Treatment - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Adam Jasper

Contributors David Theodore, Fiona L. Kenney, Brittany Utting, Magaly Tornay, Annmarie Adams, Sally Chivers, Maria Böhmer, Adam Jasper, e-flux Architecture, Lydia Xynogala, and more…

Hospitalization is the last resort for the treatment of an infectious patient, not for the sake of the patient, but for the hospital itself. Putting a contagious person into a complex, highly centralized institution full of sick people is not actually a good idea, from epidemiological and administrative perspectives. What, then, are hospitals for?

Treatment is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich (2021 and 2025), and Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2025).

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13 essays

Context vs. Paradigm: On Le Corbusier, Herzog & de Meuron, and the Idea of the Hospital

Stanislaus von Moos

The older people get, the more frequent the occasions to experience one’s body being subjected to the logic of clinical expediency.

The Love Life of Utilitarianism

Agnes Arnold-Forster

In Britain, the National Health Service (NHS) is not so much admired as revered. It is more than just a state-funded, free-at-the-point-of-access health service: it is a profoundly politicized cultural icon, imbued with nostalgia for the postwar social contract and the “golden age” of the welfare state.

The Hospital of the Future

Reinier de Graaf and Alex Retegan

Hospitals are among the least appealing projects for an architect, second, perhaps, only to prisons. The brief of a hospital project is long and complex enough to discourage creativity.

Blood Cars: Polio, Cyborg Lungs, and the New Medical Device Industry

Yvan Prkachin

The next time you happen to be in a hospital (hopefully as an observer, rather than as a patient), you will likely find yourself surrounded by machines: X-ray machines, fMRI machines, ultrasounds. The images they make constitute the flashiest products of modern medical knowledge

Ospedale degli Innocenti: The Loggia and the Creation of the Public Sphere

Britta Hentschel

As keystones of the healthcare sector, hospitals have developed into highly-complex organizations, ones that are internally arranged according to the intricate processes they execute, but are frequently barely legible as architecture.

Geopathologies: The Birth of the Hydroclinic

Lydia Xynogala

To find the source of the Loutra Ypatis, “the baths of Ypati,” follow the sulfurous smell. It will lead you to a hexagonal kiosk in the middle of a rather unkept park in a village that sits at the foot of Oiti Mountain, some 200km northwest of Athens.

Editorial: The Image of the Hospital

Maria Böhmer, Adam Jasper, and e-flux Architecture

In the mid-twentieth century, answers to the question of what (and whom) hospitals are for would have been self-explanatory.

Deception and Design: The Rise of the Dementia Village

Annmarie Adams and Sally Chivers

De Hogeweyk, in Weesp, the Netherlands, might seem eerily familiar, even if you’ve never been there.1 That is entirely by design. Opened in 2009, th…

Dreaming Nurses

Magaly Tornay

The strange story of the dreaming nurses of Münsterlingen came to me by a chance find in the archives. While researching the extensive experiments wi…

Public Proxies

Brittany Utting

In 1925, on an undeveloped tract of forested land at the outskirts of the young city of Houston, entrepreneur and oil magnate George H. Hermann built …

Learning to Feel

Fiona L. Kenney

In the April 1881 issue of The Modern Review, a British periodical published from 1880 to 1884, a sardonic Frances Power Cobbe wrote: “It is the mis…

From Care to Cure and Back Again

David Theodore

When scholars first charted the nineteenth-century “invention” of the modern hospital around a half century ago, they posited a crucial change: a …

Editorial

Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Adam Jasper

Treatment is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich, featuring co…

Subject

Architecture, Health & Disease, Care, Ethics, Housing & Real Estate

Treatment is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich (2021 and 2025), and Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2025).

Contributors

Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Adam Jasper Editorial
David Theodore From Care to Cure and Back Again
Fiona L. Kenney Learning to Feel
Brittany Utting Public Proxies
Magaly Tornay Dreaming Nurses
Annmarie Adams and Sally Chivers Deception and Design: The Rise of the Dementia Village
Maria Böhmer, Adam Jasper, and e-flux Architecture Editorial: The Image of the Hospital
Lydia Xynogala Geopathologies: The Birth of the Hydroclinic
Britta Hentschel Ospedale degli Innocenti: The Loggia and the Creation of the Public Sphere
Yvan Prkachin Blood Cars: Polio, Cyborg Lungs, and the New Medical Device Industry
Reinier de Graaf and Alex Retegan The Hospital of the Future
Agnes Arnold-Forster The Love Life of Utilitarianism
Stanislaus von Moos Context vs. Paradigm: On Le Corbusier, Herzog & de Meuron, and the Idea of the Hospital