan Lowe, Antti Ellonen, Mark D Allen, Claire Atkinson, David J Sherratt and Iain Grainge, ‘Molecular Mechanism of Sequence-Directed DNA Loading and translocation by FtsK’, Molecular Cell, vol. 31, no. 4, 22 August 2008, pp. 498-509 are reproduced with permission of Elsevier.