In Praise of Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture

How architecture must learn to coexist with bacterial life, from the authors of the bestselling Are We Human?

This provocative book is a manifesto for an alternative architectural philosophy. It treats bacteria as the real architects, construction workers, maintenance crews and inhabitants of buildings. Spanish American architectural historian Beatriz Colomina and New Zealand–born architect Mark Wigley draw on the latest research to rethink the past and possible futures of the built environment, exploring the intimate entanglements of the microbes within bodies and buildings over the last 10,000 years, culminating in the antibiotic philosophy of contemporary architecture. Hostility to bacteria must give way to new forms of hospitality from a more symbiotic architecture that learns from bacteria, embracing them and reconnecting with soil, plants and other species. The main goal of the book is to rethink the very idea of shelter in terms of forms of inclusion rather than prophylactic forms of exclusion.
Beatriz Colomina is the founding director of the Media and Modernity program at Princeton University. She has written extensively on questions of architecture, art, sexuality and media. Her books include Sexuality and Space (1992), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), Domesticity at War (2007), Clip/Stamp/Fold (2010) and Radical Pedagogies (2022).
Mark Wigley is a professor and Dean Emeritus at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. As an architectural theorist and historian, he explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture and technology. His publications include Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio (2016) and Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation (2018).