Lecture: Beatriz Colomina (Webinar)

Architecture in the Age of Pandemics: From Tuberculosis to COVID 19

Architecture and medicine have always been tightly interlinked. Architectural discourse weaves itself through theories of body and brain, constructing the architect as a kind of doctor and the client as patient. Every age has its signature afflictions and each affliction has its architecture. The age of bacterial diseases, particularly tuberculosis, gave birth to modern architecture, to white buildings detached from the “humid ground where disease breeds,” as Le Corbusier put it. The discovery of streptomycin put an end to that age.

In the postwar years, attention shifted to psychological problems. The architect was not seen just as a doctor but as a shrink, the house not just a medical device for the prevention of disease, but for providing psychological comfort, “nervous health.” The twenty-first century is the age of neurological disorders: depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorders, burnout syndrome and allergies—the “environmentally hypersensitive” unable to live in the modern world. But pandemics have returned.

With COVID-19, a virus is completely reshaping architecture and urbanism and once again disease exposes the structural inequities of race, class and gender. Will architectural discourse and practice likewise reshape itself?

Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture and the Founding Director of the Media and Modernity Program at Princeton University. She writes and curates on questions of design, art, sexuality and media. Her books include Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT, 1994), Domesticity at War (ACTAR and MIT, 2006), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines with Craig Buckley (ACTAR, 2010), Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design with Mark Wigley ((Lars Müller, 2016) and X-Ray Architecture (Lars Müller 2019)

This lecture is generously supported by the J. Robert F. Swanson Lecture Fund.

About the J. Robert F. Swanson Lecture Fund
The J. Robert F. Swanson Lecture Fund at Cranbrook Academy of Art was established in 1983 by the family of J. Robert F. Swanson, a noted architect who was also the son-in-law of Eliel Saarinen. Each year, the Swanson Lecture brings to the Cranbrook campus architects, designers, artists or scholars who have received critical acclaim for their work and enjoy a sustained record of excellence and achievement in their respective fields. J. Robert F. Swanson and his wife and lifelong design partner, Pipsan Saarinen Swanson, founded their firm Swanson Associates in 1947 and worked on many exteriors and interiors, including residences, schools, universities, churches, airports, banks, and government, industrial and commercial projects