IMPERFECT HEALTH
the Medicalization of Architecture
25 October 2011–1 April 2012
CCA, Montréal
Canadian Centre for Architecture
1920, rue Baile, Montréal, Québec Canada H3H 2S6
T 514 939 7026
media@cca.qc.ca
Open on Wednesday–Sunday, 11 am–6 pm
Thursday, 11 am–9 pm
The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montréal presents Imperfect Health: the Medicalization of Architecture, on view in the main galleries from October 25, 2011 until April 1, 2012. Through a wide range of materials including photographs, publications, art and design projects alongside architectural models and drawings, Imperfect Health uncovers some of the uncertainties and contradictions in the idea of health and considers how architecture acknowledges, incorporates, and even affects contemporary health issues. The exhibition questions common understandings of “positive” and “negative” outcomes within the flux of research on and cultural conceptions of health.
At a time when health is a primary concern influencing social and political discourse across the globe, it also finds increasing resonance in an architectural debate that is becoming medicalized. However, much contemporary architecture, urban planning, and landscape design seem to uncritically address these issues, and may even look to health for a new mandate to be ambitious in familiar ways. This short-cut to restored relevancy has many side-effects, and it needs to be reconsidered.
Problems in everyday life are increasingly treated as medical issues and defined in medical terms. Within architecture, on the one hand, this medicalization largely takes two forms: on one hand, spaces themselves are being described with language such as “sick” or “healthy”; on the other hand, architecture increasingly incorporates solutions from the medical field to address issues of health. The exhibition includes projects and ideas with a range of programs—mostly non-medical—that nonetheless engage issues of health in ways that suggest new strategies and constitute an argument for the urgent demedicalization of architecture.
Modernist projects often saw a deterministic relationship between the environment and health; they tried to be curative, and their history of unexpected consequences is a one of the sources for the nuanced and more complex notions of health in some contemporary projects. Rather than aiming to eradicate or avoid negative factors, certain projects now actively incorporate such issues as dust, garbage, and disease management.
Many architects and designers understand the limits to what architecture can accomplish, acknowledging that efforts towards ideal solutions will achieve mixed results because of the inherent complexities and contradictions in architecture. As Machiavelli pointed out, “it is found in ordinary affairs that one never seeks to avoid one trouble without running into another.”
Thematic research has uncovered examples of projects related to health issues like allergies, asthma, cancer, obesity, epidemics, and aging. These are attractive targets in an age of anxiety for an abstract conception of health that transfers concepts between professional discourses fraught with their own contemporary ambiguities, and appears to restore architecture to a place of importance. But these projects ultimately face the resistance of an imperfect world. New strategies are required and some are already being attempted.
Could demedicalization restore architecture to a more appropriate relation with its social surroundings?
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Imperfect Health: the Medicalization of Architecture is curated by Mirko Zardini, CCA Executive Director and Chief Curator, and Giovanna Borasi, CCA Curator for Contemporary Architecture.
The continuous flow of long glass walls through the exhibition explores specific projects and research by an international group of artists, designers, and architects in relation to broader health issues including allergy and asthma, obesity and movement, cancer including its causes and treatment, disease and epidemics, and aging. Providing context and evidence of our preoccupation with these issues are studies, publications, television monitors, and photographs. Works from the CCA’s extensive collection alongside loans from other individuals and institutions collections include images by photographers Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Burley, Lynn Cohen, Geoffrey James, Alfred Stieglitz, Ezra Stoller, among many others.
A book accompanying the exhibition and extending this research will be published in Spring 2012 by CCA with Lars Müller. Edited by Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi, it includes essays by Carla Keirns, David Gissen, Hilary Sample, Linda Pollak, Deane Simpson, Margaret Campbell, Sarah Schrank, and Nan Ellin.
Alongside the exhibition, the CCA will host a number of special events and lectures aiming at framing a discourse on the spatial and physical implications related to health issues.
The CCA gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition féminine, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the Department of Canadian Heritage. Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and Hydro-Québec.
The research phase of the project was developed in collaboration with i2a, International Institute of Architecture, Vico Morcote, Switzerland.
For more information contact:
Isabelle Huiban, Head of Press Relations
CCA
Montréal, Canada
ihuiban@cca.qc.ca /media@cca.qc.ca
514 939-7001 ext. 2607
Wendy Brierley
Theresa Simon & Partners
London, United Kingdom
wendy@theresasimon.com
+44 (0)207 734 4800
cca.qc.ca/imperfecthealth
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