The Hospital, the Patient, and the City
Live roundtable with Annmarie Adams, Christine Binswanger, Momoyo Kaijima, and David Theodore
November 24, 2020, 6pm
Join us on e-flux Video & Film on Tuesday, November 24, 2020 at 6pm CET (12pm EST) for a live roundtable with Annmarie Adams and David Theodore (McGill University), Christine Binswanger (Herzog & de Meuron) and Momoyo Kaijima (Atelier Bow Wow, ETH Zurich).
The Hospital, the Patient, and the City
The major role that hospital architecture has played in the history of modernism has recently attracted significant scholarship. From the origins of modernist furniture, to the importance of mechanical ventilation, the hospital has increasingly been recognised as a paradigm for the architectural avant garde of the early Twentieth Century. Somewhat less attention has been paid to the curious marginalization of the hospital within architectural discourse not long after, a disappearance so muted that it was barely noted. More recently, however, substantial improvements in computer aided architectural design, building information management and cloud computing have enabled new degrees of freedom in complex institutional briefs. In the last decade, hospitals became interesting for architects again. And in the last year, hospitals have become interesting for everyone again.
Against this backdrop, unresolved complexities in the relationship between the patient, the hospital and the city have gained new traction. Is the hospital best understood as an organ of the city, or as a microcosm of it? Is its true program more closely allied to the factory, or the school? What are patients, and what are agents in the complex of relationships that constitute medical care on the urban scale?
With the participation of leading scholars and architects, including Annmarie Adams and David Theodore (McGill University), Christine Binswanger (Herzog & de Meuron) and Momoyo Kaijima (Atelier Bow Wow, ETH Zurich), this roundtable attempts to open up a cross section of one of the richest fields of contemporary architectural research and practice, against the horizon of present problems, and future possibilities.
The roundtable will be livestreamed on this page, with audience Q&A available via chat. No registration required.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
This event is part of Architecture about Care, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) | ETH Zürich.