EPIPHYTE Lab is multidisciplinary design and research practice centered in Ithaca, NY. Founded in 2009 by Dana Čupková and Kevin Pratt, both professors at Cornell University, EPIPHYTE Lab produces built work, engages in speculative design projects, and serves as a vessel for interdisciplinary design research. Consisting of a fluctuating group of architects, designers, students and other collaborators (including clients), EPIPHYTE Lab focuses its energies at the intersection of sustainable design, computationally driven architecture, and systems analysis. EPIPHYTE Lab offers a full range of architectural services.
EPIPHYTE Lab has been founded on the premise that innovative architecture occurs at disciplinary boundaries, where analysis, insight, research and the built environment bleed across traditional didactic precincts. Our work is grounded in four fundamental principles:
1. Architecture must be understood as continuous material process.
2. If we interrogate the world intelligently it will answer us in kind.
3. Resources are finite and precious.
4. Authorship is a dubious and ultimately irrelevant concept.
Practically, this means: We are not interested in making things; we seek to embed process in relevant cultural, ecological and material systems. We believe that ideas mutate when they meet an environment, real or virtual, and are best refined through iterative feedback loops: parametric analysis, simulation, evolutionary algorithms, prototypes and full scale construction. We understand that anytime we make something, we become consumers, and we suspect that environments that are tightly bound to specific ecologies of mind and matter have a better chance of being both effective and efficient. We realize that the work we do, collectively, is more than the sum of our individual efforts, consequently we look to create open systems that can exist, happily, beyond our ability to control.