There is no disease without architecture, and no architecture without disease. Doctors and architects have always been in a kind of dance, often exchanging roles, collaborating, influencing each other, even if not always synchronized. Furniture, rooms, buildings, cities, and networks are produced by medical emergencies that encrust themselves one on top of another over the centuries. We tend to forget very quickly what produce these layers. We act as if each pandemic is the first, as if trying to bury the pain and uncertainty of the past.

Sick Architecture is a collaboration between Beatriz Colomina, e-flux Architecture, CIVA Brussels, and the Princeton University Ph.D. Program in the History and Theory of Architecture, with the support of the Rapid Response David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant from the Humanities Council and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University.

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35 essays
“Spirit of molestation, spirit of abuse, get out right now!” Locke commanded. “Every spirit of homosexuality, lesbianism, come out, come,…
For all the scientific discovery and technological progress heralded by late modernity, its lasting legacy is also one of disenchantment and alienatio…
Resolution WHA67.8 was published as part of the World Health Organization’s 67th World Health Assembly in 2014, which offered a point of action for …
Gideon Boie
Liberated from the exaggerated dreams of a healing environment, architectures of care can repair the old logic of separation for persons with mental a…
Holly Bushman
We do not see the woman as inferior, but rather as having a different mission, a different value, than that of the man. Therefore we believed that t…
In May 1919, the literary magazine Xin qingnian / La Jeunesse published a short story by Chinese writer Lu Xun called “Medicine,” in which Old Chu…
Meredith TenHoor
What would it mean to design buildings that exceed the economic accountings of liberal biopolitics, that instead offer an entirely different rationale…
Dante Furioso
In 1913, a year before the Panama Canal was completed, the journalist Frederic J. Haskin wrote that “the conquest of the Isthmian barrier was the co…
On October 1, 1998, subcontractors with the US Department of Energy set up a “situation room” in downtown Richland, Washington, to monitor a myste…
Nicholas Shapiro
I am convinced that the trailer or an improved version of it is, for better or for worse, the low cost dwelling of the future—lacking in solidity,…
Take Nebraska Interstate 87 as far as you can North till it becomes South Dakota Interstate 407. Where these two highways meet, you’ll see a tipi on…
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that international borders pervade far beyond their physical sites in order to alienate from within. In the United …
Every city, Vitruvius assumes in his first-century bce treatise On Architecture, needs walls.1 Deciding where to put them is the first thing to consid…
Alexandra Sastrawati
Questioning the Potemkin Metropolis The interplay of rhythms—the rhythm of urban capitalism and the body’s rhythmic propensities—sometimes sy…
Iason Stathatos
Of the many notorious origin myths of architecture, the story that directly relates to the insatiable, primordial human desire to eat remains one of t…
As far as Harriet Ann Brent Jacobs knew, life for an enslaved person was ghastly, and like many enslaved people she had learned to navigate the thin l…
Clemens Finkelstein
Arrested in motion, Earth appears precariously imbalanced. Crowned with a turreted city model, the personification’s muscular body twists auspicious…
Marie de Testa
A Highly Controlled Visibility Up until 1968, L’Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris treated women exclusively. During the time that Doc…
David Gissen
Discussions of architectural form demonstrate how disability is negatively imprinted into the field of architecture. In architectural theory and the h…
Angela H. Brown
Le doy fuego a la Fortaleza como se supone Y al otro día voy a la iglesia pa’ que me perdonen Mejor no quieras probar de qué estamos hechos A…
Xhulio Binjaku
Plague Clouds On August 27th, 1883, the volcano of Krakatoa in the Indonesian islands erupted. Ashes and rocks flew miles high. Barometers wobbled …
Fabiola López-Durán
At the inauguration of the First Brazilian Congress of Eugenics in July of 1929, the physician and anthropologist Edgar Roquette-Pinto addressed an au…
Beatriz Colomina
March 20, 2020 I am in New York, “the epicenter of Covid-19,” the news on TV keeps blaring, as if proud of the achievement. New York has always b…
In the March 1923 issue of National Geographic, a sketch of a tired-looking businessman invites the reader to the Tucson Sunshine-Climate Club. In the…
Iván López Munuera
Sylvia Rivera’s Home On the bleak spring morning of April 6, 1996, the TV station WPQG interviewed Sylvia Rivera at her home in New York. The cam…
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
i. Not what is critique. Not what is a concept or a book. But perhaps, why this critique, this concept, this book? Why Geontologies and its obsessi…
Kara Plaxa
My childhood playspace was in the basement of a condominium in suburban Connecticut. The room was allowed to be messy, disorganized, and filled with l…
Victoria Bergbauer
Eyes set on a village in the distance, a man stands in the midst of a peaceful landscape. Two crutches support his posture. His hands rest firmly on t…
In 1975, tired of its reputation for being a “soft state” blemished by charges of corruption, security threats, labor unrest, and uncontrolled pov…
California and its northern population center, San Francisco, owes much of its character and development to disease. “Gold Fever,” as it was calle…
On May 28, 1914, the Institut für Schiffs- und Tropenkrankheiten (Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, ISTK) in Hamburg began operations in …
With the early twentieth century development of a series of immigration stations, quarantine facilities, and hospitals at the main ports of entry to t…
I As the plague smoldered in Milan in 1630, three French youths—a scholar, a painter, and an artisan—journeyed to the city from the north, in t…
Mark Wigley
Whitewash is extremely moral. Suppose there were a decree requiring all rooms in Paris to be given a coat of whitewash. I maintain that that would b…
Beatriz Colomina, Iván López Munuera, Nick Axel, and Nikolaus Hirsch
Sick Architecture is a collaboration between Beatriz Colomina, e-flux Architecture, and the Princeton University Ph.D. Program in the History and Theo…
Category
Bodies, Modernism
Subject
Architecture, Health & Disease, Biopolitics

Sick Architecture is a collaboration between Beatriz Colomina, e-flux Architecture, CIVA Brussels, and the Princeton University Ph.D. Program in the History and Theory of Architecture, with the support of the Rapid Response David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant from the Humanities Council and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University.

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